Jason Kopec on Navigating UX in Strong Engineering Cultures

Alex Smith: Design Leader Insights is brought to you by Fuego UX. Fuego UX is a leading UX research, strategy, and design consultancy. Hey, Jason, thanks for joining the show today. 

‍Jason Kopec: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. 

Alex Smith: Yeah, of course. And to get started, can you give us a little bit of context into your journey in UX? 

Jason Kopec: Sure. Well, I started way back actually in illustration and graphic design. This is when I graduated from RIT in ‘99. But since then kind of, you know, took a winding path through work with agencies and on the client side, and then also into product design and UX in the early days of the internet which was a lot less formalized than it is nowadays and kind of ended up into management first again, starting at an agency and then more focused on teams that were sort of at pre IPO startups or smaller organizations where there was a lot of need for early stage design growth either zero to one or sort of like 10 to a hundred and took a couple of breaks here and there at larger organizations as well, like, you know, spent some time at Microsoft and some time at Amazon, but. I definitely didn't think I had as much affinity for those types of places and sort of the red tape and bureaucracy of larger companies like that. So I've definitely gravitated my career towards like early stage startup. And I'm currently at Fivetran, which is a company of about a thousand, but my team is 16 and it's another, you know, sort of pre IPO startup where we're. We're looking towards that horizon, but still, you know, doing a lot of quick iteration and growth in that process. 

Alex Smith: Tell us a little bit about Fivetran complex product for those who might not know. What do you, what does Fivetran do? 

Jason Kopec: Yeah, it's most simplistic. Fivetran is a data movement company. So, you know, everyone knows that people use data for all kinds of reasons. Normally what has to happen is you actually have to extract that data from the source of where it's being generated and then get it stored someplace where you can use it in an effective way, either in a BI tool or whatever application you have for it. So Fivetran is our nickname is like the data plumbers of the internet. So we're the company that our process is called ELT is the acronym, but without getting into specifics on each one of those phases. The process is just moving it from source to destination where it's going to be stored. And sometimes along the way we do what's called transformations. And those are things that essentially reorganize or clean the data so that it's usable in some kind of tool. 

Alex Smith: What about the users? Cause I think like a lot of the cloud data interfaces get very complex very quickly. How do you think about information overload and getting people the insights they need without overwhelming them. 

Jason Kopec: Yeah, well, I mean to start and I say this to candidates that we talk to as well for roles on our team like the product footprint itself is not super huge compared to a lot of other products out there, right? And the problems then are less surface level and much more sort of mile deep instead of mile wide and so with that, you can imagine comes a lot of video syncratic behavior from customers and therefore like with their unique situation, their unique setup, they need to be able to have visibility into what their data is doing, where errors and issues may be occurring, like how that's playing out in real time, what that means essentially for what they're going to be paying on an annual basis, on a monthly basis. And so transparency and visibility into all of that information is crucial. And so our team works a lot on like, not just the configuration of getting all those things going and set up, but also then how do customers have appropriate visibility into everything that's transacting essentially within our platform.

Alex Smith: Yeah, makes sense. I want to talk about timelines. I think designers and then you've worked at some publicly traded companies. I keep hearing from execs like it's hard to get stuff done when there's quarterly E=earnings reports, which might distract the C suite and change direction of what they want to accomplish, right? Every quarter there's something new, something new, some new shiny objects to chase, but good design takes a long time. How do you inform teams to like, yeah, we got to get this done and okay, the C suite wants this, but actually what our users need is going to take 12 months, 24 months of heavy work and rethinking the entire process. How do you prioritize those, those, you know, different timelines? 

Jason Kopec: There's different altitudes, right, that teams operate at. There's the real long term, like, looking over the horizon, trying to figure out where we're going, setting a north star. And any of the artifacts that are necessary to do that, which can vary pretty widely depending on the problem you're tackling. And then there's sort of like, okay, where there's this quarter, next quarter, you know, we often are in a situation on our team where we have to get at least a quarter ahead to be working on things that are then going to be built a quarter after. Or for two quarters or three quarters, like sometimes the design solution might be very simple and straightforward, but the backend execution is going to be incredibly complicated. That's something that then the designer would need to work on up front and then stay attached to. And that's a little bit more standard, but then we have, you know, also the ongoing like sprint by sprint, like regular issues and fixes and things that the team just needs to address right away that are prioritized alongside these longer term projects. And so I think like, trying to set us up for success is more about seeing opportunities, usually through research, like we do have a research team that's, that's dedicated essentially to looking further out and focusing on some of these problems that Fivetran might want to tackle, or we know we want to get to this as a milestone as a company, but we don't understand enough about it. So let's dive in and really get close to customers in that space and understand it. And then the design team after that can take it, the product design team can take it and sort of start to turn it into a set of solutions or a set of proposals or some ideas on how we could tackle those things. And I think seeding, you know, annual planning and quarterly planning with those types of ideas that haven't already been prioritized are a good way for design to just have an impact, you know, on organizations that are operating in that quick turnaround. Hey, we're going to change things. We're going to change things. But I think that that does require like a continuous sort of visibility of what the company's going for. And like an idea of like, these are really important things at the core of what we're trying to tackle as a business. So we want to keep coming back to them. 

Alex Smith: Gotcha. Jason, you've worked at some very, what I would, I would categorize as like engineering heavy companies in tech. How do you encourage your design team to collaborate with engineers and understand engineers' perspectives? 

Jason Kopec: I've found at a lot of companies where it's a strong engineering culture that actually being more unique than them, like bringing answers to questions that haven't been asked or looking at things purely from a qualitative standpoint, which I know in like the metrics driven world that we live in sometimes it's looked down upon, like can actually provide an amazing amount of benefit. And all of a sudden get, you know, leaders in those spaces kind of being like, oh, I hadn't even thought about that. Like that would be great to investigate this more or, we always ask this question and we never really got to the bottom of the why behind some of the numbers that we're seeing. And so I think that it's really important for a team to still maintain, even during times when you might not be getting all the reception of some of those investigations or some of that type of thinking that you want because it does have an impact on folks who just might not think that way. Like they might just not approach the customer of your business, so they might not approach essentially like the more nebulous things that could potentially be defined by qualitative signal in the same way that you do. 

Alex Smith: Well, switch gears here. I would love to know what advice you have for new designers trying to break into the field today. 

Jason Kopec: One that has really stood out to me recently is folks are graduating and getting started in the field of product design at least and like coming out pretty savvy and I think because of that, like having high expectations of the type of work that they'd be focused on. Like just know that you're going to do some grunt work for a while and you're going to work on some things that are not very glamorous and honestly, you're going to become more valuable to a team. By just accepting that and jumping on problems that are really difficult. If you're diligent and you're good at what you do, and like, you're gritty about how you solve problems, like you will eventually get to do the really high visibility, super cool stuff. So like I've seen people be on a more solid career trajectory when they embrace that type of thinking. And they end up just being like more readily accepted in a team. And like they're culturally, you know, impacting a little bit more as well. So that's one thing that comes to mind. But I also think that like, you know, like when you're first getting started and you're defining case studies and you're trying to figure out who you are as a designer and what you want to become, like, you have to be open to any way of working as well. And you have to be adopting as many soft skills during that process as possible. Like there's a lot of motivation to be like, okay, great. I got like my whole UX kit together. I know how to approach this. I'm going to go through all the stages. I'm going to be thorough. And it's like, look, sometimes you might have to adapt and now you're just selling real hard and you're like kind of designing a little bit of stuff, but it's more about relationship building. And then you hop to another project. And this one's much more about, I got to get super close to engineering and understand how this data works and why people are doing things this way, continue to add more and more types of ways that work can play out. And I think being open to the wide variety of that kind of stuff and just absorbing as much as you can with every different new engagement that you have is going to really help you grow as well. 

Alex Smith: Exactly. Well, Jason, thank you so much for joining the show today. 

Jason Kopec: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.