In this insightful talk, Behzod Sirjani shares his extensive experience in Voice of Customer (VoC) practices, emphasizing the importance of building and scaling effective VoC initiatives.

The speaker outlines four key pillars that are crucial for developing successful VoC practices:

• People: The importance of having the right individuals who are willing to experiment, negotiate, and maintain VoC practices at different stages.

• Perspective: Understanding what "good" looks like and having a clear vision for VoC initiatives.

• Playbooks: Codifying best practices and learnings into shareable, scalable processes.

• Plumbing: Implementing the right tools and infrastructure to support VoC practices, but only after the other pillars are established.

Key takeaways:

The development of VoC practices often follows stages similar to Tuckman's team development model: forming, storming, norming, and performing.

Different stages require different skills and approaches from team members.

Partnering with other teams and functions is crucial for scaling VoC practices effectively.

Tools should come last in the process of building VoC practices to avoid becoming beholden to the wrong solutions.

Calibrating expectations based on the current stage of VoC practice development is important for long-term success.

Click here to check out his full talk.

Speaker:

Behzod Sirjani - founder of Yet Another Studio

Where to find Behzod Sirjani:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/behzodsirjani/

To learn more about Monterey AI, check our website and LinkedIn page.

Transcripts

Behzod: 

Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Well, I'm I'm super excited to be here to team. Thank you so much. I know a lot of you are in a lot of different fields working on stuff that's really sexy and on the cutting edge. So instead of trying to talk about really exciting use cases, I kind of wanted to take a step back and talk about things that have felt really consistent across the 10 plus years that I've been in research and spending time with customers.

I think the fun thing about being in this room is that all of us work at companies where everyone cares about our customers, but somehow we have the privilege and opportunity and responsibility and probably obligation to be the conduit from engaging with those customers and making sure that feedback comes back to the teams.

So what I wanted to talk about was these kind of four different pillars that I've seen be really consistent across a number of different companies of different stages and sizes. In hopes that it helps you think about not just the teams that you're building and the practices, but at the initiative level as well.

So real, real quick background. I started my career as an IC researcher at Facebook many moons ago. We were about 3000 people when I started and four years later we were 30, 000 people. So we've doubled effectively every year for four years and everything broke all the time. Every process that we had, every idea, there was a lot of experimentation, which was really helpful.

But it made us be really. Really thoughtful about how we built and what we built because everything had to scale, or if it didn't scale, it was going to break. And then I had the privilege of going and joining Slack, which was a very different company for a lot of reasons. But at Slack, I very quickly shifted from being an IC researcher to leading the research operations function.

And this was very nascent for us at the time, but Christina Janzer, who was building the team was very clear that we weren't going to scale the team based on headcount. And so we needed to be thoughtful about how we scaled based on practices and processes. And so half of my job at that point was essentially making sure that everyone on our research and data science team had everything they needed to do their job.

And the other half of my time was spent making sure that anyone at Slack who did anything that looked like research or data science was well supported. So this meant say interview training for the sales team, holding office hours, onboarding tools, rolling out Qualtrics to customer success, a whole bunch of stuff, because we knew that the four, six, eight of us, by the time that I left, we're never going to be able to cover all of the things that the team needed.

And over the last four years, I've had the pleasure of working with a number of different companies in a range of capacities. But the best way that I frame it is I'm sort of like a personal trainer for product teams. So you're going to the gym and you're not getting enough out of it from a learning perspective.

And I'm here to help figure out how do I make your form better? How do we practice the right exercises? And then how do I get out of the way and how do I make you kind of self sufficient? And that's true from two person companies who don't know how to talk to customers all the way through larger organizations, like some of the ones that you see here.

So everything I'm going to talk about today is kind of anchored in this experience, but I got my real start in voice of customer when I was in high school. And I worked at a tuxedo shop because I realized that while there were a bunch of guys who were coming in to get the suit, they might be the end user, but they were definitely not the buyer and their, their opinion and decision didn't really matter.

