Debbie Levitt, Delta CX

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and chief evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore specific topics from the world of APIs through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Debbie Levitt, founder of Delta CX. I thoroughly enjoyed my discussion with Debbie when it comes to the user and developer experience, and I found her view of agile refreshingly honest.

Alrighty, well, let’s start with the basics here. Who’s Debbie Levitt and what do you do?

A good question. Thanks for having me on. I’m Debbie Levitt and I’m from a company called Delta CX. We’re a full-service CX and UX consultancy, and basically I’ve been doing CX and UX strategy, design, architecture and research in one form or another for over 20 years. That’s the short version. I didn’t know how deep you wanted me to go.

Well, let’s dive into that. I mean, let’s start with the fundamentals. What is UX?

Oh yes, I think a lot of people think they know and kind of don’t know. So UX, or user experience, is more the psychology and science than art of making sure that we’ve created, I know this sounds obvious, a good user experience, to make sure that things are usable, that they match people’s needs, and that we’re really delivering to all of our target customers something of value, something they would want to use and possibly even pay for. So that means we want systems to be easy to learn, easy to use, intuitive, accessible to all people, and of course properly researched and designed rather than guessed.

Yeah, so like many other acronyms out there, I know what user experience is, or I think I do, but I think I would fall into the category of the folks that probably don’t understand it as deep as we should. I care about the user, but I hear a lot of words around empathy and other things get thrown around, and I’m not always sure we actually are caring about the users as part of this, or we’ve separated ourselves enough with the tech, or there’s enough of a buffer between us and them that we don’t quite see them as mattering as much as they should. Do you see that across your customers? Is there a lot of lip service to this, or do you see something different when you’re out there?

You know, it’s not just any of my customers or clients, it’s really around the world right now. There’s so much lip service paid to “we care about customers” and “we have empathy” and of course “in these unprecedented times.” And I think that if we don’t have good knowledge about our target customers and users, then we can’t have empathy for them, and we can’t take the right actions. That’s the most important thing. You can have mountains and mountains of empathy, you can have endless care and sympathy, but if you haven’t taken the right actions for your customers, congratulations on your hashtag empathy.

Yes, I can’t agree enough. So I feel like most of us are doing a good job, or I hope a good job, or investing heavily in the research, in having departments, hiring people to do UX. What are the common shortcomings you see when you go out there, even when groups like us say we have it together and seemingly have a department and have a plan? Where are the deficiencies that you come across?

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of potential deficiencies across that larger workflow or task, because in many cases we think we’ve hired some good UX people, but very often the job descriptions and the jobs themselves are really crappy. They’re jobs no one wants, and you can tell from the job description right away. It always looks like the job of seven people glued together. You need to be a researcher and an information architect and a content strategist and a designer and an artist and a front-end dev and maybe some marketing. Who has time for all of this? And more importantly, how can we pretend that’s going to be agile if you expect one person to do seven people’s jobs in series? Because it’s one person and nothing runs in parallel here. How can this possibly match with any kind of agile development? We’re going to be waiting for one person to do tens, twenties, hundreds of hours of work. It doesn’t make sense.

So thing one, a lot of the jobs are poorly constructed and show that people really don’t understand what we do. Then we don’t always assess those candidates. A lot of times HR, recruiter, your hiring manager just looks at someone’s portfolio and looks for pretty pictures. Pretty pictures are nice, but UX is all about psychology and behavior and making things intuitive, and while having something be attractive or branded is part of that, it’s not the core of that. If something is really attractive and well branded but it’s awful to learn, terrible to use, doesn’t match our needs, congratulations on your branding. So people are not being assessed correctly.

