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In the fast-paced world of tech startups and scale-ups, having a strong set of core values is crucial for sustainable growth and success. As the CEO of Optimal Workshop, a best-in-class research and insights platform, I've learned firsthand the importance of establishing and nurturing the right company culture. Today, I'd like to share our journey of revisiting and refining our values, and how these principles are shaping our path forward.

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The power of values in leadership 🫶

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This is my third run as a CEO, following leadership roles at the digital consultancy Tigerspike and the EdTech company Education Perfect. Each time, I've faced the challenge of taking the business to a whole new level. From experience, I've learned that this transformation begins with getting all the right pieces in play for future growth.

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At Optimal Workshop, we've been busy laying the groundwork for our next phase of expansion:

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1. Forming a new leadership team

2. Launching a fresh brand identity

3. Developing a new strategy and product direction

4. Introducing our refined team values

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These elements, particularly our values, are not just words on a wall. They underpin our future way of working and set the standard for the behaviors we expect from every team member. By doing so, we're creating a culture of high performance with solid foundations to build upon and scale globally.

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Our core values: The heart of Optimal Workshop 💖

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In April 2024, we embarked on a journey to revisit and refine our company values. This process was collaborative and thoughtful, involving input from team members across all levels of the organization. The result is a set of four core values that truly represent who we are and who we aspire to be:

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1. Live in our customers' shoes

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At Optimal Workshop, we believe that our success is intrinsically tied to the success of our customers. This value emphasizes empathy, understanding, and a customer-centric approach to everything we do. Team members who embody this value:

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• Deeply understand our products and champion user research and data-driven methodologies
• Go above and beyond to support our customers, ensuring they derive maximum value from our products and services
• Show a profound understanding of customer pain points and challenges, always seeking ways to enhance the customer experience
• Prioritize customer satisfaction and strive to provide the highest level of service in all their endeavors

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2. Own it

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We take pride in our expertise and resilience. This value is about taking initiative, holding ourselves to high standards, and fostering an environment of trust and commitment. An "Own It" mindset means:

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• Demonstrating reliability and accountability, stepping up to challenges and delivering on promises
• Being solution-focused, supporting others, and finding the best outcomes for all stakeholders
• Bringing a high level of quality to daily work, advancing projects while maintaining excellent standards
• Communicating openly and transparently, and professionally challenging the status quo when necessary

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3. Game On!

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In the dynamic world of tech and user research, adaptability and continuous learning are key. Our "Game On!" value encapsulates our readiness to pivot, our curiosity, and our commitment to constant improvement. Team members who exemplify this value:

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• Demonstrate the ability to change direction quickly and adapt to new circumstances
• Actively contribute to discussions, ask insightful questions, and share information effectively
• Continuously learn and challenge the status quo, always seeking innovative ways to improve our processes and offerings

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4. In It Together

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Last but certainly not least, we believe in the power of collaboration, mutual support, and compassion. This value underscores our commitment to fostering a positive, respectful work environment where everyone can thrive. "In It Together" means:

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• Creating a collaborative work environment and showing respect to all team members and individuals
• Bringing colleagues and customers together to achieve better results and reach common goals
• Demonstrating honesty, transparency, and integrity in team settings
• Speaking openly but respectfully, always listening actively, and being present and ready to participate

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Celebrating our values in action 🥳

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To bring these values to life, we recently celebrated our inaugural Value Awards. It was inspiring to see team members being recognized for exemplifying these principles in their daily work:

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• GabeYoung, Head of Engineering for "Game On"
• Sarah Flutey, Head of Product Marketing for "Live in Our Customer's Shoes"
• Christine Chow, Senior Product Marketer for "Own It"
• Loren Whithair Senior Business Intelligence Advisor (Data) for "In It Together"

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These winners have set a great benchmark for all of us to follow, showing how our values translate into tangible actions and outcomes.

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Looking ahead 🔭

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One of the most crucial lessons I've learned as a CEO is the immense value of establishing clear core values and guidelines early in a company's journey. When these fundamental pieces are in place, scaling becomes not just easier, but significantly faster – especially when it comes to global growth. 

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By setting these core values and guidelines early, we've created a strong foundation that will enable Optimal Workshop to scale more efficiently and effectively on a global level, maintaining our identity, culture, and high standards of performance, no matter how large we become or how far we expand geographically.

