 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Product School fireside chat. I'm very excited to be joined today by Bessel, who is the CEO and co-founder at User Interviews. Bessel, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I'd love to just dive right in. I would love to know more about your personal story. How did you get started in the tech industry? Yeah, definitely. So, when I was a senior in college, I interned at a startup. I was at Duke in Durham, North Carolina, and there was a small company there. It was one of the first ones in the area to raise money. I just remember it being very exciting and fast-moving, and like a really good culture and community. So, I always had the idea like, oh, this would be something that would be fun to work on again in the future. Then I worked in consulting for a year, and then I actually went to law school. Then when I was in law school, my co-founders and I started a completely different company that was kind of a failure, and then out of that, we've kind of pivoted and turned into user interviews. So, I definitely took a bit of a scenic group to starting user interviews, but I think from early on, I was interested in tech. It's one of those interesting things how so many successful founders have experienced failure early on. Was there anything that was like your main takeaway from having something that failed that helped you make your next project successful? Yeah, I mean, very meta, because the company's user interview, our current company is user interviews, which really helps people find users and talk to users and do user research. So, in a very meta perspective, that first company, we didn't do any user research. We didn't talk to customers. I think that's part of the reason that it failed. So, as we were trying to save that company or pivot, we started doing all of that user research and became really passionate about it. So, number one takeaway is stay close to your customers and our potential customers and really try to understand what their pain points are. I don't imagine that you know all the answers and that if you don't talk to them, you can just build it and then they'll come. That's just not the way it works. Yeah, it's so interesting how you became successful by filling the need that you had in your first company. Yeah, so that's so meta, so interesting. So, well, you've already started touching on this a little bit. What is the main problem that you're trying to solve or rather, why is it such a big problem that these companies that need to be user focused just getting in touch with their users? Yeah, in some ways the problem is almost too simple, right? We think that every company is trying to understand their users. I think everyone agrees on that and I think that everyone knows one of the best ways to understand any person, whether it's a potential client or a friend is to talk to them and listen to them. But historically, when you kind of look at the space, it's just taken a really, really long time and there's been a lot of friction to finding these users and talking to them. It's not easy to just, you can't just raise your hand and 10 people will be coming into your office. So we believe that the values there and most people understand the value and the desire is there, but there's just been a lot of friction. So that's what we're trying to do is take away the time, take away the friction and make it super easy to talk to the users or prospective users. And how do you see the user research industry as having changed over the most recent years? Because it seems like there's been a real uptick in people adopting it as like I think they desperately need to do. Yeah, no, definitely. We've seen a massive change. Just like one aside, what we do just in case people don't know is we focus on finding users for user research studies, any type of research study. The big split there is if a company wants to talk to non-users or existing users and we have products for both, one that recruits non-users and one that manages reaching out to existing users. So with that product, we basically work with companies doing all sorts of research. And over that time, we've kind of had front row seats to see kind of the industry change. So when we first started, companies didn't really have a lot of researchers. They would outsource it or kind of other people in the company would try to talk to users when it was convenient for them. We then started seeing kind of this in-housing of research. So there was a lot of content, there were a lot of people talking about being the first researcher. And then once they were in the companies, how do we evangelize the value of research and make it so that people realize we're here and that we can be valuable? So there was a lot of talk in the community about that. Over the next few years, I guess all that evangelism worked because there's just been huge explosions in the size of these research teams. And now all these researchers are trying to figure out, hey, how do we prioritize research? We're getting way too many asked. Everyone wants research for every decision they're making, which I think is awesome, obviously. So that's really what we've seen. It's like initially we're bringing research in-house, then once it became in-house, and once there's been more tools to help decrease the friction, the demand for the research is just skyrocketed. And so to build this solution that is obviously so necessary, how are your products and engineering teams organized? Like how do you fix that problem? Yeah, we're definitely kind of constantly iterating because we've been growing fast as an organization. So when you have two engineers versus when you have 20, it's just different. I'm sure as we continue to scale up, there'll be more changes, but right now we use a pod structure where there are five engineers on the pod. So one tech lead and two