Yet Another Year in Review - Year 02

Written By Behzod Sirjani

(Read Year 01)

May 16th, 2022 marked two years of being “independent,” which seems strange when I write it out. It feels like that paradox of time, where two years both seems too long and too short. I — and the studio — have grown and changed tremendously, and yet I feel I like I’m just getting started. Both things are true, of course, and it’s that duality that makes the work so interesting.

Over the last year I’ve done work I’m proud of with a number of people and companies I respect, and the work itself has transitioned significantly. While I can trace the roots of my practice to my early projects, the path ahead looks materially different. Here I'll share three of the biggest realizations about my work as an independent, then spend time looking backwards before talking about what’s ahead.

Infinite Games, Flow State Questions & being an Intellectual Lion

A lot of people have asked me if I’m interested in going back to work for a company full time, and my answer each time is “no” because being an independent — at least for me — is getting to play an infinite game, professionally. I’ve previously written about how the studio is a vehicle for me to get to experiment, and this past year has reinforced that experimentation is a necessary condition for what I’m trying to do. I get to work with people I respect on projects I’m excited about, and I can’t think of a better orientation for work (for me), even if I feel like I have an illegible job at times (my response to "what do you do?" is often a tongue in cheek "I'm Behzod-as-a-Service").

As I’ve had this conversation, the follow up is about how I choose my work, and I think that my criteria has sharpened tremendously in the last year. I orient myself to “flow state questions” — questions/challenges/problems that are not so obvious they have an easy answer and not so difficult that I see them as insurmountable. They are questions I want to struggle with (Brie Wolfson calls these “Fires I Run Towards”). This realization came from conversations I was having with friends about our definition of wealth, inspired by Khe’s tweet. I think that true wealth is choosing your stress, and I feel wildly fortunate that, by that definition, I am professionally wealthy beyond measure (the vast majority of my stress is not only chosen, but welcomed and embraced).

This framing of infinite games, flow state questions, and wealth has clarified why I’ve preferred to grow the studio through collaboration rather than headcount. I’m approaching work with an abundance mindset where I’m focused on outcomes rather than ownership, and I want to invite others into this game I’m playing, hoping that they’ll change it for the better.

The last realization I’ve had over the past year, thanks to conversations with the incredible team at Balsa, is that I function like an intellectual lion — I’m "lazy" most of the time, but when something catches my attention, I’ll use all the energy that I have to chase it down. This framing was helpful for me as it has impacted the way I’ve structured my work — balancing the the rest and the chase (or the compressing of the spring and the leaping forward).

While this has been a meandering set of reflections, hopefully there’s a spark in here somewhere for you — or at least a bit of context on where my head is at. With that said, let’s look back at the last 12 months.

Year 02 Highlights

While there’s a lot of different ways to make sense of what happened in the last year, I’ll start with brief highlights:

When I stop and look at the highlights, it’s easy to be grateful for what was accomplished over the last 12 months. The thing that I’m most proud of here is that the work continues to push on a trajectory towards helping organizations or all kinds and sizes shift the way they learn with and from the people they’re trying to serve, whether or not they have any formal “researchers” in their organization. I can imagine that some of these things look unrelated, disjointed, or even chaotic — but as John Cutler points out in his newsletter title, sometimes it’s “the beautiful mess” that we need to spend our time in to make magic.

Looking at this highlights two things for me:

  • I continue to be in good orbits. All of the items above were done with people I respect and have learned from, whether that’s Jennifer Li at a16z, the team at Maze, or the incredible folks at Reforge (among many others).

  • More of my work has been one-to-many that I had expected. I thought that I’d be working tightly with small teams, but writing, talks, and teaching has taken up the bulk of my time — all of which have been to large audiences. As an introvert, I realize that one-to-many behind a screen is a safe medium, and doesn’t feel much different from one to one sometimes, but it’s come as a surprise as I looked back on the year.

Looking Back

Not because of the rule of three, but in looking back, I wanted to spend some time talking about three places I spent time that I’m particularly proud of — Balsa, Reforge, and the UX Leadership Playbook with Maze.

Balsa

I spent a large part of 2021 working with the team at Balsa, doing a mix of org design and market research in partnership with Nicole Zeng. It’s hard for me to choose the right words to talk about my professional relationship with Nicole, but I will say that projects we do together have the highest chance of both pushing me and resulting in something I’m deeply proud of.

Our initial orientation to the partnership was "build our own version of Xerox PARC" at least at a two person scale. We wanted to do work that was intellectually meaningfully and could be shared with the broader community. The Balsa Builder report, among other work, fits that description well. This was the rare primary research project I take on and it was one of the first times I’ve gotten to work with others to build a full website to host our findings. Even if you’re not a software engineer, I imagine you’ll see things that resonate with you about work and workplaces.

While the organization has shifted (as startups do), I'm both proud and grateful of the work we did and always excited for another opportunity to partner with Nicole.

Reforge

I've just crossed two years of being involved with Reforge — first as a program partner, and now as an Executive in Residence — and it's easy to see Reforge as being an inflection point in my professional life in many of the same ways that Facebook was.

Many people ask me what it's like to be an EIR at Reforge, and I've found myself leaning on a story that Mark Zuckerberg told us during an all hands (at least the story as I remember). The abbreviated version is:

Zuck was at a dinner somewhere and one of the guests was Chess Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. There was a chessboard sitting out in the house they were dining at and Carlsen invited Zuck to play a game. Zuck accepted on one condition — that Carlsen would explain every move to Zuck before he made it. Carlsen agrees and the game begins.