Then they get into your workspace, your workplace, maybe not yours personally, but they get into the workplace and we typically circumvent them, exclude them and overrule them. We typically have product managers and engineers who think they know UX as well as we do because they’ve been designing systems for a long time, and so they think they know our job better than we do. We are typically not empowered to do our best work. We are typically told we’re agile, what can you get me tomorrow? And of course that is not how we do our best work, that’s not how we make things best for the user. So that is a very short version of a much longer story of carnage and sadness. But ultimately, even if we think we are hiring UX people, take a look. Are they really empowered? Are they problem finders and problem solvers and critical thinkers, or did you tell them we already have the idea, just sketch some screens? Because that is an incorrect utilization of UX.

So this feels like we’ve got to do some self-introspection here and look at ourselves as far as why we want user experience. Is it just ticking a box, having that department, having that group, versus actually giving them the agency and the platform to be listened to and actually have some controls over the roadmap?

Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of models out there and they all have different names but they say the same thing. The three voices model: product, UX and engineering are supposed to be equal voices. Product is going to, in some cases, shepherd the business goals and the business needs with hopefully some attention to user goals and user needs. UX is usually looking way more at user needs and tasks than the business goals. And engineering is going to look at it and understand what’s feasible, what can be done, do we already have APIs in place, do we have the services, or is this something we’re going to have to develop or find, and we can understand technical feasibility. So for that prioritization there should be three voices, and that way we don’t accidentally end up with something that isn’t feasible for engineering, or where we end up saying to UX, well, we decided this was a priority and you get two minutes to do it. We should be making sure that UX not only has that voice in prioritization but also planning and estimation, because if you want us to do our best work it takes time, it’s scientific stuff. If you don’t want us to do our best work, why are we here? This isn’t fun.

I like your approach. So we’re busy, we’re moving fast though. There’s a velocity needed to get the capabilities, the features out there that we need to meet the business needs, and UX is going to slow us down. What’s your response to that?

Yeah, I’ve heard that for what feels like decades, and basically what I’ve always noticed about the people who say that is they’re the same people who want to put that one jack-of-all-unicorns on a feature team or a product team. And I always say, look, you put how many engineers on this team, six, eight, whatever it might be? Why don’t you give me five UX people? I want three researchers and two architects who are designers, who are not artists, they’re true UX architects. You watch how agile we can be if we get the headcount. Because while it’s one person, or at some companies a fraction of one person because they’re not even fully allocated to the team, there is no way that we’re ever going to meet anyone’s standards for speed or efficiency. But hey, let me put five people on this and let me plan ahead to have the time and the sprints that we need to do what we do, I think that can work out. But again, while UX is seen as a bunch of artsy-fartsy hipsters that make pretty screens, nobody thinks of us as a partner who can be part of prioritization, planning and estimation. But people who are senior or higher in UX should be strategic enough to estimate their own time, and let’s estimate it ahead of time. I can tell you next quarter how long it’s going to take us to do a certain thing. So it sounds like, ah, UX, they’re so slow, and I always think you didn’t give me enough people. You have to add people to the team until we’re not a bottleneck.

So that convinces me wearing my leadership hat. That convinces me, I can see the benefits there. But I’m a developer on the team, how does this benefit me? I’m just trying to do my job and code this up. What’s the benefit of UX to my world?

Yeah, there are many. I like to say that we are business intelligence, customer intelligence and risk mitigation. I love to ask roomfuls of engineers and developers at engineering conferences, and I say, and everyone at home do this now, hands up, how many times have you coded something at your job and knew that it was going to be garbage for the customer? You knew that this wasn’t the right thing to build or the best thing to build, or that it was being rushed out? Why did we let that happen? And why were you treated like some sort of factory robot? Why didn’t you feel like you had the voice to say hold on? Because we say agile, we welcome change even late in the game. We want to know when we’re going in the wrong direction. And then nobody does it. Nobody wants to stop the train. And I think that we developers have to have that voice and use that voice, and we have to have cultures that aren’t based in fear.