squads, which are pairs of engineers, then each one of those has a product manager and a product designer. And we found that kind of this size of five and kind of having people work on one problem in an iterative way over a long period of time has really been good because then the whole team gets close to those problems and they get close to the users and they know how to work together well. And how often do you drink your own champagne and do your own user research with your own user research tools? Yeah, we definitely do a lot of dog food in the product. So we do research all the time. Our product team likes to do kind of continuous discovery and we're actually really excited. We just brought in our first VP of user research. So she's really helping to look across the company, figure out what decisions need to be made and when we should use user research and how user research can help that. Because we think of user research as a tool that just helps you make better decisions. So we do it a lot. We use our own product a lot. Yeah, that's quite a meta role for her where she's like the VP of user research, a user research company. That must be quite the head spinner at dinner parties. Yeah, because they always help a user researcher doing user research with user researchers about user interviews. So there's a lot of metanus, which I think also makes it fun. Yeah, it's the kind of like the whimsy of the job, I guess. Yeah, and I think it's fun for the clients too that we're doing the research with because they're used to being on the other side of the table, right? They're used to being the one asking questions. I remember one time very early on when I just started and was doing research, I was like doing research with the head of this fast-growing startup or the head of research of this fast-growing startup. And at the end, she was like, okay, all of your questions had bias. You did all of this wrong. We're gonna like redo your whole script. So I like, I went through the research session that she basically just coached me on it. So I think it's fun for them too. Yeah, amazing. So this month at Product School, we're focusing on leadership and what it takes to be a good leader, how you can sort of achieve that next level of authority, how it changes your perspective, all that good stuff. So you've got sort of the main title of CEO as well as co-founder. What does it mean to you to be a CEO? Because I feel like it's quite a weighty title with a lot of expectations and a lot of maybe misconceptions about it. So what does it mean for you? Yeah, me and my co-founders, we were all relatively young when we started this. So we don't have it so much, hey, what does it mean to not be a co-founder? We don't have the same amount of experience that most people do. But I think probably the major thing is you realize, if there's a problem or something not working, like you can't just not think about it and assume someone else will fix it. Like it's important for you to kind of bubble those things up to the top. When I think about kind of like what a CEO does, there's a few different responsibilities. First is kind of like setting strategy and vision, obviously hiring and recruiting a great team and then managing the team that you've hired and is on the team. Helping the fundraise, obviously, if you're a venture-backed company, it takes a lot of time and the bigger you get, the more amount of your time is talking to investors and fundraising and managing those relationships. And then you also want to communicate out the vision and strategy that you've helped build and you want to make sure that you're visible to clients and partners. So a lot of communication, a lot of quick decisions and you're communicating with a lot of different stakeholders and a lot of different people within the company. So you kind of have a unique view there. What's the most fun part of the job for you? What's the bit you enjoy the most? I really like when, you know, there's someone that you're really excited about and they decide to join the team. That's obviously great. And then once they're on the team, you know, watching them succeed, being able to see them move up or gather new responsibilities, that's fun. And I do like kind of the more, you know, digging into the data probably a little bit more than most EOs and trying to come up with different insights or different strategies. And then kind of the final thing is obviously like just getting positive feedback from customers and the people that are actually using the product is always feels great. Definitely, I can definitely imagine that. So what would you say are the most important skills specifically for a CEO to have? Yeah, I think you definitely need to be a good communicator and that's something, you know, I'm trying to constantly work on and become better and that's good in both the way you communicate but also realizing the cadence and how often you should communicate and the different channels you should communicate. So that's super important. I do think, especially if you want to be part of like a fast growing startup, like you do need to just have a good work ethic, like it's not a normal job, it's a very unique job. And I think, you know, one thing that I think is always kind of, one thing that I am kind of proud of is I do think I'm good and my co-founders are good at being able to listen to people and change our minds if we find that there's new data or new insights that we didn't know before. We don't always think we have the right answer. So being able to have a team that you respect and that you don't pull rank on and that if they bring something to you, you think it's like as valid as something you might have brought is, I think, necessary as you scale. That's something interesting I picked up on there was you mentioned pulling rank. Now everyone has their own leadership style. Would you say yours is more like