So I know that a number of you have probably heard of this, and there's a great, a very famous social psychologist Bruce Tuckman, who was studying team development in the Navy, and did a big meta analysis of a lot of how teams form, and he identified these kind of four phases of how things happen, and he gave them these really adorable names Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

And so if you think about probably many of your experiences, honestly, if you've ever tried to run a workshop with your team, you have the forming stage where everyone gets together, you're excited, you care about this stuff. Then you have the storming of like, everyone's got different opinions about how things are supposed to be done.

And there's a bit of fighting and negotiating. Then you get to norming where you agree on like, okay, we're, we're going to do things this way. This is what makes sense. Perfect. Let's move forward. And then you perform and you actually do the task that you need. Well, if Tuckman happened to be writing this about VOC initiative development, I imagine he'd actually have very similar stages, right?

You have a lot of people who come together that are like, Hey, we care about our customers. We want to do this work. Let's go figure out how we engage with those people. At a certain point, you end up disagreeing about whose voice matters, right? You have people who work in certain parts of the company, care about different products.

You have the highest paid person's opinion. Who's like, we should go listen to my friend who I'm selling our software to, whatever that is. Eventually you start to establish these norms and you say, Hey, actually, this is going to be how we're going to try to approach these things. And hopefully over time that scales and you're able to build, not just like really good initiatives, but.

But broader practices. And what I really like about this is it feels very fractal. This is true both for any initiative that we've started, whether that was like how we did office hours at slack. We started by like me sitting in a room and then we realized the thing I was doing wasn't as helpful. And then we established some practices and then office hours was able to scale.

It's also true for teams, right? You get like one researcher or one customer success person. They start doing a thing. Then there's like a bunch of demands on their time, disagreement about how to do that. And eventually that practice scales up. Yeah. But what it helps me also realize is that there's kind of four parts in all of this development, whether it's an individual initiative or the broader practices that we're building.

And there's kind of this nice harmony here. So from my perspective, the things that I've seen across a lot of these companies is first off, you need people, right? Someone has to do this work and it's probably many of us that were the first people who are taking these steps or people on our team, but it's not just people.

You actually need people. Perspective, right? You have to know what good looks like. You have to care about who it is that we're trying to engage with, who's probably well equipped to do or not do this work. I'm sure many of us, especially those who work on the sales and customer success side have had the equivalent of a product manager, get onto a call and be like, Hey, I'm here to figure out how to get you to spend more money.

Right. And then the account team has to go and do cleanup because. Somebody wasn't trained on talking to customers. But thinking really about like, how do we partner effectively? You know, what does good look like? And one of the ways that this I've seen work out, it's very kind of small example from Facebook and Slack is when we think about research, there's a lot of things that can go wrong.

Like when you go and talk to customers, you can. Truly do harm. In some cases, I have friends who work with teams or victims of domestic abuse and things like that. And ask the wrong question, you trigger them in a certain way. Like there's a lot of risk that goes into that work. And so one of the things that we've thought about is given certain environments that you're engaging with or audiences that you're engaging with.

How do you think responsibly about the boundaries of who gets to do that work and in what way? And so for us, we've kind of often had this kind of three part model of there's certain work, certain audiences, certain environments, et cetera, that we consider high risk, and you need someone who's a trained specialist to be doing that work.

So that'd be often the researcher who's doing this thing about large scale surveys, et cetera. Then there's a whole domain where you can partner with people, right? You can say, okay, you're actually pretty solid at talking to customers, but maybe you're not great at writing discussion guides, or you're not as thoughtful about how to operationalize these things, but we can work together and we can make those things possible.

And then there's a whole world where we've actually made this safe. We have, you know, established practices. We know that there's no risk here, and we're just going to let anyone in the company engage in this, right? And I think part of this is important because every one of us works at companies where everyone cares about our customers.

And so we have to figure out how do we engage everyone in the practice of learning? So over here in the high risk world and you're just consuming our outputs or actually it's in the low risk world and you can drive this work yourself. But all of this leads to, as you start to make sense of these things, you can codify these into playbooks and best practices and say, Hey, here's what we've seen has worked at this stage.

And for this reason now I know many of us work at small companies that are resource constrained. And so sometimes the word playbook gets scary of like, here's a 57 step thing to follow. A playbook can be like. Please send this email before you talk to the customer to set expectations. Any, any sort of best practice, because I think the thing that's helpful is as soon as you start to learn what works, I would encourage you to write it down and then share that, right?