So developers, we’re going to help you improve your morale because you’re going to feel like I’m not building garbage, I’m building something these customers really need and can use, and it’s going to help them, and I’m not going to waste my time, I’m not going to have to interrupt my next release’s stuff because this stuff is doing badly and I’ve got to fix it. And we’re going to help you with risk mitigation, we’re going to help you understand the customers better, we’re going to help you feel like critical thinkers and partners because you are. So that to me are some of the main selling points that I find developers are excited about. And I would say the last one would be a lot of developers say to me, yeah, I hate designing these screens, I really wish they’d stop asking me to lay out screens, I’m not sure I’m really good at this, I’m kind of glad you’re here and you’re going to do this.

And I’m sold, I want you on my team because you’re going to make my life easier, you’re reducing friction, I’m going to have way less anxiety every day going home because I’m just hopefully not going to be in that pinch that I’m always in. So this sounds great now at the team level, but I’m one team, and our team, you sold us, we’re on board, but there’s that one team over there that they seem to always never really be held accountable for what they do, what they say, or what they don’t do, and they just kind of can seem to keep moving forward and pushing things through, features. We’re on board with doing this, but how do we shift that kind of culture?

Yeah, and you’re right, it is a culture shift. Because not only do we have that culture of fear where the developers can’t even say “hi, I’m coding garbage that we’re probably going to have to fix later,” but then we have some other teams that are really off the rails. Typically they are coding lots of garbage, which may not be their fault. Sometimes it wasn’t designed by them, sometimes it was designed by the business analyst or the product manager or the CEO or who does these things. But the problem is that I find that this is all swept under the rug. It seems so important right now to leaders and agile coaches and scrum masters to make our engineering teams look like they are just perfect little angels, everything is going so well here, we’re efficient, we’re agile, we’re lean. And nobody wants to say, you know what, this isn’t going right, we’ve got disaster projects, we have to do a lot of rework later, we have customer support drowning in crap, our marketing team has to go out there and tweet reassuring things to people. Nobody is really looking at the costs of poor quality, which is a fun little lean six sigma thing that anybody can Google, costs of poor quality. These are your internal and external costs when you are releasing junk to the public.

And there’s stuff built into a delicious UX breakfast. Our process is called user-centered design or human-centered design, and we’ve got stuff built into it that checks for quality before engineering writes a line of code, and that way we’re hopefully saving a lot of this rework and these mistakes, and especially when we release stuff to the public and the media gets a hand on it or investors see it. Hello, are you publicly traded? Do you care if people see your stuff? How about what competitors are seeing? So even if your company wants to pretend, and a lot of them do, that customers won’t mind, they’ll figure it out, they’ll read the help file, they’ll write to support, do we really want any of those? Yes, we can say those things, but they’re called comfort, because ultimately we don’t want any of those because they cost us money.

Yeah, agreed. So how does the feedback loop work around this? We’ve got a lot of customers out there, a lot of users that potentially we need tied into this, these boxes checking this, that’s guiding our roadmap. What’s that feedback loop look like at scale?

Yeah, so to me, before the feedback loop can even happen, there should be research that happens at the beginning. This is also the difference between a feature factory, which is “I have an idea, okay let’s build it,” and what we call task-oriented design. And it’s the user’s task. So if you think about when you get to a website or an app or a system, you’ve got a task in mind. Even if that task is “look at something and leave,” you have a task in mind, there’s something you’re here to do. And so the best approach to UX and CX and design is going to be to have done the qualitative research. Typically we’re doing observational studies and asking interview questions so that we can learn what are people’s tasks, their workflows, what are their workarounds, where do they run into obstacles, frustration, confusion, disappointment and distraction, my four horsemen of bad UX. So I know with this little narrow thing you can only see two and a half of them, and registered trademark.

