Christina Janzer

Like things never happen exactly how you think that they're going to happen but, like you can make the most out of every opportunity and experience and there's always, there's always a learning there, right? And I think as much as you can sort of take the time to reflect on like okay what is learning, what is you know this thing was, was this door closed but there's another door open here and for me it's like the other door happened to be like a really amazing job that opened up for me.

Liz Gerber

Welcome or welcome back to the Technical Difficulties Podcast where we celebrate the careers of amazing female designers and technologists. What if you could be more productive and less frustrated at work? Today, we are thrilled to be joined by the amazing Christina Janzer, who's going to help us realize this vision. Christina has held roles at Facebook and Slack, where she ran the Workforce Lab. Trained in product design, her first job was in customer service at Facebook, where she realized the importance of understanding customer needs and pain points. Christina's passion for championing people through research in the tech industry has made her a true trailblazer in her field. Join us as we explore her journey, insights, and vision for the future of work. We can't wait to hear from you, Christina. Thank you for joining us today.

Christina Janzer

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. So the question we have to ask that we start with is what is your favorite way to start your morning?

Christina Janzer

I like to start my morning with a workout. So I get up very early to squeeze it in before the kids get up and that's how I wake up.

Liz Gerber

Okay, awesome. What is your favorite creativity tool? You define creativity tool.

Christina Janzer

You know what? My answer to this question has changed. I would say that I'm having a lot of fun with Chat GPT as a creativity tool. Like it's like my brainstorm buddy, which I never expected to happen.

Liz Gerber

Cool. Okay, why not? Why didn't you expect it?

Christina Janzer

I think I had just a limited understanding of what I could use AI for beyond summarization.

Liz Gerber

Yeah? Okay.

Christina Janzer

And I started to actually probably inspired by you or some of the other people we were on a podcast with, like thinking about it as a brainstorm buddy and somebody who I could just bounce ideas off of and ask for feedback on my work and say, here's one thing that I'm thinking of, can you give me five more ideas that I might not have thought of? And it's been really fun to play with it like that.

Liz Gerber

Awesome. What did your favorite creativity tool used to be?

Christina Janzer

Well, maybe my first answer is like, get a lot of creativity when I'm running. Like it's like this really interesting moment where I kind of zone out and then suddenly all of these ideas come into my mind. And then I forget them after I run, so I have to like write them down really quickly.

Liz Gerber

Awesome. Are there specific trails or paths or streets you go on that support creativity?

Christina Janzer

So we were chatting before. I live in a really running-friendly area. So I live in Marin, which is close to Mount Tamalpais and has just a million different trails that I love to run on. Often during the week, though, I'm running in the dark, which I don't like to go outside by myself. So I'm running on my treadmill, which is maybe not as beautiful as being on the trails. But sometimes it's the best I can do.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, yeah, awesome. Okay, and then what's your favorite way to end the day?

Christina Janzer

My favorite way to end the day is, one of my favorite traditions is every night, I have three kids, every night I read a different book to each one of them. And it takes a long time because there's three of them and they don't like to read the same books, but it's like a very special tradition that I hope we hold onto as long as they let me continue reading to them.

Liz Gerber

Oh, so I try, I have a 14 year old and I still insist on reading to him. He's not so into it, but he sometimes indulges me.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, one of my family friends is a high school teacher and he said that he still reads to his high school class and he's like, just keep it up as long as possible. It's a really important practice. My oldest is 10, so he's still into it.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Okay. Okay. I like when people read to me. I'm happy to listen.

Christina Janzer

Me too.

Liz Gerber

So thank you. Okay, we are going to get started and get into some of the questions around your career. So the first question I have for you is, what was your, how did you get into technology and design? And what was your first like, I'm a designer. I should be in tech moment. Or was it more something that you only realized in retrospect? How'd you get into it?

Christina Janzer

Yeah, that's a great question and it's definitely the latter. kind of, things happened and then I kind of put together the narrative afterwards. And yeah, what things happened? So you and I were talking a little bit earlier, I graduated from Stanford with a degree in product design. And...

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so what things happened? Yeah.

Christina Janzer (10:19.894)

I, to be perfectly honest, I did not know what I wanted to do after college. And I, you know, I loved my degree. I had so much fun. It was really inspiring and creative, but I still didn't know exactly what a job would look like. And a really good friend of mine, who is my now husband, but at the time was a really good friend, he happened to get a job at Facebook right after graduation.

And he was like, you know what, this is a cool company, you should come work here. Just work here for a few months while you figure out what you actually want to do with your life.

Liz Gerber

Is that right?

Christina Janzer

That sounds great. I started out with a job in customer support and I think it was within maybe the first week, like really, really quickly, I was like, this is not just a temporary job. Like this is a really exciting, just like energizing place to be. I don't know what my job is going to look like over time, but like this is where I want to be. And like that, you know, being in customer support was really fascinating because I had this sort of direct line to people who were using the product and people who would write in and ask questions, ask, I don't know how to do this. The most common question back then, believe it or not, because like it was so small at the time was,

Liz Gerber

And this was 2005, six, just to, okay, great.