Because then we can all learn faster together. And after you're able to start building these playbooks, whether it's in one initiative or across the board. You can start to identify what's the plumbing you need, right? What are the tools and processes and other things that we can start to use that scale this?

How do we take the playbooks and figure out what tools are the ones that we can use to best support the work that we are trying to do? And I see a lot of people do this backwards. They see a tool, they fall in love with it, they think it's really sexy, and they're like, hey, let's use this. And then they have to back into all of the other things, and it often ends up with a lot of rip and replace.

So, what The interesting thing for me is I've looked at a lot of practices who don't have all four of these things. And when you're missing parts, you end up in very different stages, right? If you don't have people but you have some perspective and playbooks and process, like, you just have a dream.

You're like, I wish we were doing this, right? And I'm sure a lot of you are in this place. Like, you're understaffed, you're trying to do more, and you're like, as soon as I get a person, they actually can go and execute on this, and that would be great. If you have people and no perspective, and playbooks and plumbing, you end up with stagnation.

You end up probably running a process for a while, but you're not able to think about is this working? Why is this working? Where is this failing? And it never gets better. And I think a lot of us have probably inherited things that worked for a while. This was true at Facebook all the time. We're like, yeah, just keep running the playbook.

Keep using the tools. But no one's thinking about where this works or where this doesn't work or how this could be better. And eventually these things start feeling less and less valuable. And very often that has a negative impact on the team. We start to lose resources or headcount because that thing that we're doing, that thing that we prioritize actually isn't delivering as much value over time.

Now, if you have people and your perspectives on what good looks like, and you have no real playbooks and a bunch of tools, you just have chaos, right? You're like, well, I'm going to do it this way and you're going to do it this way. And we're going to use the same tool. And I think it ends up leading to a lot of confusion and often erodes the trust because you have people who are spending more time fighting and doing the same, same thing in very different ways than actually moving things forward, right?

You have teams that work kind of in, in counterproductive directions. And I imagine where most of you are is that you have yourselves and smart people on your team. You have perspectives, you have some playbooks, you figured out some things that work at some level, but you don't necessarily have the institutional support or the budgets for this tooling, right?

And so for you, it's just a lot of hard work. It's just you figure out how to scale these things and you're doing it as best you can, but maybe there isn't as much support or it doesn't feel as fluid as you'd like to be. And none of this is bad. But it's more of kind of my assessment on what the world looks like.

The other thing I like about this four pillar approach is it very much aligns from my perspective with the order in which you need to build these things when you look at Tuckman's model. So if you think about how things develop and go from, hey, I think this is worth doing, to like, we have a really established helpful practice.

The first thing you almost always need is people, right? All of you caring about doing something, you showing up here and saying, Hey, maybe we can do this better. And then starting to spend time trying things and figuring out what does that look like? And then building those playbooks and then building tools.

Some of those things can definitely come in earlier stages, but if it's missing, you know, it's helpful to think backwards a little bit. The other thing that I really like about this is it helps you think a lot about who are the kind of People that you need at each stage. And this was a mistake that we made at Facebook over and over again, because we just assumed that you could have the same people working at different stages and they would successfully be able to help mature those practices.

But very early on when you're starting to form this stuff, you need people who are willing to build, who are willing to roll up their sleeves and try things. Things are going to fail. It's not going to work, but they're okay. Experimenting, right? They're going to spend time thinking about things, trying, exploring, and so on.

And that takes a different kind of stomach and aptitude, I think, than a lot of people who come in later stage in companies. You see this just by company stage, right? The first ten employees are very often different than the next hundred, or different than the next thousand, and so on. And then as you start to get into this storming phase, I've seen a lot of people fail because they're not able to negotiate.

They're not able to identify, Why certain people feel different perspectives and how to arrive at common ground. I've worked with people. I've definitely been this person myself where I was really stubborn about how something was done. And I was like, no, no, no, we're going to keep doing it this way because it's right.

And very often those initiatives die because we weren't able to identify how do we mutually align on something that's going to benefit both of our teams. But as you get there, then the thing that becomes helpful is you find these people who are able to architect and write and documents and say, Hey, let's do this.