So first of all, before we can even have that feedback loop, sorry, someone tried to seal it, before we can even have the feedback loop, because the feedback loop happens when we’ve released something, we need to save ourselves from mistakes even before that. So in a task-oriented organization we are doing that early research first, which we could call generative research, exploratory research, discovery research, so that we really understand our target users and all the things I just said. Then that should influence product roadmap and our prioritization with engineering, because now we know where people are struggling or where our competitors are not serving their needs and we’ve got opportunities. Then after that’s been built and released, then we can look at that feedback loop. And I think that the mistake that many companies make is they take kind of a marketing approach to it, which is “we’ll have marketing run a survey next quarter.” Well, does that sound agile? Does that sound like the feedback loop agile suggests? Doesn’t agile say that we’re supposed to have a feedback loop, and if we hear stuff from customers we’re supposed to fix it within a month and not have it sitting in the backlog or icebox forever? So if marketing is running some sort of survey a decade from now, this doesn’t help us, this isn’t that right feedback loop.

So I think in addition to things you have in place that are quantitative, which could be surveys or checking analytics for certain types of usage or patterns, there also has to be UX circling back and again observing people. Now that we released it, does it look like it’s working for them? Does it look like it’s meeting their needs? Does it look like we missed something? Does it feel broken to them, or are they giving it five stars out of five? And to me that’s the feedback loop. You know the feedback loop much better from looking at someone do something than from asking them about that, because people are sometimes bad judges of it. People who have kids, and I don’t have kids, there’s a real difference between watching your kid do their homework and asking them how well their homework went tonight. “Homework went great, thanks.” But probably if you’re watching them do the homework you would find some things that didn’t go so great. So same thing in this world. So to me the feedback loop can’t just be the quantitative stuff, we’ve got to bring that qualitative in as well.

Wow, so great on that. Because the feedback loop, I would say, as a fire hose can be overwhelming. But before I want to dive into that a little bit more, you keep mentioning agile along the way here. To put out, role play in my hat here, my org, we’re not fully agile, we kind of sort of did agile and jumped on this train, but we’re not real agile. Is you actually depending on us being real agile?

You know what, I don’t think anyone’s real agile if you ask me, because to me, what does agile say? Agile Manifesto principle one says our highest priority is customer satisfaction. Is anyone doing that? That’s customer centricity. We’re not doing that. We’re making excuses, we’re saying just fail fast, just put it out there. I saw someone on LinkedIn said, hey, Agile Manifesto principle number one says our highest priority is customer satisfaction, which you measure through continuous delivery of working software, and they said see, that’s the CI/CD pipeline. And I said, whoa, if you read that and you saw that whole thing about highest priority is customer satisfaction and you just walked away with CI/CD pipeline, I think you missed the point. CI/CD pipeline cool, working software cool, but does this have value? Does this do what people need? And again, hands up, how many people, when I ask people, and let’s do right now, can you think of a website or app or system that is so freaking amazing, like, what would I do without this thing, these people just got this right? Yeah.

So it is hard getting it right. Getting it right is hard, and it was easier when we were a three-band rock star trio and we were able to just crank out these features and hits as a small startup. But several rounds of funding in, and different companies, enterprise organizations with the entrenched, well, let me go back to the startup, because I think the startup version hits on another aspect that I hear you saying between user experience and customer experiences. As a startup, I’m navigating between free tier massive users using it and not paying for it, and they’re very loud, they’re on Twitter shaming us if we don’t do something that they want, and then we’ve got a smaller slice of customers, but then I’ve also got internal architects who have strong opinions. So is that what user experience and customer experience does? Because the customers are paying us and we’re going to prioritize in a certain way, our architects or co-founders or people have a hand in the product since day one, they go back to those rock star days. So is it the research that helps us balance across those? What helps us manage that?

Well, I think research done well by experts always helps everything. But when I think about the example you just gave where you’ve got like a narrow group of happy customers who are paying, and then you have a wider band of maybe free customers who are bitching you out on Twitter, I think that now is a great time for UX, CX, product and sales, even if that’s one person from each team because you’re a small startup, to get together and talk about who are our target customers. Because sometimes you have to take a look at those slices of people you’re never going to make happy and say, we might not ever make these people happy, why don’t we focus in on that sweet spot? What if we said, you know what, we’re not going to be for this giant rainbow of people, we’re going to be for this section of the rainbow of people, and maybe some of these people are just going to have to move on.

