UX Strategy Interview: Jim Kalbach, MURAL

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Success at MURAL. I spoke with Jim about his recent work related to user experience strategy. Our conversation is presented below. Jim will be presenting a strategy-focused workshop at the UX STRAT Europe conference, which will take place in Amsterdam on June 10 – 12 (see https://www.uxstrat.com/europe for more info). 

Paul:

Hi Jim, thanks for taking time out to talk with me today. Can you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself? Your current company, how you got into the field, what’s led up to your current gig?

Jim:

Sure. My name is Jim Kalbach. I’m currently the head of customer experience at MURAL, that’s a start-up. We’re an online whiteboard. It’s a solution that lets teams be collaborative and creative even when they’re distributed. So, we provide a big space where you can add Sticky Notes and images and collaborate like you would on a whiteboard, even if you’re not in the same room.

Prior to this role, my background: for over 15 years, I was in various roles of UX design, mostly digital product design, web applications, a little bit of service design, even little projects like sound design. So, looking at a broader kind of scope of experience design for various companies, I was both internal and external prior to coming to MURAL. 

I shifted gears a little bit coming into MURAL. Now being in customer experience, I focus mostly on customer success. I’m actually working directly with our largest customers to help them be successful, so there’s a little bit more of a business mindset that I have, looking at metrics in a different way, for measuring success, and really looking at the experience beyond just the product experience. We create digital products that allow people to do something with that, and that’s great, it gives them a superpower if you do it right. But that superpower is then embedded in a context, and I’m really learning a lot about the human side of what happens when digital tools come into a company or a team, and how that affects their workflow, and adoption, and broader issues like that.

I’m still thinking like a UX designer, I would contend. But I’m not dealing with pixels and bits anymore. I’m really dealing with education and a lot of face-to-face contact, whether it’s remote or in-person. But really looking at education and adoption in a broader sense.

Paul:

Awesome. Well, you’ve been part of the UX STRAT family for quite a while, but you have an upcoming set of presentations. What’s your workshop going to be about at UX STRAT Europe?

Jim:

So, my workshop is going to be about a topic that I’ve been looking at for a while, called Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). Lots of folks are talking about that these days. I’ve been working in various ways with JTBD since about 2003 or 2004, almost 15 years. One of my goals is to simplify it. I think there’s a lot of confusion out there, first of all, so I want to clarify things. But I think some of the practical application of JTBD is missing. Folks like Clayton Christensen, a famous Harvard business professor, writes books on these things. But he operates in the stratosphere and just assumes that, with one meeting or one decision, that you suddenly decide that you’re going to be in a new market. Well, that’s all fine and good to use JTBD in that way, but what about us mere mortals who are, you know, in the trenches.

So, I believe that there’s an application for JTBD across an entire organization and I want to bring it there, bring it down, clarify and simplify things. So, I’ll be giving a four-hour workshop on JTBD. I present a simplified framework; we have hands-on activities, lots of discussion. People bring up their own cases and we’ll discuss those as a group, so it should be a very interactive session.

Paul:

Yeah, I’m hearing more about JTBD these days--I mean, you’ve been speaking about that at UX STRAT for a couple of years now. I think 2014 was maybe the first time that you started talking to us about it. It seem to be gaining more traction now.

Jim:

Yeah, I’ve been seeing that, too. I’ve always been attracted to it, but one of the reasons why I’m spending more time with that topic now, doing workshops, and I’ve recently just signed a book deal with Rosenfeld Media to write a book on the topic as well. One thing about JTBD is it’s actually an umbrella term, and it’s a theory, and there’s actually lots of different techniques and practices within that, and those practices and techniques actually fall into two different camps as well.

So, there’s lots of confusion on what level altitude we’re talking about when we say JTBD. Some people are talking about a specific application of it, and a specific technique, and other folks are talking across those two different schools of thoughts--there might even be three different schools of thought, depending on how you divide the world.

In any event, it’s a broad field that is very interesting to me because it comes from the business community. I have a design background and I know you have a design background, Paul. A lot of the tenants of JTBD make sense and ring true with us, right? Start with the user’s goal and things like that. The interesting thing about JTBD is that it comes from the business community, so I think that there’s a lot of overlap. JTBD, for me, is kind of the nexus of human-centered design and a lot of design thinking, the school of thought that I come from, with business thinking as well, too. And I think designers can bring a lot to that conversation. That’s really what I want to do, is I want to bring our skills to that business conversation around JTBD.

Paul:

It seems to me that design thinking is somewhat of a top-down methodology. You’re looking at the world out there, and large problems, and how do you come up with something innovative that’s not being done yet. Whereas JTBD seems more of a bottom-up approach, where you’re starting with somebody’s day, and they have to do something today. My daughter today needs to get her care package for her final exams. That’s her job to be done today. So, they seem to be coming at the problem from different angles, but I imagine they both have their own places in our repertoire.

Jim:

Yeah, I agree, that’s my perspective as well. I don’t think it’s JTBD or design thinking, or lean. I think we need all of those things in our toolkits. Organizations are big and complex, our markets are big and complex, they’re changing very, very quickly. I think we need to understand all of these lenses and perspectives and be able to drive them and apply them when needed. So, I tend to not have an exclusionary position.

One of the things that I also want to do in my workshop and in my book is actually tie them together. Use JTBD at this point as a bottom-up, as you say--I say problem space thinking--and then use design thinking to get into the solution space, and then use lean to prove out that solution. In my mind, it makes a perfect continuum of these things, and it’s really just about understanding how that can actually play out.