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Here's to the journey ahead – onwards and upwards, across borders and beyond!

Alex Burke

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The only tool you need to power your entire qualitative research workflow is here. We’re excited to announce the new and improved Reframer is now live for all customers!

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What is qualitative research?

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It’s an integral part of any research journey. Think: customer or stakeholder interviews, prototype testing, A/B testing, moderated interviews, and open-ended questions. In a nutshell, it’s anything that isn’t a closed question.

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It’s also the most popular research method – 85% of people who do research conduct interviews and usability tests as part of their projects or workflows.

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How can Reframer help me with my qualitative research?

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It’s no secret that anyone conducting research is time-poor. Qualitative research is especially time-consuming and messy, as it’s almost always conducted across multiple tools or mediums. 

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Reframer gives you your time back, and enables you to manage your entire qualitative research workflow within one single tool. 

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From setting up and conducting interviews, through to analyzing your data – you can uncover those juicy insights in days, not weeks (or months) without ever having to leave the Optimal Workshop app.

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Powerful, in depth tagging and analysis tools

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Analyzing and making sense of your interview or usability testing data with Reframer is easy and flexible (not to mention very aesthetically pleasing!)  

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Visualize and group observations with the affinity map

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Affinity mapping is a flexible and visual way to quickly group, organize and make sense of qualitative data (i.e. post-its and whiteboards). 

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With Reframer, affinity mapping is more powerful than ever. Your observations, tags and themes are all connected and stored in one place. It’s easy to search and filter your data, group like observations by proximity, then review and sort them in table format. 

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Discover patterns with the theme builder

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The Themes tab offers tag-based analysis with powerful filters. It enables you to explore the relationships between your observations and then create themes based on these relationships. This gives you more quantifiable results to support the qualitative, observation-based analysis that you’ve done in the affinity map. 

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Explore connections between tags with the chord diagram

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The chord diagram is a beautifully visual way to easily explore the relationships between your tagged observations and spot key themes. 

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If you’ve got a lot of tags, it may look a little overwhelming to start with. But don’t let that fool you – it’s easy to get the hang of, and once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever analyzed data without it!

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Real-time collaboration with your team

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We recommend that you conduct qualitative research as a team, whenever you can. Reframer makes this easy – it was built with collaboration in mind. 

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Invite study members

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On an Optimal Workshop team plan, you can work together from start to finish. Team members can take notes and create or use tags during interview sessions. In the affinity map, you can work collaboratively to group and edit observations in real-time. 

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Invite guest notetakers

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If you just need an extra helping hand with taking notes during your interviews or usability tests, you can invite guest notetakers to your sessions. Guest notetakers can take notes in the sessions you invite them to, but can’t see notes taken by others or analyze data.

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The guest notetakers feature is a great way to involve your wider team or stakeholders in your user research activities.

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Share your findings

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Need the raw data from your interviews? Want to share your affinity map visuals with other team members? Both are easily downloadable with the click of a button!

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An intuitive, end-to-end workflow

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When it comes to conducting qualitative research, Reframer is faster, easier and tidier than using other digital (or manual) tools. It houses all your data and insights in one place and supports the collaborative nature of qualitative research. 

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It’s not just for seasoned researchers either. We’ve put special focus on ensuring that the analysis is easy to learn for anyone doing qualitative research, regardless of skill level. And our in-app guidance will have you up to speed in no time.

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So what are you waiting for? Login now and get started on your Reframer journey!

In this post, Daniel Szuc describes why it’s important to go beyond how we may see our roles traditionally when only focusing on job titles. By exploring other roles, as outlined in the post that follows, we can all play a part in helping to glue a team together, making project work easier for all and creating a more positive environment to help in making meaningful project experiences.

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Collaboration is hard and needs practice 🙂↔️

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“Collaboration” is a term that gets thrown around in workplaces to encourage people to work together better. Sometimes, though, the people using the term may not understand the range of skills required to make collaboration work well, including (but not limited to) listening, expression, empathy, and curiosity.

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‍Each of these skills requires practice.

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‍So asking people to simply collaborate, without understanding the skills required nor the necessary spaces to practice these skills, may well frustrate people more than it helps.

