Ali Maaxa Research Portfolio

Ali Maaxa, Ph.D. Experienced Research Leader Portland, ORE + remote + hybrid Seattle/SF ali@maaxalabs.com (971) 930-0520 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alimaaxa/

Experience Lead UX Researcher Amazon Web Services: AI/ML, Platforms Principal Researcher Anaplan Researcher & Strategist OregonMetro, Seattle SoundTransit, Recreation.gov Professor & Researcher William & Mary, Virginia Tech, UNC, Duke, PSU Accredited Certifications Product Management, Marketing: Cornell University Product Management, AI Artificial Intelligence Governance Group Research & Strategy Consultant MaaxaLabs, LLC Lead, Product Strategy and Research New Relic Incubator, AI/ML Director, Research & Projects Digital Africa, Virginia Tech Staff UX Researcher FCV (Digital Agency) Research Fellow Mellon Foundation, Peacock REACH, DK WIlgus Ph.D. Anthropology, Media Studies (UNC)

Teams, Leadership, Research Sites Teams of 1 to 28 people (research, operations, analytics) Communications and engagement models Collaborations with stakeholders Teach and learn with workshops Performance and coaching and career growth Lead projects with cross-functional teams Research operations: governance, tools, budgets

I give talks, teach workshops, about and guest on panels and broadcasts about research & human experience Recently featured in:

In-person or remotely, on the street, in the office and in homes, I get to the heart of how people use products.

I’ve widely used, taught and mentored teammates in these mixed methods: Journey Mapping Jobs to be Done

Lightning Surveys Mixed Prototyping

UserLabs for CrossFeedback synthesis & Functional teams analysis

Roadmapping

Directed Storytelling

Recruiting hard-toreach users

Unmoderated Testing

State-of-theContextual Inquiry Industry Surveys

Tree Tests & Card Sorting

Video Highlights reels

Usability testing

Training and teaching customer-centricity and research methods through one of my journey maps (right) and a prioritization radar (left)

Using Research to Influence Strategy

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

Customer retention and upselling are critical to our revenue in 2022. We need to understand our key accounts and improve their experience.”

- CEO of ACME SOFTWARE at a company all hands meeting

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

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s gh t u n o r u h t o es olleagu ey acc

k iews with c eeting o d t a m rv Wh l-hands nal inte al tio e a h t m r r o e f In y aft n a p m the co

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

What values, pain points, and opportunities do key accounts experience?

Meet and plan research collaboratively

Marketing & Product & Design

Sales

Research

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

Qual or Quant?

My research strategy needed to combine specific observations with a broader understanding of trends and patterns. Qual first to understand journeys and contexts, synthesis to build frameworks, then quant to prioritize and apply insights.

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

Qual: field research and customer workshops to document experience issues leading to greater time to value and total cost of operations

Field research in: • 5 Cities • 1 workshop at our annual convention • 73 Customers • In partnership with 7 Product, Design, Research collaborators

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

In addition to field research to discover the way work teams complete their end-to-end jobs to be done with our product, we interviewed users and purchasers to understand drags on time to value and total cost of operations: factors our sales, product, and design leaders knew to be essential to Acme’s success

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

Sketching what we learned at each customer visit about how teams at key accounts get their jobs done

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

From Qual to Quant • Survey with 154 “enterprise customer stakeholders” globally, including: • 91 “process owners” who are responsible for outcomes • 48 “purchasing decision-makers” or team managers • 15 “executive stakeholders” • Segments were determined by using cluster + factor analysis on their tooling ecosystem, verticals, and work collaboration habits

VARIED & UNSTRUCTURED INFLUENCING STRATEGY

4 key segments

PROCESS OWNER Sets and guides process

PEOPLE & RELATIONSHIPS

MANAGER & PURCHASING DECISION-MAKER Manages internal colleagues and sets them up to succeed

PRODUCT USER Spends most work time working in the tool, teaching others, troubleshooting

PROJECTS & TASKS DATA OWNER Completes many tasks each day to fill a required role for others

ROUTINE & STRUCTURED

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

How XYZ Work Together “We need to get this process done, correctly, on time!”

Reports to C-Suite & Board Prepares project team

“Let’s get our tooling and people dialed in.”

Leads the project team Schedules checkpoints

Tool & automation setup Addresses manager’s feedback

Reviews final budget Leads stakeholder review

“This is how we use process and tools to to nail our mission.”

“I’ll upload the data we need for this.”

Locates, cleans, preps and uploads data Troubleshoots data changes & issues

“Let’s deliver our results to C-suite decisionmakers.”

Suggests potential solutions Troubleshoots workflow

Setups up org & board review Digests & socializes outcomes

Manages deadlines & bandwidth Reviews deliverables

Explains the project process Justifies tooling decisions

“I’ll send approved budgets to the org.”

Files the yearly report Updates company finances

Identified opportunities for cross-functional teams

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

• Cardboard cutouts of target market segments for in-office summit, • virtual deck and video walk-through for remote teams, • slides, posters, stickers and a survey anyone could take • buy-in and further understand customer segments

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

INFLUENCING STRATEGY

Month Year CEO intros new products Influenced by research

At 1:20 in this video (youtube link)

Supporting a Product Team with Targeted Research

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

“We have a product on use that needs a series of both fine-tunings and, in two quarters, major improvements. How do we prioritize changes to the current project, and anticipate future needs, features and products? We have 10 weeks to figure this out. It’s COVID era and we need to stay fully remote.”