hands-on digging in or are you more like willing to delegate? A little bit of both. I think I really like to be aware of what's going on and I definitely have an instinct which I probably could be a little bit better about of just like jumping into the data or going and trying to understand something myself just because I like being close to the customers and close to the problem. And because that's what I used to do when there wasn't a big team. So with that being said, I do think that I really do try to allow my team to make their own decisions and to not micromanage, although I do like to definitely understand what's happening. Yeah. And I think there's definitely like a good nuance to be found between like hands-on and micromanager. Most of the people that we are lucky enough to talk to on the firesides, they found that balance. So that's what it's good to do. It's always kind of recalibrating because as the team grows, it's the job changes so often. Absolutely. That was actually gonna be my very next question. You totally read my mind. How do you, well, do you have to consciously adapt your leadership style as the team grows or is it something that just sort of happens naturally? Yeah, definitely. I think one thing is just at a very basic level when there's 10 people on the team, like I talked with everybody probably almost at least once a week. Some people more at the least, maybe like once every two weeks, right? So you didn't need to have as much structure with your communication. And you also didn't need to be as deliberate with communication because you just had a stronger relationship with everybody on the team because you're talking with them more. Now that we're over 70 people, there's different layers and there's just, you know, just it's mathematically impossible for me to talk to everybody that much. So sometimes that means, hey, stuff won't happen naturally. You need to build in structures. You need to build in times where you communicate this. And then also sometimes, you know, when you're talking with people, you need to realize I might not talk to this person again for a few weeks. So let's make sure that we're careful. I'm careful with what I say or that we're deliberate with what we're saying. So that's been one thing that, you know, when you're first starting, you don't think you need to change. You're like, okay, I'm just gonna be natural. This is who I am. And then as the company gets bigger, you just need to think a lot more about that structure and that communication cadence. And I guess another thing that tends to happen a lot when companies start getting bigger is that you have to start thinking more consciously about building the culture. Because when you've got a room of 10 people, the culture is the chemistry that exists between those 10 people and you don't really need to work at it too hard. So is that something that you're having to consciously build and really think about is like the culture of your company and how do you go about that? Yeah, definitely. Especially because we're a fully remote company and have always been fully remote. We've always had to be a little bit more deliberate about building time for interpersonal relationships, which I think is very important for culture because you're just gonna feel a lot more comfortable asking people questions, you know, just digging in, pinging people when you're not sure what's going on. So being able to build that comfort, it just wasn't gonna happen naturally because we're fully remote. So we have a lot of different kind of structured meetings that are almost, they're structured unstructured meetings where there are times on the calendar where people can just hang out, don't need to talk about work. And then we also have structured meetings for, hey, this is when we share our OKRs. This is like a AMA. This is a time where we show what we've released in the product recently. So you have to build in all of these structures so that people feel close and connected over time. Yeah, especially in a remote setting, it always reminds me of like going back to university when you arrive in your first two weeks and you don't know anyone and it's just a bit chaotic. So you have to like organize events to get to know everyone. It's like kind of structured, organized fun just to be able to like meet face to face. So that's what it always reminds me of. I don't know if that was ever- I think that's 100% right. That like, yeah, that's like a really good analogy. Yeah, the organized fun that we all started appreciating much more after the pandemic. So if you had to, oh, leadership's a big topic and it's difficult to summarize, but what would you say is the main characteristic that really makes for a great leader? Yeah, and I will say like, I think there are many different types of good leaders, right? And I think, you know, some are in vogue while others are out of vogue. I think like some of the best leaders of all time, probably, you know, we would frown on the way they were leaders. And that's just, you know, not the type of leader I am, but I think we should acknowledge that there's different types of leadership. But for me, I think some of like the marks of a good leader are, you know, being able to change their mind, being able to admit when they were long, being able to, you know, there are tough decisions that need to be made, being able to make kind of trade-offs between long-term and short-term. And it's not always you wanna choose the long-term, but sometimes you do and you need to figure out that right trade-off. And I think kind of like the marks of it are, you know, you have a team that's retentive and high-performing and it feels independent and feels empowered to take bets and to make decisions themselves. So I think those are like the main marks, like trying to find that balance between pushing forward the team, but also letting the team go out