We figured out that this works, we do this for this reason, and we hope that you can, you know, reflect on this practice with us, but it's not necessarily the Wild West, or it doesn't have to be. And then you get to these later stages, and I think this is where probably a lot of us spend time that maybe feels less exciting, where you're in this kind of, I've built some plumbing, and I'm just taking care of the garden, right?

For those of us who are really excited about the early stages, we get here and we're like, great, I'm Now I'm going to hire someone to take care of this, and I'm going to go build the next thing, or I'm going to go start playing. But I share this because it's definitely something where I've had to go through all these stages, and I've seen, I've probably done a bad job at all of these stages in different ways but it's been helpful as we think about who we hire and who we bring on, and even who we partner with, right?

When I think about partnership with other functions, I think about what are their goals and their incentives, and are they actually the ones that we want You know, okay, taking a risk at this point in their career and trying things that may or may not work, or do they need to feel more empowered and more consistently successful?

And I want to give them stuff to maintain. So I want to walk through a quick example from working with our customer success team at Slack, because you get a bit of all of this in there. So Slack had a really brilliant quantitative researcher named Nicole Zhang who built all of our tracking surveys very early on.

We went from like forming to performing in like six months, and we were sending hundreds of thousands of surveys out every quarter and getting tons of analysis back. And that was great for us on the product side. Now, our customer success team who do not have PhDs in survey science were sending out surveys to their customers as a part of doing their job, right?

They're doing pre training surveys or post implementation surveys, and like, this is not a criticism of them at all, but they were often sending out kind of, The same kinds of questions in different ways. They'd send the same question with different answer options. They'd use different platforms. And again, not a bad thing.

This is the reality of a lot of the businesses. As I inherited the tracking service from Nicole, I would then be accountable to our customer success leadership who would ask me questions like this. Hey, my data says X and your data says Y. So which one of us is right. And I ended up in this place all the time where I was just like, well, my data's right.

And your data's probably directionally correct, but you know, and I either could be really bummed about it or we could figure out some way to partner. And I think for us, as we went through that storming phase of quarter over quarter being like, I can't tell you how satisfied your customer is relative to the benchmark because we're using a seven point satisfaction scale and you're using four and like, we can kind of squint, but you know, Let's just do ourselves a favor and not and what we realized was that we actually had very similar goals and the best way to get us to a stage of like performance and actually being able to mutually benefit from this work would be to partner.

And so we spent about six months working together. So I'm going to collapse all this into one slide and not try to make it seem like this happened overnight, but we realized that there was a really big opportunity for us to partner that customer success team was going to need to send out surveys as a part of their work.

And we were never going to hire enough researchers to send and own all of those surveys. So I partnered with a CS scale TS person named Shalina and we basically audited all of the customer success surveys that went out over the course of a year, we interviewed a handful of people and we said, what are the most common use cases that people had?

And then we built a number of templates into Qualtrics for them and a 70 question library of other things that they could use. We demoed it and piloted it with a couple of customer success folks, rolled it out at a customer success, all hands. And then. Basically agreed to do ongoing support and whatnot for a year in like a Slack channel.

We rolled out loom trainings, had office hours and a whole bunch of other kinds of maintenance things. But what this allowed us to do was kind of go through all of these stages of like, let's test something we're going to, you know, this isn't going to work. Let's build a playbook. Let's try this playbook.

And very shortly afterwards, the customer success team at Slack was sending out more surveys than our research team. So in my mind, that was like a huge success on the performance side, because again, I was never going to hire enough people to staff that and I wasn't going to block them from doing their job because sending these surveys were really critical.

So we had to figure out how to partner and how to make that work. So I've been up here for some number of minutes and I think I'm supposed to end and have time for Q& A. I want to end with like five thoughts for all of you. And I think a lot of this is stuff that probably feels very intuitive, maybe phrased in slightly different language.

The first one is that people matter. Hopefully that came through in a lot of cases. All of you matter, us being able to have this space together and sharing matters. But how you staff these initiatives becomes really important, right? You want to think about for the people on your teams, where are they in their career, how do you, especially for the early stage where things are forming, how do you give them the confidence and make it okay and acceptable for them to fail?

