UXC Spotlight: Chris Johnson

 

Interview by RondalScott

Photos by Nini Jin

October 14, 2015 

Having served multiple roles in his 7+year career here at The Advisory BoardCompany, has brought aChris Johnsonunique perspective to ProjectManagement at EAB. A fan of airplanes,muscle cars and Superman, Chris dashesheadfirst into the everyday challenges ofproduct development with an optimisticoutlook...and the tune of Kenny Loggins'"Danzer Zone" humming in his head. Hisstrong belief in the power of providingstellar user experiences for ourcustomers inspires Chris' team to failfast, learn quickly and stay agile. 

Rondal: What’s your role at The Advisory Board Company?

I’m currently Director of Product Management for EAB’s Community CollegeBusiness. We’re in the process of launching our first ever “consumer” facing productfor ABC with which is a direct-to-student application.SSC-Navigate

Beyond that, I’ve been part of the ABC family for over 7 years, and have workedacross three separate verticals - C&O, RCS, and EAB. I served the Healthcare sideas the product manager for Nursing Compass, Theater Compass (SurgeryInternational), and ED Compass. I transitioned from an operations focus to therevenue cycle of healthcare to build a new product for payment transformation andresearch the world of cash flow under risk models and contracts.

 

Was there ever anything else you wanted to be growing up?

 "...arecurringconundrum is tryingto get UX

agile.We’ve

struggledwith it in

general atABC [but]

theprocess

we’ve putin place on

the EABNavigateteam hasworkedreally

well..."

I loved two things growing up, airplanes and cars. My father served in the Navy andintroduced me to fighter jets and other aircraft. This, coupled with seeing “Top Gun”way too many times as a child, got me thinking of being a fighter pilot until I realized"Danger Zone" doesn’t exactly play in the background in the real world.

As for the second, racing cars was a popular hobby back in my town in Tennessee. Ifell in love with Mustangs and had the idea that mechanical engineering was my truecalling in life as it seemed the easiest way to feed my muscle car obsession.

 

ee,Speaking of Tenness you graduated from Middle Tennessee State Universityin 2007 where you earned a Bachelors Degree in Economics. Did youexperience an “Aha!” moment that initially made you want to pursue a career inhealthcare? 

*laughs* Not even a little. I’m from the Nashville area which is saturated with thehealthcare industry. I think, naturally, there was more opportunity and a greaterchance for me landing in healthcare based on proximity alone. Healthcare also had,and still has, many growing needs opening the door for startups and initiatives. Theseare great for entry level folks, fresh out of the collegiate world.

 

 

How did MTSU prepare you for a position as a Business Analyst with CHDMeridian Healthcare?

Well... “prepare” is sort of a funny word. I would say indirectly, the track I took foreconomics, by choice, at MTSU was focused more on Statistical Analytics rather thanjust the general micro/macro concepts you learn about in those 100 level econclasses everyone has to take. Courses like Econometrics set the foundation for abusiness analyst mentality. It shaped how I process what’s in front of me, such as“how to approach problem” and “how to build and calculate models,” providing softand hard skills respectively.

 

Were you still there when Walgreens acquired the company in 2008?

I was, but I was already on my way out. It was interesting as they did the round ofinterviews to understand current roles and responsibilities. It had this “Office Space”type feel to what was going on—you’d have to see the movie to understand this—butthere were these “What would you say you do around here?” meetings with the newexecutive. Lucky for me I was at the start of my career, finding the situation much lessstressful than others.

 

Is that what brought you from Tennessee to Washington D.C.?

Nope. CHD Meridian actually offered me a job to stay in Nashville, but since I had

been in the middle Tennessee area most of my life—childhood, high school,college—I really just felt like I needed to try something new. I applied to jobs in citiesthat I thought would make for interesting experiences like DC, San Francisco, London,etc. After interviewing, the choice was easy. ABC offered the most opportunity and theeasiest transition since the business analyst role I took on here almost mirroredexactly what I was already doing at CHD Meridian.

