Shavon Bernard

I attribute my success to the opportunity to hear people. I think we live in a world where a lot of times we're not heard, and sometimes you'd be so surprised how our participants, who are our customers, how engaged they are, how excited they are at the opportunity to tell us what is going on with their products. I'm such a big fan of leaving Yelp reviews, Amazon reviews, and I think it really drives our world more than we think. We should give it more credit because I won't buy anything without reading several reviews. So why is there any different when it comes to building our products? We only think about that review as a part of the standard consumer purchase, but what if businesses start to really think about what our consumers are experiencing at a large level and even at a self-serve level? By talking to them and really honoring their feedback enough to do something different with our products and services that shape the world, we can make a real impact. Our products are not just for our customers - they power so many different parts of our economy. Some of our biggest customers are Stripe, and we know how many merchants are empowered every day by using their tool just for transactions. We have AWS customers and other big businesses and enterprises that use our products and services to drive their business. So it's so important for us to get those details right. I think about it like life at home - it's those little unseen mental loads and things, like when the mom picks up that extra Lego that's been sitting on the stairs for about 24 hours. Those little details, they matter. It might seem simple to someone who's not into the details, but it's when those little details weren't worked out that glitches happen.

The best career advice I've ever received is to keep your why at the forefront. Your why can't be tied to a person, a place, or a thing - it has to be tied to you, to your heart, to your values, to your goals. When people leave, things fall apart, and places are no longer available, what drives you? There's always going to be transition in life. Change is inevitable. And if you hold on to your why, that will carry you through.

UX research is a very niche field and it's hard to break into. It's not like software engineering where as long as you have the credibility, certifications, and requirements, you can just get your foot in the door. UX research is typically seen as a newer practice within the product development lifecycle, so it's not something that a lot of companies have always recognized as a necessity. My advice is to just continue building and do what you love. If you love interviewing and studying to get those answers, to build those insights, to make changes to applicable products, keep doing it. I started out with my own portfolio based on my own clientele, reaching out to small business owners and saying, hey, I can take your application and I can bring it from here to there, and this is what I would do based on UX research and UX design. A lot of them didn't know about UX at first, and so it was so exciting to kind of explain the practice and the value, and take them on as a project to be able to build that out and showcase the difference. I've worked with MongoDB, which has been the largest company thus far, but outside of MongoDB, I've worked with very small individual business owners, sole proprietors, and I've also worked with mid-sized levels and startups. So just keep building your portfolio and doing the work you love.

For me, I really, really value communication. Communication at home, communication at work, communication in all of my relationships, whether that's with my spouse, my children, my colleagues, my coworkers, my stakeholders, customers - communication is key. Expression doesn't exist unless it gets out, unless it's there. Sometimes we have different ways of getting it out, but communication is so important to me, and I can't get that through enough. I'm trying to explain that to my kids these days, that you have to talk to mommy to tell me what's happening, how you feel. Same way when I tell our customers during our study sessions, please do not hold back. If this is what's going on, let me know what's happening when you use this API or this command line. Same way I tell my stakeholders, hey, I'm here to help you, so before we even get into building out what it is you need from this research, tell me what it is that keeps you up at night. What is it about your product that stresses you the most, what is your biggest unknown, that biggest fear? Communication is key, because we hold all of our thoughts so much sometimes that it's hard to get it out.