Q&A with top leadership on RingCentral’s User Experience (UX) Team
An Interview with Michael Peachey, VP of User Experience, RingCentral
I had a chance to sit down with Michael Peachey, VP of User Experience, at RingCentral. Read our Q&A to get a glimpse into the role UX plays on the Innovation team, his thoughtful insights on how to be a good leader and his predictions for industry trends.
Question Quick Links
1. Tell us a little about yourself and the journey that got you to RingCentral.
2. Who do you report to at RingCentral & how is this different from other companies?
3. What is the secret sauce to making a great UX team?
7. How do you foresee cloud communication disrupted in the next 10 years?
8. What advice do you have for someone starting their career in UX?
9. What is your leadership philosophy?
10. What drives you and inspires you to be the best at what you do?
11. What do you enjoy doing on the weekends?
Questions and Answers
- Tell us a little about yourself and the journey that got you to RingCentral.
Michael: I’ve been leading UX teams for about 15 years. Before it was called User Experience (UX), it was called Information Architecture (IA) and Web Architecture. I’ve been at RingCentral for about 3 years as VP of User Experience. Prior to that, I was VP of User Experience at Sumo Logic, a pre-IPO startup in cloud software and before that I was at TIBCO for 10 years, an on-premise middleware enterprise software company.
2. Who do you report to at RingCentral and how is this different from other companies?
Michael: User Experience, Engineering, and Product Leadership teams at RingCentral report to the EVP of Innovation headed by Kira Makagon. We are able to create collaboration between engineering, product, and user experience at a peer level because we all report into one department. UX is not part of a Marketing function as is the case in some organizations or part of the Product team.
UX is one of the 3 legs of the Innovation stool with Engineering and Product and has an equal say at the table.
3. What is the secret sauce to making a great UX team?
I think it’s the people over anything else, so when we hire people we look at fit first.
People who are going to thrive within the organization share the values we have. We talk to a lot of talented designers that maybe don’t have the fit. I’m particularly interested in highly effective and collaborative people with low ego. We’re a very flat organization and don’t have a hierarchy of directors, managers, and leads, so we’re able to work collaboratively on projects. From my standpoint, a product or feature can be supported by any one of 2 or 3 designers. This allows us to share the workload and makes the work for designers more enjoyable since they aren’t working on one project all the time and the output is better as many minds have contributed to it.
4. What initiatives have you championed that have made a difference to your team and the organization?
Michael: As a team, we’ve created a demand for job functions that typically get overlooked by other UX organizations. We have writers, a researcher, and a UX producer. By bringing on specialists in these functions, we can produce a better user experience.
For instance, our UX writers create consistency in our content. Our designers and product managers aren’t the ones writing our error message, instructions, etc.
We also brought in a full-time researcher. Before that, there was limited evidence-based decision-making. Designers were doing what they could, but we’re now trying to build a research-based discipline.
One of the key roles that we have here that I don’t see in a lot of UX teams is the producer. She helps in the trafficking of all the UX jobs so designers can design and not worry about negotiating priorities with product teams or dealing with what’s in Jira. Designers can thus focus on designing and doing what they like and others can do other stuff.
5. What’s a day at your job look like? How much of it spent in cross-functional collaboration, building empathy or ensuring we hire the right talent?
My main focus is on the health of the team. When people are working well and are in their creative zone and not worried about things, with a clear sense of priority, teams are way more effective. The health of the team is critical to me. Everyone on the team can feel it when it’s working and everyone on the team can feel it when it’s not working.
The experience of creating a great team is rewarding for all involved — we all have to do something all day long and if we are all working with excited and motivated people you feel good about your contributions and that makes for a really strong team.
6. Give us an example of a project you are currently working on that could change the way customers communicate and collaborate.
Everything we do here helps people communicate and collaborate with each other. The smallest feature makes it easier to send a message to a team, to join an online meeting, or share your screen. People communicate and collaborate within an organization because they want to get stuff done. You communicate and collaborate in your personal interactions because you want to, and it helps with self-actualization.
For example, we have a project going on now where we’re redesigning how you’re joining a meeting from a conference room so that it’s easier to start talking to your peers. We all have that experience where you enter a conference, and you have an iPad and you try to get a meeting started and you’re trying to share your audio and screen with people offshore but it’s difficult. You want to focus on having a good meeting and communicate, but instead you end up spending a lot of time getting the meeting set-up. We can be successful if that effort on our part gets multiplied by 5 minutes for every meeting for years and years, so if we put 300 hours into that project and save thousands of thousands of hours of people’s time.
7. How do you foresee cloud communication disrupted in the next 10 years?
Circling back on why people communicate and collaborate is to get stuff done. The next frontier in this collaborative communication is how it gets involved with workflow. If you want to get stuff done you may be managing your tasks in Asana, it might be sticky notes on your desk, or it might be just trying hard to remember stuff. To communicate you have phone calls, meetings and screen share, emails, and text messages in apps like RingCentral to get the job done. I think there is some really interesting work in bringing that workflow into RingCentral.
For example, if you were in a meeting with your peers offshore and you are getting to the end of the meeting and everyone is wrapping up and you have next steps but the meeting ends and you have to go back to your desk to think of the next steps. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an AI in the meeting and 2 minutes before the meeting ends you say “let’s wrap up with next steps,” and the AI starts paying attention and you. It then pieces things together and says “Okay, Jill you are going to send the proposal and Frank you are going to call Legal” and all of those things turn into tasks for a shared team in this group of people and each one checks off their tasks when it’s done.
Think about all the times you’ve been in a meeting and there’s a great discussion going on and then you realize no one was taking notes. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take the last 15 minutes of the meeting history to get what was transcribed by the AI and then review it? So, there is a lot of work to be done in that collaboration and work flow that we’re only really beginning to think about.
8. What advice do you have for someone starting their career in UX?
It depends on where you are in your career. When you are starting from schools, you need to become very good with the tools. Later you want to spend as much time thinking and building relationships. First, you get the tools and the basics down for your job and then it becomes about relationship management.
The difference between a good designer and a great designer is maintaining relationships with engineers (to know what’s feasible, what’s doable, etc.), with project managers (to know what’s on the roadmap, what are the priorities, etc.), with marketing (to collaborate and communicate on the stuff you are building) and other relevant groups. The higher you get in your career the more important these relationships become.
9. What is your leadership philosophy?
Hire people smarter than me and be nice to them. People want to thrive in their careers so if you can create an environment that is low drama and highly collaborative and where people are learning from everyone around them you have 90% of what you need in an organization. It’s my job to facilitate that growth and to work with people on their career plan. What are the skills they are developing and learning to demonstrate, so there is a roadmap for their growth. I think an organization owes it to every employee to leave them better off than when they first joined the organization. Everyone will eventually graduate from the position they are in to another position, either within the organization or outside.
As a leader it is my job to grow talent and people. If you are focusing on people’s growth the deliverables come as artifacts of that growth process.
10. What drives you and inspires you to be the best at what you do?
It comes back to the team. I’m very blessed to work with a team of strong, smart, highly collaborative, and motivated professionals. To be a part of that environment and stay ahead is what drives me.
11. What do you enjoy doing on the weekends?
Well, I’ve got 4 kids and spend time with them on the weekend. As far as activities go, I kite surf. During the kite surfing months (April to October) in the Bay Area I’m out on the bay kite surfing.