I tried a piece of software last year who I won’t name, and there was a lot I loved about it, but there were some things that didn’t work for me, and I tried posting to their feature requests board, and as soon as I posted to the feature requests board, they literally wrote back like “we will never do this.” Some people freak out and they tweet and they post back, you’re all jerks, hate you. I always write back, I guess I’m not your target customer, and that’s fine. So my feeling is when I see a company that acts like “nah, we’re not going to do that, that’s not who we want to be,” then I go, oh okay, then I don’t belong here, I don’t fit in here, and I’ll go find the place where I do. And so for that startup I say, look, you probably started out casting a very wide net of customers because you wanted that traction and adoption, you wanted anybody who would use these things, especially if you were trying to impress investors with “we have people who use these things.” But now that it’s out there and now that you’re seeing who is this really right for and who isn’t this right for and who do we really want to build for, that’s when I think you have to start thinking more about that product market fit. What is the product and who’s the market it’s for? It doesn’t have to be for everybody. The trying to be everything to everyone, especially as you grow bigger and take on funding and you take on money and people want you to capture more market, be more, have more features, there’s a lot of pitfalls that way.

So I think that’s sound advice to help us stay focused. So if we follow this advice and we’re very tuned in to who our audience is, we’ve got it well-defined and we have this cycle in place, is it going to allow us to kind of shorten the release cycles? Are we going to be able to be quicker because we have it dialed in, or is it still pretty wide cycles to be able to do this properly?

Yeah, to me that comes down to planning. So whose cycles are those? If we can have a good, say, tri-track agile approach, even if you’re fake agile, the idea behind tri-track agile is super simple. Even if you’re two percent agile, the idea is that you have UX research as one stream of work, you have UX design as one stream of work, and there are iterations along with, of course, influencing product on prioritization and things like that, and then you have all of engineering, and we stay out of each other’s business but we collaborate. So when it comes to how many cycles will we have before we release something, well, that depends. How did we prioritize and plan? If we can do a really good job planning ahead, you can say, you know what, for three months from now we really want to have this group of features out there. And I go, great, thank you for telling me early enough, now I’m going to have my research team start the research. We need to know what’s the right thing to build so that we’re closer to getting this right the first time. So you know what, we’re going to spend three weeks on that research, then the design team is going to spend two, three weeks on some designs and iterations after some usability testing, and then we’re going to be ready to give those pieces to engineering. Or if anything’s ready earlier, we’ll get that to engineering. But you should plan, because we need, and I’m making this up, six weeks. Let’s make sure that engineering is not planning to start until a certain date.

And I think the problem that we have is a lot of product managers or people who do project planning, first of all, they assume the best. I’ll never get that, hello. There’s something that I like to call predictable unforeseeables, I call it. We know something terrible is going to happen, we don’t know what it is, why didn’t we plan a little bit of buffer time? So I think that we can get on a good cadence and a good release cycle, and it doesn’t have to be a squillion years between releases. But I think if we care about releasing quality, then we can still release something every month, but let’s make sure it’s quality. I technically don’t care what your cadence is as long as you’re giving people quality, because that’s what customers want. I hear people say to me, oh my god, I can’t imagine slowing things down so that we can have better quality. Say that to your customers, really, you don’t want better quality? And one guy said to me, well, we have to be fast because our competitors are fast. I said, yeah, but if you’re losing people to your competitor, it’s probably not just because they’re fast, they’re probably good. That’s the bottom line. I don’t go with companies that are fast, I go with companies that are good. I go with companies that match or exceed my needs, the companies that help me get it done better. So be careful of this whole “we have to be fast, we have to get it out 10 minutes from now,” because you might end up having to fix it 20 minutes from now. And so if it’s not five-star quality out of five stars, what are we doing? Lean says that’s waste, we should cut.