Product Manager

Ali Maaxa & UX Team

Engineering

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

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The Situation Since 2020, engineers at scaling startups face a looming challenge: keeping their systems up and efficient in the context of digital sprawl–unprecedented scaling, complexity and unpredictability in the cloud. Our company launched a major initiative in that would lead us to serve open source users in a way no one else could. And we had 10 weeks to do it.

My Task • define the user experience questions with the highest business impact, • strategize Agile user research to answer as many of these questions as possible • deliver and socialize recommendations to support nimble product development.

The Challenge: • “Blitz” initiative • 10 weeks total time • No onboarding time • Moving goal posts • Close research relationship with sales and support • COVID: Fully Remote

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Build a Research Strategy My research strategy needed to take into account the short timeline, high strategic priority, and mix of discovery, targeted, and evaluative insights needed by the team. I took a holistic approach that would help the team in the short and long terms, and help them maintain ongoing conversations with their customers as they iterate

Integrating team needs into a research strategy:

• Support the principal designer in evaluating an evolving series of UI solutions and prototypes as she developed them • Support the PM & save engineering hours by evaluating the ease or difficulty of various tasks & processes • Define our core UX concerns by consulting with our market analyst vendors to better understand the question of who • End-to-end workflow evaluation to make sure our entire solution delivers

I recognized the need for alignment toward a vision and took a page from my experience at AWS: a “Working Backwards” press release for two quarters of targeted product team research

I produced a three-stream research strategy to cover these goals:

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Assess Current State We needed to understand how our current prototypes, weeks from release, were working. I produced a “stitched prototype” with some live and some conceptual elements that participants could walk through with us, using a SEQ (Single ease question - “on a scale from one [extremely difficult] to seven [extremely easy], how difficult or easy was this part of the task?”) to benchmark our progress.

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

I set into scheduling 20 user labs with carefully-targeted backgrounds through UserInterviews.com and began within 48 hours

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

I produced journey maps for systematically gathering data from each user as we interviewed them, and collected them centrally for the team to review.

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

I synthesized and published summaries of this work on our internal blog

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Test New Solutions As our designers and engineers produced more high-fidelity journey segments, I wove them into our “stitched” end-to-end prototype. To anticipate the PM’s strategic questions about the product roadmap, I produced a state-of-the-industry survey to anticipate what our customers would need in months and years to come.

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Stream 2: Major state-of-theindustry Survey of Open-Source Monitoring Users with 451 research, marketing, pricing, many internal stakeholders

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Stream 3: End-to-end user journey: stitched prototype, flow, friction and value reveal, vertigo, 10 SEQs and 6 qualitative questions

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Key Findings: ESSENTIAL FINDINGS: • • • • •

Users tend to belong to a culture all their own: autodidactic, flexible, disruptive, creative, engaged That being said, they may *not* have deep continuous experience with any one tool, query language, etc ICs in scaling startups are often the first to experience the toil “tipping point” of scaling and seek solutions They must then communicate with their leadership why trying new tooling promises to save this toil Tooling decisions are often collaborative and involve considerations by security, strategists, and technology officers; they will be used across teams

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SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Iterate & Innovate Often, my teams need ongoing, iterative access to representative customers. I setup a process for them to conduct weekly “UserLabs” for PM, engineering and design to talk with three users from our panel for ongoing feedback and prototyping.

SUPPORTING PRODUCT TEAMS

Research Impact: ROI

Jira Board: Alerts Noise

Product Strategy: Slack Integration

Evangelism and Customer Obsession

Building a New Product

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

“We have the capability to engineer something new along these lines, and our company needs to innovate to stay on top. What should we build?”

VP/Product Design Director Ali Maaxa

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Feasibility

Collaborate with analytics/CX team to analyze usage analytics: Find 2 workflows that are most feasible for initial vision of new product

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Prioritize Types of Customers (with the 2 usage workflows)

Customer Type 1| Industry VSB (9 employees)

Plan Remote Research Sessions Customer Type 1| Industry VSB (20 employees) Customer Type 2| Industry SMB (60 employees) Customer Type 3| Industry SMB (75 employees) Customer Type 3| Industry SMB (250-499 employees)

Customer Type 1| Industry SMB (1-5K employees) Customer Type 2| Industry ENT (5K-10K employees) Customer Type 3| Industry ENT (11K employees)

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Same product usage across very different use cases

Tedium

Creativity Roles Type of Company Industry

Role Type of Company One of the largest (industry types) in the US

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Training designers, engineers, sales to actively participate in both onsite and remote research; by keeping them engaged throughout, we turned over “unknown unknowns” and stayed aligned on market pain points and opportunities

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Qualitative research synthesis

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Identified 4 clusters of needs: Which of these needs should product focus on for v1 launch? Put into a survey to ask customers …

Random Set of 6 per respondent ATTITUDES USAGE Demographics

IMPACT OF CHALLENGES Cloud

IMPORTANCE OF NEEDS

FREQUENCY OF NEEDS

CHALLENGES

Needs & Challenges

Intro

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

Survey to understand pervasiveness of needs across customers

BUILDING A NEW PRODUCT

I worked with leadership to match these insights to the known business case and delivered on the research mission: leveraging scientific data to answer critical questions and reduce the risk of innovation