and like pull you forward. Absolutely. And are there any skills or characteristics that you're looking to get better at or any areas of leadership that you would personally like to improve on? Yeah. Once again, I think like communication is constantly, you know, something you can never be great at. And I think as the company gets bigger, figuring out where to delegate exactly and where not to delegate, those are the two that you're kind of constantly doing as you get, as the company gets larger. And then I think another thing as like a leader of a growing company that you don't think of as much when it's smaller is more organizational design. So like, how are the departments organized? How do they interact with each other? And what are the structures for that? Is something that, you know, now that we're at this stage, I'm trying to try to read more about and learn a little bit more about. We've actually sort of on that topic, we've got an interesting question from Adam on LinkedIn who wants to know, and he says, interested to understand how you decided which roles to hire for as you scaled from 10 to 70. Obviously you don't have the budget to hire every role under the sun. So how do you prioritize which roles to hire for? Yeah, I think one kind of like sideways answer to this question is the one thing you notice is that the roles self reinforce each other. So a lot of it is balanced because let's say you hire like five people, then you also need someone like an HR or if you have more product managers, then you need more data scientists or user researchers so they can be better at their job. And you start to realize, oh, like every time I hire this person, what pressure does it do on the other departments that help support that person or that person's supposed to support? So it's very easy to get into the cycle where the more you hire, you need to keep hiring more people. But at the end of the day, you have that strategy, right? You have to figure out, okay, like this is our goals. So therefore we need this many salespeople to hit that. Therefore we need this many leads. So then you need a marketing team of this size and then on the product side, like we have this many engineers. So therefore we need this many PMs, this many designers and you need to figure out how they all interact. So that's the most probably like important thing I've learned as a scale of the team is that the way to think about it is not to think like, oh, do I hire this department or this department? It's okay, hiring this person, what does that do to the whole ecosystem and to the whole company? It's interesting that you said you saw base it on the goals that you want to achieve. So I feel sometimes when I've spoken to hiring managers in the past who say that their C-suite is focused on output rather than outcomes. So they say, we want to do this, this and this. So we need to hire these people to do it. We're not really thinking, okay, but what's that going to achieve? Like we need to base it on the outcome. So it's just something interesting that, for example. That's idealized. I don't want to pretend that I'm perfect at that. Like sometimes it's hard to say, this person leads to this, but at least that's like a framework you can try to lay back on. But sometimes you do have to go with your intuition or with what your VP's tell you they need. So it's definitely not perfect. Of course. Well, everyone's got their own learning curves for sure. Yeah, definitely. So what are some of the things that you're the most interested in learning about these days? It doesn't have to be related to leadership. Like what are some of the things that most interest you? Yeah, so I'm always interested in just saying like macro trends and tech and startups and what that might mean for our company, but also just the space in general. And then from a more like, hey, this is how I can become a better leader. It is more of that organizational design. And part of that's learning through reading. A lot of that's learning through talking to peers or talking to other founders at later stage startups to see how they do it. So having that peer group's been very useful. And just another question. So circling back to hiring. I'm not sure how involved you are in the hiring process now that you're starting to scale a bit more. But when you were interviewing people to come and join you in the early days, what were some of the characteristics that you looked for just in general from the people you were bringing on to the team? Yeah, I mean, definitely out of startup you need like people who are like organized and can manage multiple priorities at once. And that also are like self starters. And then it obviously depends on the role. There's like other skills you look for. But people who have shown like initiative either in previous roles or life outside of roles like they have a side project or they're curious about this one thing and spend a lot of time like learning or working on it. That always like shines to me. Like, oh, that's gonna be a great member of the team. Cause they've shown that they can like prioritize things and also like be a self starter. They don't need someone to tell them what to do. Yeah, I guess in startups you need sort of almost as many entrepreneurs in the room as possible when you build something like that. Yeah, so when you're building your teams how much did you have to consider like the small thing not the small things but the softer things like people's personalities how people would sort of like mesh together the culture. Was that ever a consideration or was it more about the resume, their experience? Like how did you find the balance between those two things? Yeah, I mean, there is this concept of like, we want culture ads not culture fit. So you don't wanna just have like everyone who's like around a room looking at each other but there are some things that you try