What are the signs, after investment, hiring the right people, getting the right processes in place, what are the signs that I’m going to see that we’re now doing it right?

Yeah, to me there’s a lot of signs that we can look for, though of course it’s going to be different across different companies. Everyone’s going to have to create their appropriate KPIs, OKRs and other metrics. But I think in general, when you’re doing a better job by your customer, I think you would see fewer complaints. So for your voice of the customer stuff, fewer support tickets, fewer chats complaining about something, this doesn’t work, this isn’t right, why doesn’t it do this, fewer angry tweets, fewer angry Facebook posts. So first of all, look for sentiment to improve and look for customer support to have less BS to deal with. Also, I think that where the improvements you’re making or the features you’re building have to do with customers being able to accomplish their own tasks and fix their own errors and improve their own ability to self-service, then you should see a great reduction on customer support, because now people don’t have to call up to change their phone number, they can just go to the website and change their phone number. So I think these are some things that we can look for.

Certainly we can look for traditional corporate stuff: revenues up, ROI is up, retention is up, conversion is up. Some things you usually don’t want to be up would be time on page, and that’s one of those things that’s left over from like the web in 1996 where we think if people spend more time on a page that must be better for us in some way. But if you think about your own use of websites and apps and systems, unless it’s reading stuff where you do want to spend more time reading stuff, chances are you want less time on the page, because that’s going to be more of a measure of efficiency of people getting their task done. So metrics around task completion and task completion without errors, these are great. And so these are some of the things that I tell people that they can look for. Sure, you can measure NPS or other satisfaction scores, but to me NPS is misleading because it asks people to predict an unknown future. Would you recommend this to a friend or colleague? Sure. Have you recommended it? No. Will you actually? Nah. But is it in your heart to possibly recommend us? Well, thanks a lot. I give you a hearty New York thanks a lot. And so I think that we have to be careful that NPS doesn’t represent satisfaction, it doesn’t represent happiness, it doesn’t represent product market fit, it doesn’t represent loyalty. So some of these are common corporate metrics and numbers, but I feel like they’re not quite what we think they are.

Critical thinking wise, a lot of these numbers get baked in, and like you mentioned, page views, time on page, some of these are old, and in society there’s a lot, like how many steps do we take a day, that is good versus what’s bad. A lot of these things are just BS from the past that have just been laid down as truth, and they’ve been that for so long. How do we as a culture, as a team, how do we shake those and constantly reassess what metrics we’re using and identifying which ones are worthless and we shouldn’t be using?

It is so hard, that’s such a great question, because that’s one of the hardest things to do at a company. Because normally when those metrics were established they were directly tied to someone’s sense of our success. And so once you believe that our success is tied or inextricably tied to time on the page or page views, or did we make people do a thing that they didn’t want to do, mailing list sign-ups, let me give a little bit of fire for the mailing list signups, mailing list sign-ups with pop-ups and interruptions. So I think that once somebody who is a strategist or somebody in your company or startup decides “this is the measure of our success,” it is really hard to tell them it’s not a measure of anybody’s success, because if our customers aren’t successful, how successful will we be in the short or long term? And I think it’s got to be both a bottom-up and top-down thing. The bottom-up people have to be able to raise their voices and say I think we’re measuring the wrong things, and then there have to be some leaders who are also comfortable saying I think we’re measuring the wrong things, or these can’t be the only numbers we focus on as a measure of our success or our revenue.

Because we have to watch, then we have to start watching ethics. I’ve definitely seen companies who had some misguided metrics, and of course that trickled down to the product and engineering and UX teams, where everybody was told do whatever the beep you have to do to make people do this thing so that we could show that we’re meeting these numbers and we’re successful. And that’s how you end up with what in UX we call dark patterns, which are those tricks and those surprises and the fine print and all the things that lead you to do something you didn’t want to do.