 

Did you consciously decide to transition from being a Business Analyst (BA) toProduct Manager (PM) or was it a natural progression? Was it the same forgoing from healthcare to higher education?

It would say it was a little of both. Yes I did choose it, but it was also a progression inlearning what I enjoyed most as well as what I was naturally performed better.

The analyst role, my first, was very definitive in that I had a clear start and stop foreach project/implementation I managed. It was also weighted heavily on technicalexpertise. After 18 months at ABC, I transitioned to being a consultant for the sameteam, Nursing Compass. This added a new challenge since the consulting/dedicatedadvising roles were much more relationship focused. I could still leverage my ability toanalyze and solve problems, but the majority of my job was change management andsubject matter expertise. I found myself having to try much harder to get to the samelevel of success I had an analyst. I felt like I struggled to keep up and make progress.

It was around this time that I purchased my GMAT books and started looking back atNashville. After chatting with an ABC executive about potential academic and careermoves, I was asked to interview with other positions within the firm. ProductManagement happened to be one of these. I quickly fell in love with the PM role andits nice coupling of technical and relationship expertise, and the rest is history.

 

 

  How do you interpret the term “user experience” and what impact does it haveon the way in which you approach your work?

User experience, to me, is two things: what the user feels during an interaction andthe response it evokes. In a perfect world, controlling the user experience allows us tomanage a user’s perception and accurately anticipate the reaction. If you canaccomplish both, then you can build a product customers love.

Managing UX requires that it sits at the center of our development process, sincethat’s where the user sits. You have to research it, experiment with it, design aroundit, test it, and then start over again.

 

At ElevateLIVE you gave a great presentation on SCC Navigate in which youaddressed the role user research played in its development. Can you give us abrief overview on what the methodology and process was like for testing?

 "For SSCNavigate,

[userresearch]was verymuch a'fail fast'

For SSC Navigate, it was very much a “fail fast” approach. We needed to learn assoon as possible where we were wrong. Going into user testing, it was important forus to approach each pilot group, or user, with the mindset that “we’re here to learn”not that “we think we’re right”. That helped define how we set goals and interpretresults.

For example, in our BETA testing for “academic planner,” we developed a process inthe application that mirrored how students manually go through planning courses. Ourgoal was that students could get through the process of planning a term with coursework and build a schedule based on their preferences and available course sections.“Success” meant that the student made it through the whole process. This wasimportant because first, it gave us feedback that our approach was viable and second,because we now had data points to measure the qualitative aspects of the exercise,like how quickly did they move from start to finish, did they select the right courses fortheir major, and were they able to find a schedule that fit their availability for college.It’s this philosophy of “design like you’re right, but test like you’re wrong.”

 

What were some other key insights you discovered during the research phase?

For starters, we learned we were wrong…a lot. * If I were to name a couple*laughsthat stood out to me, I would call out the fact that desktop trumped mobile, and thatand students like the DIY (do it yourself) approach.

Originally, we thought mobile was the way to introduce this new tech into the market. Imean why not? Everyone stays connected through mobile devices, and the majority ofinteraction happens via smartphone. However, we quickly learned that studentsviewed things like picking class time and registration as a “significant” task and verymuch preferred to be sitting in from a machine. It provided a feeling of security beingconnected by a machine rather than Wi-Fi or cellular service. This is not unlike thetransition to mobile banking or monetary transactions. It did take a shift in comfortlevel with mobile before people started to feel secure handling finances away from thesafety, if you could call it that, of their desktop machines.

Another key insight was scheduling. In our initial alpha pilot, our “scheduler”component allowed students to simply put in their availability while our algorithmwould run and find open sections for the courses they planned for a particular term.Seemed easy enough right? Almost little to no effort and * you get a schedule.*BAM!Unfortunately, that’s not how students think. First, they like to plan the courses wherethere is a specific section they want, either because of schedule or maybe because apeer is in that particular class. Only after they’ve taken care of their “need to have”sections are they ready to throw the rest on the calendar where they fit in. Sonaturally, our BETA approached switched to this method, allowing a hybrid modelwhere the student could select individual sections up front, and they auto schedule therest if they so pleased. And yes, it was very successful.