to kind of stay away from, right? You don't want people who seem like overly critical or negative about other people that they're working with or who just or who don't seem like to have some of those positive traits I mentioned previously. So like there is definitely a reason to have kind of these more like behavioral soft skilled interviews for sure but at the same time you wanna make sure that you're like taking away the biases that you have so that you're kind of like continuing to expand the team and the diversity of the team. But it is important to make sure that you're not gonna have someone who is kind of continuously bringing down morale across the team. I remember we asked that same question of I think it was Yareeva Dan I think from Google, maybe I'm wrong. And when we asked him that question he just said, oh, I have a very strong no jerks policy. It was the fantastic answer. It doesn't get better than that. So obviously, you've not just scaled your company but you've also scaled as a leader in your career. What were some of the major changes for you as you moved more into a position of authority like as a CEO and a co-founder? Yeah, I'd love for you to have this safe interview with people on my team to see if it matches. But for me, definitely delegating more, right? When it's just you and the co-founders, I'm doing every sale, we're doing every ops thing. My co-founders, CTO is building everything. So you have to be able to let go of these things that are hard to let go. And I think over the past few years there have been things that I probably have held on to longer than I should have. So that's been the biggest thing. And then the other thing is kind of like, you know, there's things that happen naturally when you're small and you need to kind of be always looking ahead to see like, are we taking this for granted? And what can we do to make sure that we don't wait too long to fix it? You want to get ahead of those problems over time. And we were coming up to our last few minutes now. So I just want to do a little bit more of a deep dive into user research and user interviews. If there's a company that somehow has managed to get by so far without doing much user research and they're suddenly realizing, oh my God, there's this huge thing that we just haven't been doing enough of. How would you suggest that they start from zero with their user research? Maybe even with your tools. Yeah, so I think our tools specifically are like the very self-serve they're made for people to just come in and launch without a ton of background. So we just try to really focus on finding the right user for you really fast. So easy to use. People definitely use this just for single projects initially all the time and low commitment. But I think the number one thing I would do if I'm trying, if I realize, hey, we're not doing enough user research of the team is to really think through, given the audience here, assuming we're talking about product teams, like really try to like map out what the product process is like, hey, this is when we set goals. This is when we choose what we're building. Like, I don't know what the iteration processes different companies have different ways. But if you really like map out that process, I think you'll find times where, hey, a decision is made here, a decision is made here, the decision is made here. And like, this is the type of decision where analytics would be super useful. Or this is the type of decision where, hey, we probably should talk to somebody and then you can kind of end up putting that research into your process. You want it to feel a lot more natural. And you also want research to feel a lot smaller. You don't want it to be like a very big, scary project that you have to plan for two months and it's gonna cost thousands of dollars. You want to just be like, hey, at the end of the day, research is asking someone a question. And this is a time where I'll have a question. I'm just gonna do it very quick, and not spend that much money, not spend that much time. And then you start building up that muscle. I'm excited about that. Start slow and build your way up for sure. Yeah, good. So unfortunately, we are running out of time. I'm watching the minutes tick away, unfortunately. I just have one last question before I'll let you get back to your very busy day, I imagine. What advice would you give to your younger self to help you go further, be more successful, be a better leader, all that good stuff? Yeah, I think one, find a peer group. The more peers you can talk with or bounce questions off the better. I found that I get, me personally, like peers are sometimes more helpful than mentors. So finding a peer group's been really important. And then thinking bigger, I think a lot of people kind of underestimate how big their companies could be at the beginning. And I think really trying to think about that vision and make sure that then the small decisions you're making early on are pointing in the right direction. And then I think I saw a quote that was like, most decisions should be made faster, but the biggest decision should be made slower. So trying to think like, hey, this is a decision where I really need to get to like full consensus and do a lot of research. Or it's like, it doesn't matter that much. And let's just like really focus on moving or on the flip side is this like a very large decision and let's take our time with it. So generally I would say like trying to make decisions faster. Absolutely fantastic advice. I hope you will write that down, you at home. Great advice to take away. So that was my very last question. Basil, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have you. Awesome, thank you for having me. And thank you all for joining and enjoy the rest of your mornings, afternoons, evenings, night times, wherever you are. And we will see you in the next fireside chat. Bye.