Gabrielle Bufrem is a product manager at Pivotal Software, which has quietly helped 30% of Fortune 100 companies reduce operating costs, deploy faster software at large scale, and explore new markets.
Until 2018, Gabrielle worked at Pivotal Labs, the strategic services offering of Pivotal Software, which offers world-class software consulting focused on unifying development, design, and product management.
During her career building products across North America, Europe, and Asia, Gabrielle has heard the most common protests to user research time and again – "the tools are expensive, the people are expensive, you're wasting time" – but knows how ineffective these arguments are, as well as how to convince people otherwise.
In her Turing Fest 2018 session, Gabrielle demystified common myths and gives product managers a toolkit to carry out more research and craft better user experiences. No budget? No team? No buy-in? No problem, says Gabrielle...
Born in Brazil, Gabrielle has lived in 13 cities around the world across 10 different countries. Despite this, she emphasises one eternal truth: people hate change. "I can probably count on my fingers how many people actually like change," shares Gabrielle.
Your users dislike change too, even if they say otherwise. "They like routine and things they're familiar with." However, when changes to user experience are approached intentionally with research and the user's needs and goals top of mind, your users will thank you in the long term.
In today's businesses, we're asking users "what do you need?" and "how can we improve that?," explains Gabrielle. "We can't do that without research, but it's hard to convince people to do something time-consuming and expensive when you can't say exactly what's going to come out of it."
Ahead of her return to Edinburgh for Turing Fest 2019, here's Gabrielle's toolkit for user research that any product manager can put to good use right now...
"People can understand if something works or doesn't work. They don't need to understand the behind-the-scenes that you and your team are going through in order to decide if the feature is going to work or not for the users."
Book recommendation: Just Enough Research by Erika Hall (who also has awesome talks on YouTube, adds Gabrielle.)
"Research is very fuzzy and complex," says Gabrielle. "It's very helpful to be able to point to a piece and say, 'Now we're doing problem discovery and in three days we're going to run these things and this is the result we're going to get out of it'."
Even if you're lacking budget, resources and buy-in, it's possible to inject user research into everything you do, says Gabrielle.
With user research, you're in the best position to develop solutions for the problems that your users actually care about – your most important role as a product manager.
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