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Misalignment 😤

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As work hums along in a team, it’s easy for misalignment to creep in. Misalignments are caused by a lack of communication, limited time, poor project management, and micro/macro issues that are addressed too late, causing friction between people. If specific roles are not put in place, these frictions can create difficult work environments, making coming to work unpleasant.

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Teams may lack common artifacts to help them communicate with a shared language, which in turn helps connect a project and business narrative together. Importantly, this helps aggregate what a team learns together from customer interviews to help improve a product or service.In effect, there is no light leading the way, so people can get lost in details that have nothing to do with a common and well understood purpose.

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Roles beyond a job title 👔

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When we speak about roles, we are not referring to traditional job titles such as project manager, developer, and designer, for example. Rather, we mean roles that everyone can play at various points in a project, helping others do their job well and the team deliver on making meaningful experiences.Roles, beyond job titles or the tasks inherent in those titles, help people think in integrated and holistic ways beyond their official job title.

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At times, our work requires that we delve deeply into design details; in other situations, we are required to step back and see how all the elements of our work connect in delivering solutions that are part of a broader narrative.As members of teams, we can work more effectively – whether it’s by advancing ideas or in recognizing when it’s time to consider alternative approaches.

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Four roles for making meaningful experiences 🎢

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We have identified four roles to encourage making meaningful experiences for the team and customers, as well as to encourage integrated ways of working:

1. Facilitators can define approaches that guide the process of informing, sense-making, and evaluating. They can craft agendas for working sessions and identify what problems need attention. Facilitators can also manage interactions between functions, aggregate a team’s learnings, and map these learnings to shared artifacts. They identify themes that require further study and set goals for the team’s next sessions.

2. Mentors need to be aware of approaches and skills that require ongoing development and practice, and organize safe spaces in which people can practice, using them over and over during working sessions and across projects. Mentors should work closely with facilitators and custodians to identify the knowledge that the team has captured and map it to a learning program for team members, with a focus on informing, sense-making, and evaluating.

3. Connectors create artifacts that help bridge gaps and make interactions between people feel more fluid, connecting people’s skills and roles.

4. Custodians maintain the knowledge base that forms over time and leverage it in creating approaches and courses that help our project teammates to improve at what they do.

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Practicing shared skills within roles ⚙️

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Independent of whether a person works in management, engineering, product management, design, user research, or some other function, there is a common set of skills of which people need to remain aware: skills that help make our project teams’ collective efforts better.Because there is an intention to integrate ways of working, collective learning makes teamwork effective and results in more meaningful experiences. Working sessions, in which people from different teams or functions come together to solve a problem, provide a common space to focus on that problem, define approaches to help solve the problem, and work through issues together.

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A team can identify the skills they practice, reflect on any gaps that may require them to expand their practice, and aggregate their learnings in common artifacts. These then help form and guide a project narrative with which the team resonates or can critique.In understanding the ways in which we work together – in essence, developing empathy for each other – we may see other benefits in addition to the work we produce.One benefit could be to move away from a blind focus on just tools and processes towards a primary focus on how we approach our work together or how we think about problems within the context of a project.

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The ways in which we interact with each other suggest that we should look at the following roles, again independent of function or job title:

1. Informing a problem - What evidence or learnings have we gained to date? What outstanding questions do we need to answer? How would the answers inform the solution to a problem we’re solving now or over time?
2. Making sense of the data we have - How can we make sense of our learnings as they pertain to specific questions or larger themes that we need to understand and for which we need to design solutions over time?
3. Evaluating designs - How can we evaluate designs and iteratively improve a product or service and its positioning over time?

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Questions for future consideration 💭

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• What roles resonate with you more?
• What roles do you think are missing?
• What skills do you need to practice in order to help your team make more meaningful experiences?
• What skills do you think are missing?
• What gaps, if any, do you recognize between roles on project teams?
• What frictions exist on a team and why do you think they occur?
• How can customer interviews – as one approach to understanding customer stories – encourage constant cycles of informing, sense-making and learning in the spirit of the learning organisation, so to help glue team practices together and create integrated ways of work?

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Acknowledgements

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Thanks to Josephine Wong for contributing to this piece. For more, see Integrated Approaches to Constant Personal Learning, Improvement, and Maturity.