There's going to be a lot of stuff that we try that doesn't stick, and that needs to not feel like a reflection of their failure in their career. That might just be the wrong idea at the wrong place at the wrong time. We're going to try again. We tried thousands of things at Facebook that didn't work.

It's fine. Second thing, which I've said a couple of times is that tools come last. We all need tools. When we get to a certain stage to scale our work, if you pick the wrong tool too early, your practice totally takes a right turn and ends up in probably a place that you're a lot less excited about, or you become beholden to these tools and you have a long time, you know, implementing them and then you have to rip and replace.

All of that is miserable and very expensive. And we are in an economy and a climate where like, maybe not the right thing to do. And I probably don't have to tell all of you that, who are doing a lot with a little right now. The last thing, or the third thing is one of the mistakes I see a lot of people make, and I'll, I'll speak mostly for research.

It's like for a very long time, especially in this like Zerp era, we had a lot of people who thought their job was to build really big teams and they thought the only way to scale was to hire. And I don't just think that's like wrong. I think it's like wildly problematic and actually does a huge disservice to the things that you're doing because all of you have great partners, probably across your organization.

And figuring out how you can partner with them and build a broader practice that's inclusive of other people is going to be really beneficial. And related to that, I would encourage you to think about how do you do the highest leverage thing that you are capable of doing and make space for other people to take things on.

Right? You have a lot of smart people across your teams and across your partnerships. Let them identify their own opportunities that they want to make impact. And the last thing I'll say is just calibrate your expectations based on stage. Right? You're going to do things that are going to start off and they're going to feel good and then they're going to break.

That's fine. You're going to get to a place where you have playbooks and those playbooks also break. That's fine. You're going to get to a place where you have tools and things are good and then you need to go pick something else up. Totally fine. Right? We're all in this phase of experimenting and figuring this out.

We're in a conference for a term that like didn't really even exist five years ago, or was used in a very different way. So let's continue to share and be open and figure this all out together. And although the slides are blocking it, I was going to say, if you liked what you heard I have really good SEO.

You can find me pretty much anywhere on the internet. If you didn't like what you heard, same applies. So I think now I have some time for questions. Thanks.

I have some time for questions, right? Yes. I've got a mic back here that I'll distribute. Yep. I'll take it.

Q&A: 

Thanks for this. You mentioned perspective and perspective out of the four seems like the North star kind of that's where you're aiming, but you've also mentioned the idea of the challenge that the goals may be different based upon, you know, who is the highest paid or the loudest, loudest voice, et cetera.

Do you have any advice or thoughts on how, how to get a line of perspectives?

Behzod: 

Some advice. The more I've done this work, the more I realize that almost all of these are like interpersonal, you know, dynamic, emotional intelligence kinds of things where I see the most struggle, the thing that I found to be successful is starting with what is the mission and like the vision for the company, like, why do we exist as a company?

And then what is our mission? And then as you get into kind of the company strategy and the different strategies for those disciplines, like, okay, we expect the world to be different because of X in order to make that change, we're doing this thing. The product will help drive that change through this marketing will help through that.

And like, when you work it through that way, you realize that all of us are kind of in the growth business. Like all of us are trying to help acquire the right customers, drive meaningful value and engagement. So they retain and then monetize so that we can keep doing this. And I think as you start to work through that, you can say, okay, given that my team.

Owns research or we own the customer relationship or we own sales. It's easier to start to like work through that puzzle and kind of that chain of logic to say the highest leverage thing I can do to drive our business forward or to help us achieve that goal is this. And because you're working backwards from that, it's almost like, instead of arguing about the initiative, right?

Like if I'm like, Oh, we should go left and you go right. Or you say we go, right. It's like, we're just fighting about that. I'm like, We're going to the store. And you're like, yes. I'm like, I think the closest store is here. Yes. Okay. So it's at this address. Perfect. Okay. That's left, right? So much easier for us to work through that.

If we just are fighting about whether we go left or right. And I think doing it from the company side, you just do a top down. I found that to be helpful. It also often exposes cracks in the fact that like there isn't a strategy or the products and the sales have like different incentives. And so I think like working through that way, it's, it's less combative.

It's less, I brought you're wrong. And we're like, are we steering the ship in the same way? And like, is my team paddling correctly or whoa, we actually had different orientations.