Paul:

That makes sense. And then you’re also giving another presentation, and it’s on quite a different topic. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jim:

Yeah, sure. This is a topic that I’m really excited about, and it kind of begins with a story of me getting contacted by an NGO in Abu Dhabi. The name of that organization is HEDAYAH. They’re in the field of countering violent extremism, which is something I knew nothing about when they contacted me. But they found me on the internet by way of my book. I wrote a book in May of 2016, called Mapping Experiences, and my sponsor, somebody whispered in his ear at some point in time that he should map the experience of former violent extremists. I’m not sure how he came to this idea. But he found me through SEO--keywords, right? He found me, he found my book, and asked me if I wanted to facilitate a two-and-a-half day session with former violent extremists to understand their experience after they get out of the hate groups that they were in.

So for me, it was a personal challenge, honestly. I wanted to prove to myself that my book wasn’t about software design. Because if you publish a book by O’Reilly and put an animal on it, everybody thinks it’s about software design. But it’s not. And Paul, I’m sure you know, too, when we talk about mapping experiences, we’re talking about human experiences, right? It’s not about optimizing buttons that people click on or putting things into a shopping cart. That’s all fine, right, and that’s part of the design job. But when we talk about experience and experience strategy, it’s broader than that.

This gave me the chance to kind of prove it to myself. I wasn’t in a digital realm; I wasn’t even in a commercial realm. We were looking at how we can understand the experience of former violent extremists using the methods in my book. And, you know, spoiler alert, the answer is yes. And that’s what I want to talk about in my talk: my experience and how the stuff that we do isn’t just about bottom line commercial purposes. It’s about human experience.

Paul:

You and I have been in the field for a little while, so we’ve seen some evolution from websites to mobile, and then probably soon seeing virtual reality, artificial intelligence, etc. One reason that I keep asking you back as a speaker is your steady focus on strategy. To me, strategy is just an approach or recipe for finding the smartest way forward. “How are we going to reach our vision and goals, and do it in the most intelligent way, given the resources we have?” But your thoughts: what do you think of when you think of strategy?

Jim:

I think about it as a lens or a perspective that is a hypothesis about how you’re going to move forward to solve a particular problem. To some degree, I think design, particularly labels like UX as well, too, have been kind of shoe-boxed into only digital product design. But there’s also digital service design, and, like you said, there’s AI and virtual reality and all these other experiences. And if you take a step back and look at human experience, and then look at strategy, those things are universal enough that you could take any situation--a virtual reality situation, for instance, if that’s what you’re trying to design an offering or solution for--and apply experience strategy to that as well, too.

We used to get into an argument: should a UX designer know how to program HTML, code and things like that? Just that short list of technologies that you just gave out there, it’s like, no, because where does it end? Do I have to know how to program an Apple Watch? No, but I can still do UX strategy for those things if I understand what experience is and I understand what strategy is, right?

Paul:

Yeah, I think the most helpful reason for learning how to code is so that you can argue with the coders about why they actually can do the experience that you’ve mapped out for them to develop.

Jim:

[laughs] Exactly, right. No, I don’t want to say that it’s not important. It’s important for a designer to understand the medium in which they’re working. But that’s far from being a coder or an actual person who does that. I think that’s a different ballpark, and I think having skills in strategy and understanding the human experience--you put those things together and, wow, that’s powerful.

Paul:

You taught this workshop for us at UX STRAT USA last year in Boulder. Our audience tendes to be very experienced, but one thing I liked about your workshop is that all different experience levels can gain from JTBD. There’s a very clear path forward I think for any experience level. Would you agree with that?

Jim:

I definitely would agree with that. It’s tricky; I think because you can get some immediate insight and benefit from JTBD on kind of a local level, the field of your current concern, a project or something like that, but it’s also powerful enough to do things like define a market that you’re going to go after. So, some folks who are applying JTBD are using it to define corporate strategy at the highest level. So, it has that power behind it, and that universality behind it.

But I think it does have that immediate, “A-ha! I get it! I need to look at the person’s goals and their needs, and that can help me design a project.” Or even talking about support; I was talking with my support team, saying, “When you’re on a call with somebody, don’t just listen to their question. Ask what they are trying to get done.” Because they might ask you about something like, “I can’t download the mural,” or something like that. They want access to their content. Maybe there’s another way to solve that, what they’re fundamentally trying to get done. So, even something as normal as a support call can be influenced by JTBD thinking as well, too.

Paul:

Well, putting on your wizard hat and looking into the future… Both of us have used a graphic in our presentations recently of a double diamond approach to product design and development. The first diamond is the strategy side of things. What do you see coming up for us in terms of especially that first diamond?

Jim:

I see the conversation going up a level. It’s not just about product design, it’s about the value that an organization creates for the people that it serves, and the perceived value that they get. And I use the term “value” to kind of avoid the word “business,” because often when you say the word “business” you mean money and finance and bottom line, and that kind of thing. That’s all important as well, too. I like to talk about value creation and value perception from both sides; from both the organization, how do they create value, and from the customer side, how do they perceive value. I think we get into that level of conversation, or we should, at least.

To your double diamond, I’m actually looking at a figure eight, and I don’t mean to be facetious. The double diamond is great and I use it and I refer to it all the time. But we’re also starting to see this continuous striving for creating value and reinventing the value as well, too. So, I’ve moved from a double diamond to a figure eight, first of all, and the figure eight is to kind of show a continuous stream of activity. But I’ve also started just talking about value creation as well.

Paul:

Awesome. I really appreciate you taking some time out to talk with me today. Is there anything you want to say to our readers as we wrap up our conversation?

Jim:

I’ve been involved with UX STRAT for a number of years. For me, it’s the go-to conference for topics that we just discussed: strategy, experience design. Paul, you’ve done a great job bringing this community together. This is my first time going to UX STRAT Europe. I’m really excited to be in Amsterdam this year. If you’re thinking about it, I want to encourage you to come on out, it will not disappoint!