Judd Antin
Founder & Executive Coach, Judd Antin Consulting. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveacademicauthoroperatorLinkedIn ↗juddantin.com ↗
Judd Antin is an executive coach, consultant, and lecturer who previously served as Head of Research and Head of Design Studio at Airbnb, as well as a UX research manager at Meta and Yahoo. He is recognized for his product and UX strategy frameworks, including "The UX Research Reckoning Is Here."
1shows
1appearances
28statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Judd Antin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Antin: Middle-range UX research is interesting but lacks business impact
“And then you have this middle range, which is this blobular place where the research questions are sort of middle altitude. And a lot of the core kind of, let's say user understanding questions fall here. And a lot of what research is doing is research in that…”
Antin: Middle-range UX research enables performative customer obsession
“So they yield results, which are interesting, but sometimes hard to operationalize. They trigger the post hoc bias really, really, really well, where like a lot of people can say confidently like, oh, that was kind of obvious. We knew that already. And they fu…”
Antin: Average product managers perform customer centricity without real interest
“The average PM who lives in that land all day, every day. And what they do is not in the Venn. You know, I think those are people who are also like Performing customer centricity and performing user centeredness a lot when they're really not interested.”
Antin: Product design is plagued by performative design thinking rituals
“Design, it has a ton of performance and it comes from the fact that we have like figured out user-centered design, this process or design thinking, which IDEO popularized, like that's what we're supposed to do.”
Antin: CSAT is more precise and business-correlated than NPS
“Customer satisfaction, a simple CSAT metric is better. It has better data properties. It is more precise. It is more correlated to business outcomes.”
Antin: User Researchers Must Be More Focused on Profit and Business Success
“I think researchers need to be more profit focused. And there are a lot of people out there who think that's not, I think they think that's not cool or not research's job. And I'm kind of like, well, what are we doing then if we're not helping businesses succe…”
Antin: Casual customer conversations do not constitute valid research
“Anyone can talk to a user that does not constitute research or insights work, you know, because one user can be powerful, but one user can be idiosyncratic.”
Antin: NPS cannot be meaningfully benchmarked across companies
“The problem with that is the research shows that NPS is idiosyncratic. So it goes up and dows in, in ways that we don't understand. And there's a lot of inconsistency in how it's asked that creates variations in the data, which means it's not apples to apples.…”
Antin: UX research remains ineffective while treated as a service discipline
“As long as research is a service discipline, I think we're going to be stuck in this spot.”
Antin: Top user researchers must master five specific multi-method tools
“So the best researchers I think are, first of all, multi-method. The first iteration of user research was primarily a qualitative discipline, but a strong opinion that I have is that is largely one of those models that needs to evolve. It's not that qualitativ…”
Antin: Late-stage user research validation is performative box-checking
“Every time a PM comes to a researcher at the end of a product process and says, can you just run a quick user study, you know, just to validate our assumptions. That's user centered performance. It's too late to matter. That PM is not interested in being wrong…”
Antin: Product intuition harbors blind spots that researchers must expose
“Intuition is where all of those biases lie. It's where all your blind spots are. And what great insights people do, what great researchers do when you're next to them all the time is they'll expose you.”
Antin: UX research teams should share identical OKRs with product managers
“I never asked for research teams to have their own separate OKRs. I said two things. Number one, what's the team's OKR? Like, shouldn't the PMs, the engineers, the designers, and the research, everybody should have the same set of metrics for success, right? B…”
Antin: Researchers who ask customers what they want are bad researchers
“A researcher who's going to ask customers what they want is a bad researcher.”
Antin: Best research provides recommendations without dictating exact product roadmaps
“The best research doesn't like leave it at that. Right? It tells you, and it's like the what, the so what, and then the then what. But the problem with that is some researchers go too far in the other direction where they're like, we ran the study, it yielded …”
Antin: PMs must not rely on personal intuition when dogfooding products
“Doing product walkthroughs to identify lists of potential issues is a great thing to do. Prioritizing that list. Figuring out which ones are more or less a problem and for whom is an area where you should be extremely wary of relying on your own sort of opinio…”
Antin: Researchers cannot operate in A/B testing environments without basic statistics
“The best research to know a little bit of stats, like you can't interact in a world of A-B testing without knowing basic statistics.”
Antin: Teams should approach user research to falsify assumptions, not validate
“Like one of my big kind of mantras was we don't validate, we falsify. Right? We are looking to be wrong. That is the mindset you should use when you're approaching insights and research. I want to be wrong. I want you to do research that shows we were off base…”
Antin: True researcher success is when decision meetings require their presence
“My metric for success Is when they won't have that meeting without you. That's my metric for success. If they cannot have that decision-making meeting without the researcher there, that means you've developed influence, strong, strong trusting relationships. Y…”
Antin: Airbnb made millions by changing seven characters on a CTA button
“We changed the text on the button with help from our amazing content design or UX writing team. We basically changed seven characters and made Airbnb millions of dollars.”
Antin: A/B tests rarely explain why user behavior changed
“AB tests are great, but one of my most painful things to do is to sit in a room full of PMs and data scientists who have just seen the results of an experiment that like flipped to Statsig. And then they're like, cool. I was significantly down over this course…”
Antin: UX researchers must learn to say no and prioritize focus
“Most researchers that I know are working on teams where they're like, I'm the only researcher. And there's like, I have seven PMs and 20 designers and like I'm trying to do 10 projects and no one's going to do a good job that way. So researchers have to learn …”
Antin: Companies must stop siloing separate research and insights disciplines
“They were like, listen, we have all these different people throwing insights over the transom. And it's great. We want to hear from the data scientists, from the product specialists, from the customer service people and the voice of the customer, whatever, all…”
Antin: User researchers cannot effectively manage more than three concurrent projects
“I used to say that a full plate for a researcher was probably three things, two big projects and a small project, right? Like a side project. More than that, your researcher is probably not doing a very good job.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Judd's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & Executive Coach, Judd Antin Consulting | 1 | 28 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |