Human Insight Podcast
Hear from top experts in the fields of conversion optimization, UX research, design, product, and more.
Janelle Estes
Chief Insights Officer,
UserTesting
Andy
MacMillan
CEO, UserTesting
Andy
Webinar Dec. 8th: Learn about the biggest trends and challenges in product management today Register now 
The three skills of successful product managers
This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interviewed Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder and CEO of Product School.
Product School is the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.
In his interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting's Chief Information Officer, Carlos discusses:
- The role of a product manager in today’s world
- The skills and experiences product managers need to be successful
- The role customer feedback plays in a product manager’s day-to-day life
Why great product teams adopt a continuous discovery mindset
This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interviewed Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits.
Teresa teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises and has taught over 6,500 product people core discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy.
In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Teresa discusses:
- What is continuous discovery?
- What role does customer input and feedback play in a product manager’s day-to-day life?
- Who should manage continuous customer feedback?
- What do we do with those customer insights?
- How do we align those insights with business goals?
This episode originally aired November 15, 2021.
Developing continuous engagement with your customers
This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interviewed Emily Carrion, VP of Marketing at Esper and veteran of the Seattle startup scene.
In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Carrion discusses:
- Her observations on the progress being made in getting more women startup founders, board members, and senior leaders
- Why it’s important to hear directly from customers, in their own voices
- How marketing benefits from customer feedback
- What startups should prioritize with their customer feedback and testing?
- Her advice developing continuous engagement with customers
This episode originally aired November 8, 2021.
Identifying your best fit customer
This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interview April Dunford, a tech executive, board member, CEO and founder of Ambient Strategy, and author of Obv!ously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It.
In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Dunford discusses:
- Is positioning just for startups
- How has the pandemic changed the role of positioning
- How our biases inhibit our positioning efforts
- Who should be involved in positioning
- The importance of customer feedback in developing your positioning
- And how to identify your best fit customers
This episode originally aired November 1, 2021.
Season Two insights and takeaways
In this episode, Andy and Janelle recap highlights from Season 2 of the Human Insights Podcast, as well as offer a sneak peak at what’s in store for season three, which kicks off in September.
This episode originally aired June 14, 2021.
What does it mean to be customer obsessed?
Catherine Richards said one way Tesco Bank builds a CX culture is through positive disruption.
“And what I mean by that is, as leaders, you need to know when to make a call to positively disrupt how you're working,” said Richards, who is head of design at Tesco Bank.
An example was introducing Customer Wednesdays, a day dedicated in the week to spending time with the bank’s customers. They started that four years ago, bringing in customers to get feedback early in the design process. That’s continued during the pandemic, just that now they get that feedback remotely.
“When you tell a story about a customer that you've seen, or you've spent time with, there's just something about that, that people remember. They remember the customer stories,” Richards said.
In her conversation with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Richards goes on to discuss:
- What is the role of leadership in driving customer-centric design and experiences
- What metrics or KPIs does her team directly or indirectly influence
- How has the financial services/bank customer experience evolved over the course of your career?
This episode originally aired June 7, 2021.
How to become a great product manager
Christian Idiodi has led or consulted on nearly 200 successful product launches for a range of companies from startups to big banks. So, you’d think he always wanted a career in product management, right?
“Actually, I wanted to be a doctor,” said the partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a global product consulting firm. “I wanted to solve hard problems like cancer or HIV. That was always what I had dreamed and aspired to be.”
Idiodi joined the Human Insight Podcast to discuss what makes a great product manager, how companies and managers should invest in coaching their product managers, and how product managers work with teams to ensure customer satisfaction.
In his conversation with Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Idiodi discusses:
- His role today at SVPG
- His new initiative, Innovate Africa
- How the product world has evolved over the years
- Best practices for developing and coaching product managers and leaders
- Staying close to the customer
- Balancing processes and innovation
This episode originally aired May 24, 2021.
Reinventing how we work: a roundtable discussion with MURAL and UserTesting
As Jim Kalbach likes to say, work is not an office it is what we accomplish together.
As many companies are now planning if and when their employees return to offices, the questions of what work is and how we accomplish it are top of mind.
This week’s Human Insight Podcast dives into the topic in a roundtable discussion with Mariano Suarez-Battan, co-founder and CEO at MURAL; Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL; Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting.
In their conversation, they discuss:
- Distributed collaboration
- Digital Transformation
- Diversity & Inclusion
This episode originally aired May 17, 2021.
Building strong design teams that scale: a conversation with Susan Rice
How do you build a customer-focused design team that scales?
Susan Rice has done it three times. She’s the Vice President of UX at Workiva, a global SaaS reporting compliance platform that enables the use of connected data and automation for reporting across finance, accounting, risk, and compliance.
In her Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Rice discusses:
- Building a customer-focused team
- Her favorite UX design KPI
- UX design differences between B2B and B2C
- Advice for those embarking on a design career
This episode originally aired May 10, 2021.
Retail trends that will outlast the pandemic
The pandemic has changed so much about retail, but some retail trends will outlast the pandemic, such as providing a personalized experience, says Sean McKee, the former Director of eCommerce and CX at UK footwear retailer, Schuh.