Yeah, good advice. We’ve got to figure out how to constantly turn these things over, and I feel like COVID’s given us some opportunity to reassess and think a little differently about things. But one of the common mistakes I’m seeing and experiencing in different companies that I talk to is the user experience and the engineering team, they’re all located in Bay Area, west coast, high percentage of white male on the team, and so we’re strategizing, but we’re a global company and we have a very large, massive global audience. You have any advice for how we can start shifting that so we’re getting a little more diverse in our thinking and we’re expanding the horizon a little bit?

Yeah, super question, and that’s obviously where we have to drop our hashtag empathy, because let’s face it, teams of predominantly white people, and you and I are on that list I guess, there’s only so much empathy we have for the people who aren’t like us. We can be sympathetic to them, we can care about them, but we don’t really know what their lived experiences are. And I think one thing that can help us shift some of that, well, really there’s two things. Number one, fix your hiring. There are absolutely wonderful people of every skin color, of every religion, of every gender, of every everything else, LGBTQ, these people are out there and they’re looking for jobs. Why are we acting like we can’t find them? I’m on LinkedIn for 10 seconds and my feed is full of LGBTQ autistic people saying “where’s my job?” And I say I want you to get that job. So number one, we have to fix our hiring so that it is not rooms full of this stuff. Number two, when we are doing our research and our testing in our UX process, we’ve got to bring more of those people in. We have to make sure that we are recruiting for multiple genders, we are meeting people of different age groups, we can’t just meet the cool millennials, we’ve got to meet grandma. Grandma uses this thing. We have to make sure we’re meeting people of different incomes, people who have different types of devices. I’m so sick of everybody at companies testing everything on the latest iPhone. Hey, I bet there’s a bunch of your customers who are still using a Samsung Galaxy S7 because that’s what they can afford or that’s what they like. So we have to start broadening the idea that it’s the true diversity, equity and inclusion, and our customers are probably a rainbow of people, and we have to get more of them involved in the process. Research with them, test with them, research with people with visual disabilities or conditions, with mobility issues or conditions. We’re not including these people. We’re not even making stuff good for left-handed people, and they’re 10 percent of the population. We freaking don’t care, and we’ve got to care.

I feel like I’m just seeing this Venn diagram of agile, UX, CX, diversity and inclusion, accessibility, and whether you’re having honest conversations, I just feel like they’re not overlapping.

Yes, it’s just circles.

Yes, we have so much work to do, but this sounds like a whole other episode between you and I that we could do that would be pretty compelling. What keeps you in the game? What keeps you coming back every day and doing this for a living?

You know, I am just driven to help people and make change. That’s always who I’ve been. Even as a little kid I’ve just wanted to be that catalyst, helpful person who pushed somebody else’s boat out. And so that’s kind of what keeps me going, because I feel like we could be doing so much better for users and customers and our own employees. Think about all the people who are not happy at their jobs right now, think about all the people you know who are secretly applying and telling you “I wish I could get out of here.” We have to do so much better for all of these people, even the people in the Bay Area. It’s not enough to live in the Bay Area and make a stack of money, because the Bay Area will drain that money. So congratulations on the stack of money you didn’t hold on to. Where is the quality of life, and what feeds us, what is helping us feel rewarded? And I think if we built better things for people, then people would start feeling a little more rewarded. And we should pay them better anyway, but that’s a larger issue. So for me it’s how can I give people some good advice that’s actionable and helpful that they can try, or at least open up those conversations at their job and go, I heard this wacky lady on a podcast and she’s asking us to take a second look at the BS that we’re doing here and the crap we’re sweeping under the rug and pretending is going well. I think she’s onto something. Why don’t we have that tough love come-to-Jesus conversation with ourselves?

I like it. One last question, what has COVID changed for you on all of this?