Some amount of time passes and Zuck realizes that all the guests are watching the game and he and Carlsen are holding up dinner. He asks the other guests if they should stop so everyone can eat and one of the other guests says something to the extent of "Why would you stop? How often do you have someone who is the best in the world at something explaining it to you?" Zuck went on to mention that he didn't realize this was such a novel feeling, because it's what he felt like working at Facebook.

While I've felt this way to various degrees throughout my career, I've never felt it as strongly as I do at Reforge, where I have a front row seat to some of the best operators in the world across a range of fields. I've mentioned that Elena Verna has the highest rate of "insights per minute" in conversation of anyone I've met, and I could say similarly kind and true things about so many of the other incredible people I spend my time around. I'm open with most people that I plan to "never leave," though I imagine that my engagement will shift over time.

The User Insights for Product Decisions program launched in Spring 2021 and I recently facilitated it’s third cohort, which just crossed 500 people in terms of live participation (not including self-paced programming). Reforge plays a lot of different roles in my life, but one of the best things that it’s done for the studio is take all of my inbound requests for “how to do research” training. Instead of paying me more than what Reforge costs, people who want to level up their individual (or small group) practice can join Reforge, go through the UIPD program, and then come back to me with that knowledge so that we can operationalize it for them and their organization (not to mention joining Reforge gets you access to 15 other programs, a ton of other content, and an expert network). This has (obviously) reinforced the value of having a “product” to sell that isn’t your time, though given the quality of Reforge’s team and content, set a ridiculously high bar for me in terms of other things to produce.

Reforge is both incredibly intellectually satisfying and also aligns very strongly with the intellectual lion laziness I described earlier — it takes up a lot of my cognitive energy during the live cohorts I lead in Spring and Fall, but outside of that, a lot of my involvement is shaped by the intersection of where I can be helpful and what I'm excited about. I'm incredibly grateful to Brian and the team for continuing to let Reforge be a home.

Democratization Playbook

The last thing I want to talk about is a project that was deeply gratifying in ways I couldn't imagine — the UX Leadership Playbook that I launched with Maze and ADP List in April.

I’ve been an advisor to Maze for two years now and have continued to learn from and partner with so many fantastic people at the organization, both in terms of org and product strategy as well as on their other resources [1], [2]. I’ve spoken with a number of people at Maze about releasing something related to democratization during the course of our relationship, and then a few months back, things really kicked into high gear.

From my perspective, the process was incredibly smooth — which speaks to the where and how I was involved, as well as the caliber of the Content Marketing team at Maze. I had a conversation early on with Elena Luchita, the Content Marketing Lead, about the principles I think are important for building organizations that learn, and followed up in a Notion doc and with a few Looms to answer her questions, push on ideas, etc. Then about three months later, I got a note from Giada Gastaldello, a manager on Elena's team, letting me know the playbook was done and they wanted me to write an introduction. They sent over a copy of the draft and I was blown away by the energy and thoughtfulness that went into the book and the voices and stories included.

When I say that this project was gratifying, I'm speaking to the quality of the execution in the final product and the incredible partnership with Maze. But I am also moved by the fact that nearly two years ago, when I wrote "Democratization is our Job," the idea that we can and should be helping others with research and research-like activities seemed like such a controversial - if not taboo - topic, and in the time since then, our discipline has had enough people exploring and reflecting on different ways to open up our practice to such a degree that we could put together a playbook of 30+ voices.

I'm thankful for everyone who contributed to this project, and I hope that it may truly provide a blueprint for others who are starting to explore shifting their companies towards being organizations that learn.

Looking Forward

I've recognized that the last year, especially in a macro sense, has been quite chaotic, and that the path forward will continue to look different for me. The two biggest changes I'm acknowledging are the shift toward more of an "advising" practice and an opening up of the practice in more ways.

The Shift to Advising

While I reflected above that a lot of my time was one to many, something that’s also shifted significantly in my work is that I function more like an advisor to the companies I work with — partnering directly with senior leaders as they identify and build good research practices within their organizations. This work has been incredibly enjoyable, but takes a very different shape than prior engagements.

Instead of a lot of surface area with an organization for a short-ish period of time, I’ll have a lighter engagement (often weekly or bi-weekly) over a number months. This feels like it honors the rhythm at which the organization can take metabolize our conversations and act on them, and also gives us time to build intentionally without creating too much thrash within the organization.

If this is something you're interested in exploring, please reach out. I still have some capacity in the fall/winter and would love to hear from you.

The Collective (opening up the practice)

Over the last year, I've had a few trusted friends in "Yet Another Backchannel" on Slack to share about our work, get feedback on how we practice, and work on writing and talks together (originally inspired by what Tom Critchlow has done with !& on Discord).

I want to expand that conversation moving forward to share everything I know with other people who are excited to contribute to a body of work that will help companies improve the way they learn with and from the people they are trying to serve. I'm still working out the details of this, but I'm been thrilled with the success of YAB so far and seen enough positive momentum with this experiment to be willing to take the next step.

Since I'm not trying to scale the studio through headcount, this is not meant to be people being a part of my practice so much as all of us having a space to share our own perspectives and our practices in a deeper way than Twitter or a mailing list allows. Again, if this is interesting to you, let me know.

The Outro

I want to wrap this up with a note of gratitude — so much of this is possible because of the the wonderful people who have invited me into their games and joined me in mine.

I’ve described the different buckets of work I do as “vehicles for the conversations I want to have” and that implies that there are other people willing to enter a dialogue with me. Fortunately there are (for now, at least :sweat_smile:). I appreciate all of you.

Behzod Sirjani https://behzod.com
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