A conversation with Laura Klein, Principal at Users Know & Author of ‘Build Better Products’ and ‘UX for Lean Startups’
This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.
Laura Klein once worked with someone who “missed” the internet. During our conversation, she shared this humorous anecdote from her first job. In the mid-1990s, she worked at a think tank that was doing future-casting: “One of the younger UX designers went to the [head of the company] and said, ‘I really think we should be looking at this internet thing.’ And he replied, ‘No, I don’t really think it’s going anywhere.’ I was in a think tank about the future of technology where the guy in charge managed to miss the internet.”
Laura herself hasn’t missed much in her career. In fact, she’s worn many hats. She’s worked as an engineer, user experience designer, and product manager for companies of all sizes. She’s also written two books — Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Currently, she’s the VP, Product at Business Talent Group and Principal at Users Know, which helps startups learn more about their users and potential customers.
Avoid Innovation Theater
In my interviews with innovation experts, I often start by digging into what they see as wrong-headed or misguided in today’s organizational innovation programs. Laura talked about the importance of being open to new ideas, as well fostering existing ones. “[Innovation programs] tend to be very focused on creating ‘Big Ideas’ and making huge changes. But, the most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”
“The most important thing is learning not to shoot down the good ideas and new projects already coming from within the organization.”
Innovation must extend beyond the idea stage. Furthermore, the innovation groups responsible for generating these ideas may not be helping when they simply pass along their ideas to other teams to execute. “What that team probably needed wasn’t more great product ideas. They needed more talking to users and understanding their actual needs so that they could come up with good solutions on their own.”
Similarly, Laura warned against companies focusing too much on what she called “innovation theater” — sticky notes, open workspaces, whiteboards — the sometimes clichéd trappings of a creative work. “[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”
“[Companies] put in things that feel like what they think innovation should look like, but none of the hard follow through.”
This concept of follow-through was an important thread throughout our conversation. She talked about how there are few “overnight successes” in innovation or the startup world. For those who appear like they had a meteoric rise, she says: “I guarantee that they had 73 bad ideas that they tried before they came across this huge overnight success, with a few exceptions. Even the ones that did stick to the initial great idea, they tried a bunch of other stuff along the way that didn’t last for very long.”
What Needs to Change
For new and innovative ways of working to stick inside an organization, Laura talked about the need for coaching and organizational change, in addition to education. She’s seen what happens when companies solely focus on the education piece: “You get everybody together for forced training and you spend a bunch of money on workshops. Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching. All of their incentives remain the same, so they have no reason to do anything differently.”
“Then everybody goes back to their desks and forgets all about it because there’s no organizational change that helps them implement what they learned and there’s no follow-up coaching.”
She talked more about how funding can also stand in the way of corporate innovation: “Big company structure isn’t necessarily the right one to take a little tiny idea and nurture and grow it. All the things in the company are setup to not pay attention to any of that, right? Funding is based on ‘How much money is it going to make me in the next quarter?’ Suddenly they have to do something that’s not going to make any money for six months, a year, or ever. They don’t know how to do that.”
Beyond budgets, there are other significant organizational changes that she recommends to support new ways of working: “You have to change a tremendous number of things, like your HR department, your procurement department, how you rate your employees, and how you fund projects. You have to change all of that for some of these things to work.”
Not Just the Fun Stuff
Let’s return to the concept of follow-through and the importance of execution. “Sometimes you’ll see labs come up with a prototype and…the problem is that they give it to the organization and expect somebody else to ‘raise’ their product and understand why to do it.”
She cautioned against scenarios where innovation teams do the “fun stuff” (i.e. idea generation and prototyping) and then pass off the hard work to the rest of the organization: “Who wants to build somebody else’s idea? Even if they do, what if it doesn’t work out? Who’s fault was that? Was it a bad idea or was it bad implementation?”
“You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”
Nothing should be pitched over the “wall” to another part of the company. Ideally, there shouldn’t be a chasm between the innovation group and the people that execute. According to Laura: “You need to have the people who start it keep building it until it’s actually a product and it’s a thing with its own market and resources.”
Measuring Value
We also discussed how companies can and should measure innovation. Laura’s answer illustrates her dedicated focus on the end user. “I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people — both within the organization and for the users of whatever that organization produces.”
“I think that everything should be measured by the value it produces for people.”
She went on to say: “Ideally, we would also be thinking about the impact on the world at large and the rest of society because we should care about those things, because we all have to live in it. But, those things are often harder to quantify.”
The Potential of Machine Learning
We closed our conversation by talking about what Laura is most excited about right now and she brought up machine learning: “I think it has a ton of useful possible applications, but there’s also a tremendous potential to screw it up. It is both exciting and terrifying. I think it has a lot of potential to help people make better decisions. I think it’s terrifying because it also has the potential to help people make really awful decisions…”
She explained some of her concerns: “There are a lot of ethical questions around how we train data models, how we give the right information to people to make good decisions, and how could we automate away some of the really boring, awful parts of people’s lives, but not just give them worse things to do.”
But in the end, Laura has healthy skepticism about any “hot” topics like machine learning based in her time in the industry: “I’ve seen virtual reality be the next big thing three times so nothing’s that exciting to me right now.”
If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.