 

 

approach...It's this

philosophyof 'designlike you'reright, but

What’s your relationship been like with UX and development on SCC Navigate?

Simply amazing! This is by far the best UX/Development team combo I’ve everworked with in my career. In past experiences, the UX lead time in both research anddesign hindered our ability to stay agile and really deliver usable iterations of ourproduct. Typically, you experience this “piecemeal” approach of building the UXwireframe to spec over a period of releases. The problem I often see is that a teamprioritizes the features from a UX workflow and wireframe, breaking them up overreleases to align available resources to their priority. You end up only getting parts ofa solution at a time, when in reality you should always get a complete solution.Features should always be a byproduct of the solution, not the solution itself.

In our case, we’ve brought UX completely into the agile fold, having them work withthe Development team to simplify the overall design until if fits within a given releasewidow. I start by setting goals for our UX and Development team based on ourbusiness objective. This is always accompanied by “the problem we’re solving for”and the “a timeline to pilot” of a first approach. UX then brings forward the idealworkflow and visual design that our engineers review and estimate for feasibility,allowing the Development team a chance to comprehend the actions UX isrequesting.

We then go through a collaborative process—aka arguing, compromising, andbargaining—to come up with a feasible solution that has features we’re able todevelop in a given time frame. This iteration of design has UX marking through, up,around, and over wireframes to design a simpler solution fits within our releasewindow. This will go back and forth as many times as it takes to get something simpleenough that we can test with and get meaningful results.

 

Does your team ever struggle to collaborate—either amongst itself or otherteams—and if so, how do you resolve these conflicts?

Every team struggles. That’s where the best decisions are made. There are disputes,mainly among the team alone, but they tend to resolve quickly. We began settingiteration goals that mimic a user story just at a higher level. We’ve learned to pull upon these when we have disputes about priority, MVP, etc. This helps us fall back onour measure of success instead of getting lost in the moment.

 

Speaking of obstacles, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced asa Product Manager?

It would probably be easier to just point you to a book! * Every product*laughsmanager I know is challenged at one point or another with the same things anotherhas faced.

I mentioned this already, but a recurring conundrum is trying to get UX agile. We’vestruggled with it in general at ABC. The process we’ve put in place on the EABNavigate team has worked really well to handle this. Like I said before, organizing UXwork around the upcoming release objectives and having the Development teamprovide input into that releases design, has made a real difference in keeping UXagile.

The other thing that comes to mind is typical for business to consumer products. Thisleaves PMs to balance the dichotomy of user and buyer needs. There’s no silverbullet here, but the more Delivery services and Marketing agree on, the better off youare.

 

test likeyou're

wrong.'"

 

Do you have a daily routine? What’s a typical workday look like for you?

I don’t have anything rigid I follow every day, but I do have my preferences. I like tonot read emails in the morning since it’s usually the most creative and juiced I am forthe day. I try to spend that time brainstorming with teams or designing the nextsolution. I don’t think there is a typical day for a product manager. I probably spendmost of my time in three main ways...just not in any resemblance to something calledtypical. I’m either designing a market/release approach, helping the team execute onthat approach, or influencing some stakeholder somewhere that it’s the rightapproach.

 

If you could have your ultimate workspace—no budgetary or creativelimits—what would it look like?

Yikes! As a product manager, I find myself usually in other folks’ workspace. If it wasjust for me though, I would go for a space with lots of natural light and dimming glass,whiteboard space, and large flat panel monitors for presentations. The open layoutwould also provide an Apple Store-esque demo environment with machines, tablets,and phones all demo ready any stakeholder or interested parties to visit and playaround with current versions or our technologies.

 

What excites you the most about the work you do here?

At this moment, it’s the speed that we get things done and make an impact. Highereducation is so far behind, but every move we make sends it flying forward. It’s ripefor change, and we’re easily in the best position to make change happen.

 

Favorite quote as a parting shot:

"Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He's gonna fight and he'sgonna lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle, he does notlose himself." Eric Taylor—