Sheetal Agarwal on the importance of advocating for our customers

Sheetal Agarwal has over 20 years of experience in deeply understanding humans and telling their stories in ways that motivate people to take action. This work weaves across her career as an investigative journalist, a technology and community science academic, and most recently her 10+ years in user research. As the Head of UX Research for Window + Devices she leads a team of over 30 researchers to drive human-centered product-making. In a rapidly advancing environment of AI, we sit down with Sheetal to understand how we can continue keeping our customers’ needs at the core of our product making process. 

What does a day in the life of a UX Research Director look like at Microsoft?

I spend a lot of time going through various human insights my amazing team creates daily, pulling and elevating critical learnings that can help inform our product direction and strategic decisions. Armed with those insights, I help drive understanding around our customer experiences with our product and engineering leadership team, sharing where our customers might be struggling with our products, and the opportunities for us to drive and improve their experiences. A portion of my time is also focused on building disciplinary excellence. This is done through mentoring and providing feedback to researchers and data scientists on my team and across the company. In addition, I build craft-focused programs and actively work alongside my leads to understand how we can activate our learnings to help our partners develop inclusive, customer-based product intuition.

You mentioned “elevating critical insights”. What does that look like in Microsoft?

I love this question. It can look like a lot of things. We can gather our design, product and engineering partners all in the same room to sit with the learnings that research has attained and generate new ideas and direction. We do co-creation with designers and the people we are building with and for. We also do experience reviews, which bring our product managers, engineers and designers, through the experiences from the customer’s lens. These reviews generate further understanding of our customers from an empathetic lens, and allow for important, vulnerable conversations across various disciplines. Another way, which is a lot of what I do every day, involves me engaging across different kinds of product conversations that could range from data science wallows, driving customer and experience metrics, and product strategy. Showing up in these conversations as an advocate for the customer’s voice is crucial in driving our products in the right direction.

It seems like there’s a lot of thoughtfulness in having these different conversations. At the same time, in the last 2 years, there’s been a lot of acceleration and energy across our industry around AI. How do you balance moving fast, with ensuring we are building things right?

The accelerated pace of innovation that we are experiencing today is very real and can be exhilarating. This kind of speed sometimes leads to us thinking “We don’t have time for research” or “We don’t have time to integrate our learnings”. So how do we create room for the right learning to take place, and stay true to our customer voice? Over the past year, my leadership team and I have spent a lot of time and energy focused on understanding what our product making process is today. To influence our products in a positive trajectory, we identify where the critical decision-making points are for us to bring research to the table, where we need to be more agile in getting insights, as well as where we need to push for more learning.

We need to not be shy about bringing up the customer perspective and constantly wear our customer advocate hat in our everyday conversations.

Have you observed any shifts in the UX research discipline in this new era of AI?

It’s been super empowering to see the different ways that the research community is recognizing the opportunity we have with AI. A handful of easy quick wins include using Copilot to pull core insights from several decks of existing learnings or quickly synthesizing multiple customer conversation transcripts. There are amazing tools out there that can help researchers perform more routine tasks such as desk research, writing standard protocols and basic qualitative analysis. Alleviating the effort around these tasks allows us to focus more of our energy towards uncovering nuanced insights, connecting various product research findings, and elevating key insights at the right time for product-makers to maximize impact. In fact, I have been truly energized working closely with my research peers who are building AI tools internally to help the discipline move faster and more efficiently.  By leveraging AI tools and coupling them with our depth of understanding around our customers through our years of experience, we can effectively scale UX research.

There are also limitations to the AI tools that we’re learning from hands-on experience. For example, there are a hundred different measures that we have developed to capture customer delight, but what it comes down to for me is when I experience a moment of user delight. When customers take a gasp of pleasant surprise, or their shoulders relax due to the simple nature of executing a once complex task – that kind of joy and relief reflects that the product has done exactly what it needed to do for our customers. It’s rare to be able to go through a transcript and determine where moments of delight were. But being in a customer conversation and interacting face to face, there’s no denying receiving those raw emotions from our customers is powerful and a story I can tell or show my colleagues to influence our product decisions.

What are some essential skills of a successful UX researcher?

It all boils down to having a problem-solving mindset. Not only around the design question in front of you, but the bigger questions that are applicable across your company.

What is the customer need? What are the business needs? Being able to have a systems view on what your work plugs into is a really important tool to have in your toolkit. Secondly, stay true to your convictions and raise your hand to advocate for the customer. Being opinionated goes a long way in creating positive and meaningful product impact. Next, have a flexible mindset. Be willing to look at a problem and think differently. Recognize that speed and rigor can co-exist, especially in this moment of rapid AI advancement. Build on new capabilities and tools and consider different ways of approaching how we learn. Lastly, the most successful people I see in UX research are those who develop strong partnerships across all disciplines in the product making process. Be a full team member. If you’re engaged and understand the bigger picture, you’re more empowered to influence direction at the right time and place in the process.

Moving from an Individual Contributor role into a leadership/ managerial role can be challenging to navigate, especially in a large company like Microsoft. What is one piece of advice that you would give someone who’s aspiring to be a leader in UX research?

Own Your Influence. Leadership isn’t solely about expertise. It’s about shaping outcomes. Recognize the power you have, not just in your skills, but in your ability to advocate, inspire, and drive change. Identify what fuels your passion, whether it’s championing people, influencing strategy, or challenging the status quo, and use it with intention.

For me, that’s embracing my power as a customer advocate every day and speaking my truths.  

What are some resources you would recommend to someone looking to learn more about UX research?

First and foremost, go check out what Sam Ladner is writing, posting and publishing. She specializes in ethnographic research and design thinking, pushing UXers to consider the bigger picture, while also grounding the industry in the value and critical role that UX research and design play in building successful tech futures.  Another go to resource for me is the UX Research and Strategy community which has great local and virtual events and talks. Erika Hall’s “Just Enough Research” is a great book for both researchers who may be flying solo and for leaders who are building teams and making the most of their resources. Finally, two books that helped me in identifying my leadership style as well as building curiosity into my research practice are, “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhhig.