In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Daniel Escher, Director of UX and Research at Remitly. We talk about more ways for researchers to add value, business questions over research questions, and the things that researchers worry about.
Where I think collective identity can be limiting is when someone thinks of themselves as a researcher and says, “Therefore, that means this is my small box of things that I do and ways that I contribute.” And what I always want to do is push that box to be bigger, right? I’m not at all saying that the box doesn’t exist in any way. But we as researchers can drive far more decision-making, far more strategy, far more hypotheses than I think we realize. I think that we tend to want to hand off work to other people when actually what I encourage my team to do is figure out where are the places where actually a handoff doesn’t make sense, but a handshake makes sense. There’s some contact there. Or where does hand-holding make sense, where there’s really extended involvement? - Daniel Escher
Show Links

• Steve and Inzovu - Storytelling workshops (www.inzovu.co/workshops/story...)

• Formats Unpacked (www.formatsunpacked.com/)

• Daniel on LinkedIn ( / danielescher )

• Remitly (www.remitly.com/us/en)

• Nazir Harb Michel on LinkedIn ( / nazirnharb )

• Savannah Young on LinkedIn ( / savannahespiveyyoung )

• Angelina Erine Theodorou on LinkedIn ( / angelinatheodorou )

• José G. Soto Márquez on LinkedIn ( / jgsotomarquez )

• James by Percival Everett ( / james )

• Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing (and Jobs to be Done) (hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-chris...)

• RITE Method (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITE_Me...)

Help other people find Dollars to Donuts by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/d...) .
Transcript
Steve Portigal: Welcome to Dollars to Donuts, the podcast where I talk with the people who lead user research in their organization. I’m Steve Portigal.
In collaboration with my friends at Inzovu, we’ve been running storytelling workshops for clients. Storytelling is an essential human skill for any team. It drives connections, influences decisions, and inspires empathy. In innovative and creative practices, the ability to tell a compelling story is just as crucial as doing the work itself. While good teams focus on delivering high-quality work, great teams go beyond and wrap the delivery of their work into stories. A team’s ability to tell well-crafted stories is critical for influence, which is always the key to the outcomes they seek. That’s where our storytelling workshops come in. These workshops empower your team by enhancing their storytelling prowess. It’s valuable for a range of roles within growing product and service organizations, like user experience design, user research, product management, marketing, and innovation. We run this in a few ways. One is a series of short online sessions across several weeks with individual and group assignments between meetings. We also have an in-person full-day version. Check out more info at www.inzovu.co/workshop/storytelling. And I’ll put that link in the show notes. One resource that participants have found useful and inspirational is Formats Unpacked, which really opens up the idea of what a story can be. An opening monologue is a format. A podcast interview, which we’re getting to in a moment, is a format. An unboxing video is a format. The same interview, one year apart, is a format. You might enjoy checking out the Formats Unpacked site, which dives into many different approaches to presenting stories and sorts out what it is that makes them work.
Now let’s get to the episode. Today, I’m speaking with Daniel Escher, Director of UX and Research at Remitly. Daniel, welcome to Dollars to Donuts. It’s really great to have you here on the podcast. Thank you.
Daniel Escher: It’s such a pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks so much.
Steve: I’d like to ask you to start by giving a little introduction.
Daniel: Yeah, I think the very first thing people are surprised to learn about me is I’m the youngest of six children. I realize that’s pretty uncommon in this day and age. But I come from a big family. I have 14 nieces and nephews across myself and my husband. And I grew up in Hawaii, also kind of surrounded by not just my biological family, but very much a sense of community and broader family. And I think I’ve generally taken that throughout the rest of my life, where I try to surround myself with people wh...