In his Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, McKee discusses:
- His 25-year career at Schuh from storeroom to boardroom
- The biggest changes to retail and ecommerce over that time
- Keeping a customer focus in a sea of ecommerce data points
“What retailers have to think about is the question of experience and what experience looks like because if doing things that were at the experiential end of the spectrum were important before COVID, they're even more important now,” McKee said. “Customers really need to have a compelling reason to visit your store because they've just had an education that tells them they can do other things. So, the experiential stuff is important.”
This episode originally aired May 3, 2021.
Creating a framework for customer listening
Dan Storms, CookUnity’s Chief Product Officer, said adding steps to their sign up process had a positive result on the business.
It was a counterintuitive action from a design perspective. Usually, you want to eliminate steps. But listening to their best, most raving fans, yielded insights that a few added questions initially would result in an even better experience for customers.
And it was great for CookUnity, too. They saw a 50% increase in conversions.
The three-year-old startup is a direct-to-consumer meal delivery platform that allows its customers to choose a range of ready-to-eat meals from celebrity and up-and-coming chefs. It’s based in New York City, recently opened its second community kitchen in Los Angeles, and delivers to twenty-seven states.
In his Human Insight podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Storms goes on to discuss:
- How they leveraged two bestsellers to create a framework for customer listening that they then applied to their product and market strategy
- How to validate customer feedback with surveys
- Insights on planning the NY Product Conference
This episode originally aired April 26, 2021.
Speaking the language of execs: it's not about CX
This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interview Tamara Adlin, Chief Product Officer at Blockchange Ventures and a C-level strategy and CX consultant.
In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Adlin discusses:
- Her career journey and work with Blockchange Ventures
- Her seminal book, The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas
- Adopting the practice of customer-centricity
- Her magic trick to achieving executive alignment
- Startups and the Catch 22 of the MVP
- UX discovery and more
This episode originally aired April 19, 2021.
How video evokes empathy: insights from a former design lead at Hulu
When John S. Couch started at Hulu as Vice President of UX and Design in January 2016, one of the first things he wanted to do was produce a vision video.
Design is a lot like the parable of the elephant and the blind men, said Couch, author of The Art of Creative Rebellion. In the story, the blind men have never come across an elephant before so each man feels and describes only one part of the elephant, like its trunk or tail—unable to describe the elephant in its entirety
“They're all correct, but they're looking at it only through one slice,” Couch said. “And what I wanted to do was make a short film, which described the end result. What the whole elephant looked like.”
“And there was an immediate mental shift,” Couch said. “From ‘We're not really sure’ to ‘Oh, that's the elephant.’”
In Episode 11 of the Human Insight Podcast, Couch goes on to talk about his career path (such as exaggerating his skill sets to land a job at Wired to the evolution of his role now as a Mr. Wolf—consulting companies on their UX and design problems).
This episode originally aired April 12, 2021.
Accelerating edtech: A conversation with Raina Mehta on supporting learners in a remote world
Edtech is booming. In this episode of the Human Insight podcast, we interview Raina Mehta who is vice president and head of product and UX at Kaplan. In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Raina shares how edtech is accelerating their efforts to engage with today’s online learners.
This episode originally aired April 5, 2021.
Innovation and UX in the public sector
Stephanie Nguyen, Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab and Nick Sinai, Senior Advisor, Insight Partners and Adjunct Faculty, Harvard Kennedy School join UserTesting CEO, Andy MacMillan, and Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes.
This episode originally aired November 30, 2020.
UX in a B2B world
Kate Lawrence, Senior Director, User Experience at Akamai Technologies, joins UserTesting CEO, Andy MacMillan, and Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, to discuss user experience in B2B.
This episode originally aired November 16, 2020.
The parallels between UX/CX and employee experience
Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, and Head of UX Research at Humu, Marieke McCloskey, discuss the parallels between UX/CX and employee experience.
This episode originally aired November 2, 2020.
Harnessing customer emotion to create meaningful experiences
UX leader Paul Stonick joins UserTesting's CEO, Andy MacMillan, and Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, to discuss harnessing customer emotion to create meaningful experiences.
This episode originally aired October 19, 2020.
Building a customer-centric culture at Rothy’s
Rothy's Product Designer, Gina DeMatteo, joins UserTesting CEO, Andy MacMillan, and Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, to discuss taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs and building a customer-centric culture.
This episode originally aired October 6, 2020.
COVID-19's impact on travel industry consumer behavior
Diya Loney, Costco Travel Product Manager, joins Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, and guest co-host VP, Market Strategy, Michael Mace, for a discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted travel industry consumer behavior.
This episode originally aired September 21, 2020.
Measuring user happiness
Tomer Sharon, Managing Director, Head of User Research & Metrics at Goldman Sachs, joins UserTesting Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, to discuss measuring user happiness.
This episode originally aired September 7, 2020.
Health communication and the future of telemedicine
CEO, Andy MacMillan, and Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, speak with Director of The University of Texas at Austin Center for Health Communication and Professor of Population Health, Michael Mackert, Ph.D. about what health communication is, why it matters, and the future of telemedicine in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
This episode originally aired August 14, 2020.
Messaging and brand during COVID-19
Chief Insights Officer, Janelle Estes, hosts a discussion with CEO and Founder of Motivate Impact Mona Patel on messaging and brand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This episode originally aired August 6, 2020.