Q&A: 

Hi, thanks for the insights. I think the, to follow on what you said about do what's highest leverage. I feel like it's the teams I've been working with. It's not. I think I'm highly leveraged as other people think that you should be doing. That's the thing. So I think that's what I'm saying. So like, how have you been able to help coach organizations?

Everybody thinks there's someone else to be doing that.

Behzod: 

I have the privilege of often working directly with executives, and so I can sort of push them on a lot of the thinking that we just talked about. Very often, I'll use a research example and then maybe generalize out. When I first start talking to companies, they're like, Oh, we think we should do research.

I'm like, great. Look at the next six to 12 months. What are the biggest bets you're making that you want to be more confident about? And then what would it look like for us to be more confident? And they're like, Oh, well, you know, I would love to talk to these kinds of customers and hear that this matters.

I'm like, great. Okay. Let's staff those things. I'm like, cool. You have like half a researcher. They're going to do this. The next highest leverage thing is this cool. Here's the whole list of. Everything that's below the line. And it's like, does that all feel good, right? Like, these two things are good, and everything else is less than more?

Like, yeah, like, alright, so stop bothering them about all of this stuff, and let them go do this. It might be like, oh, actually, we have more staffing. It's like, great. Let's keep working through that prioritization. In doing that, we very often end up with like, oh, I realized that the team was doing the things that looked urgent.

But weren't important or the thing that was most important actually has a longer planning cycle or a longer execution cycle, whatever those things are. But the core of the disagreement is often on the like what doing the work looks like. And so you have like for researchers, it's not very like, well, we're shipping this next week and it doesn't feel like they're working on it.

It's like, right, well, they worked on it last quarter or we decided that. It's not a one way door and like, if it goes out and it's not great, we're going to phase the role, whatever those things are. But really aligning on like, because you think I should be doing this, where does that come from? And let me help you understand my global prioritization relative to like driving the ship forward and how this, and sometimes I've been in fights with partners where I just escalate.

I'm like, you know what? I don't have the right level of visibility in the company to make this call. I was told by my boss to do this. You think that I should be doing something else. I think you two are the best people to go figure this out, because you can see things I can't, you're in rooms I'm not.

You know, whatever takes a certain level of like courage and support and, you know, job security to do some of that sometimes. But Christina, my old boss could tell you very often. I was like, you're a director and I'm not, so go talk to my boss and like, she'll tell me what I need to be doing. But I think that the goal in, in having that conversation is to regularly orient to like, What is it that our business is trying to do and how can my function or me or my team actually contribute to that and like make that visible to other people?

Cause I think right now we're in, I'm not going to speak for your companies, but a lot of the companies I work with are resource constrained and struggling and like, The more that we can communicate why the thing that we are doing is how we believe we are going to be highest leverage, the less we spend time having that conversation, which honestly, over time, just feels exhausting and like erodes the trust in the partnership and whatnot.

Some of that is like roadmap socialization. At Slack, one of the things that we did really well and credit to Christina was like. All of us would go basically to our GMs of the different parts of the product and be like, what are the things that you think you need help with, right? What's the confidence you want?

And then we'd come back and we'd look at them across the board and be like, we can't do all of this. Are there areas that we can like mutually align? Like, Oh, platform cares about this. And enterprise cares about this. And then we go back to those teams and say, Hey, we know you asked We're going to do like X prime with this other team, because is that good with you guys?

Great. Okay. And I think like bringing people into the process, especially for a lot of the work that we're doing, it's like, why are you talking to these customers? Why did you have this event? Why aren't you doing X, Y, Z, right? The more we can socialize, like, Hey, here's what we're trying to do. Here's how we think this helps here.

The missing puzzle pieces. One of my favorite metaphors for like decision making and company is kind of like wheel of fortune, right? Like there's some puzzle we're trying to solve. Every team has different letters. Let's like agree on which letters are missing and what we need before we decide to move forward.

It's kind of a version of that, of like, let's just make sure we're, we're not going after the same puzzle pieces that we already have, like actually getting new letters. How would you talk more about that afterwards?

All right. It's awesome. Thank you. Bazaar. Very insightful.