You know what COVID has changed for me is, I would say, accidentally quite personal and individual. I can’t speak to, I think what I say will be true for other people, but it’s certainly not a universal experience because some people have had it way worse than I have. Four years ago I moved away from the United States and I live in Italy, and I was living in the Bay Area and working in the Bay Area, and I had ramped up my career to such a point where I was actually starting to get jobs without an interview, because I ended up being in demand because of some of my specialties and some of my approaches. And it was a running joke at the time, like, oops, my contract just ended, how many days will it be before my next job? Oh, it looks like two. And then when I moved to Italy people acted like, whoa, where are you, and what time zone is that, and how do we pay you, do you speak English? And it was so ridiculous because I’m still an American citizen with a C corporation of the state of Arizona, and I’m hashtag not sponsored Wells Fargo bank account. I am easy to find and easy to pay, and everybody acted like, whoa, how are we going to do this? When I first moved here, which was exactly four years ago, January 2018.

And when the pandemic hit, that changed. All of a sudden people were like, okay, you’re in Italy, can you work New York hours? Yeah, sure, that’s only minus six. And how can we pay you? Well, I’ve got an American bank account, I file taxes. Or can you pay my corporation? Oh yeah, yeah. So all of a sudden obstacles, previous obstacles, weren’t there, because now everybody was remote, everybody was somewhere else, and the main question was does your time zone overlap hours, or do you mind adjusting your day to overlap our time zone? Which I don’t, I mean, I’m talking to you to accommodate your time zone, it’s 9:30 at night here, do not care, happy to do it, then I will roll into bed. So actually, when I first moved here I was still a contractor at Macy’s.com San Francisco office, which has since been completely laid off, but I was working I think 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. my time, and people thought like, oh, you’re crazy, you’re an idiot. And I said, let me tell you, that was actually quite cool, because I got to have a bright sunny day with my boyfriend, I got to have a bright sunny day with my dogs, I got to go food shopping when everyone was at work, and then I took a little nap, and then I started the day again at six, and I thought that was fantastic.

So when people acted like “you’re way over there, how are you going to do this,” well, since then we figured it out. We figured out how to hire people, we figured out for the most part how to pay them, we figured out how to onboard them and incorporate them in our teams, we figured out how to have some sort of culture that wasn’t within smelling distance of each other, and we figured out a way for us to let people work from places where they are, many people but not all, more comfortable and happier, especially people with disabilities and conditions and sensitivities that made commuting and working in offices in some cases awful, beyond awful. And so I’m hoping that even post-pandemic we’re going to have flexible remote working policies that don’t treat working from home like a perk you get to do one day a week. These are things that people need, especially when you consider people for whom commuting is a nightmare. When I was living in Daly City driving into San Francisco on my motorcycle, I was nearly run over every day. That wasn’t cool. Yeah, I kind of don’t miss that.

Yeah, I’m in a similar camp. I would say I found a sweet spot in the COVID, I’m privileged, I speak from definitely a place of privilege, but I’m finding balance, I’m getting my health in line, I’m not flying everywhere like I used to, just back-to-back flights. I’m exercising every morning, healthy, I’ve found balance. Now I just want everyone listening to make my time online as frictionless and easy as possible and meaningful as possible so I can get the hell offline, so I can get online, get done what I need to get done as a human being, and then get offline. And so that’s why you’re here, and that’s why I’m hoping, I’m counting on you, Debbie, to help us make this happen.

I’m doing what I can. Obviously, if anybody listening has any questions, I’m happy to answer them for free, just reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn, it’s Debbie Levitt, it looks like this with more Photoshop, and you can also email me, I’m deb at deltacx.com. You can hit the Delta CX website, you can find me on YouTube. Please, if you have any questions at all or you think there’s something I can do for your organization, please reach out.

We’ll post all of the stuff in the show notes when this goes up, so definitely look out for Debbie if you need some help. Thank you so much for joining me today, I loved having you, this is a great conversation.

All right, thanks to everybody and your whole team.

Thanks again to Debbie for stopping by. For more on Debbie you can visit deltacx.com and Delta CX on YouTube and Debbie Levitt on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.