Christina Janzer

2005. Yeah, so was September of 2005. And the most common question was, my college is not on Facebook yet. Can you add my college?

Liz Gerber

Yeah, it was tiny. mean, there were probably just a couple hundred people working at Facebook at that time. Right?

Christina Janzer

Yeah, I mean, think when I started there were 50 people at Facebook. So it was just this like exciting, everyone was just kind of playing different roles, wearing different hats, but very motivated and ambitious, right? And yeah. And anyway, so no, go ahead.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, yeah. So, well, I was just gonna say, so I was at Stanford at the same time and I remember being in a classroom and this guy named Mark coming in with a hoodie with a couple other people trying to recruit people and everybody in the class was like, I don't know.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, that was, yeah.

Liz Gerber

So that was like back in the day when there were 50 employees and and Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies were just trying to recruit wherever they could. So I'm

Christina Janzer

Yeah, and there was just this steady stream of Stanford grads who would just sort of walk across the street.

Liz Gerber

Across street right that's exactly what it was right yeah.

Christina Janzer

All right, it was so close. But anyways, this is what happened in retrospect. I was really interested in this feedback loop where we would hear from users of the product. They would ask questions. They would be confused about something. We would launch a new product. And this is way back before there was ever a research team. We would launch a new product without having shown it to a single person beforehand.

Liz Gerber

Right.

Christina Janzer

And people that I remember the day that we launched News Feed and there was a revolt outside. Like people stood in front of the office with signs saying like, yeah, like users of Facebook saying bring back the old Facebook. They hated News Feed.

Liz Gerber

Like customers, customers.

Christina Janzer

And know, News Feed was a really important part of the vision, so we weren't gonna take it back, but it sort of helped us realize like, hey, we need to be better about anticipating how people are going to feel about the products that we're launching. We just need to have a direct line to our customers. And so I sort of raised my hand and said, hey, I want to be part of this. I want to figure out how we can make that connection to customers a little bit more proactive versus waiting for them to complain.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Christina Janzer

At Stanford, I was introduced to this idea. I just didn't know that it was an actual job. And so I started the user research team. I want to say it was early 2007 and just made the case that, hey, we need to be better about bringing people in, showing them things, talking to them, understanding their needs, just the typical things that you would expect to have been happening but wasn't happening at the time.

Liz Gerber

Amazing. Can we go back earlier even when you started college? the way it makes it sound like you knew you wanted to do design. When you showed up at Stanford freshman year, did you know you wanted to do design? And how did you, if not, how did you learn about it?

Christina Janzer

I 100 % did not know what I wanted to do. Actually, my dad was a lawyer.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Christina Janzer

I had this idea like, wouldn't it be cool if we had a family practice? And I don't know when that idea went out the window, but I'm glad that that's not what I ended up doing. I had the whole like, maybe I want to be a doctor, know, experimented with a lot of those classes that didn't really feel right. And then my freshman year roommate did know that she wanted to do product design on day one. And so her very first quarter she was taking, know, I'm trying to, I think it was probably

Mechanical Engineering 101, I think that was what it was called. And she was always in the hallway building things and making things and making prototypes. And I was like, gosh, this looks really fun. Let me do that too. And so I took a couple classes and then realized, this is really exciting. It's sort of this mix of engineering and design, two things that feel really fun to me. So I did not have any idea what I wanted to do. And like I mentioned, even when I graduated, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So some of this is like, right place, right time, a friend happened to recruit me to Facebook, and then I just sort of found my path from there.

Liz Gerber

Yay! Okay, and you were there for, I think about a decade, if I'm right, and then you went to Slack. how'd that happen? What was that transition about?

Christina Janzer

Yes, yes. And then I went to Slack, yes.

Yeah, so my time at Facebook was incredible. basically from 2007 when I started the user research team, I sort of built it from there.

Liz Gerber

Amazing.

Christina Janzer

you know, just got really excited about this like practice of user research and the role that it plays and the importance of it. And just like, it's kind of obvious, but like, how can you build products without really understanding your customers, understanding their needs, understanding what's working, what's not working? Like, it's just such a, it's like such a like fascinating feedback loop. And I just really love just like talking and connecting to people and that I just get a lot of joy from that. So I had that incredible experience and you know, I started out at Facebook, that was my very first job out of college. I started this user research team not because I had the skills to do it, like I'm just gonna say that really transparently.

Liz Gerber

I love that. I love that.

Christina Janzer

I didn't have the skills to do I had the ambition, I worked really hard, I had developed really great relationships and a lot of trust. So people, like they trusted me to do this, right? But I made so many mistakes along the way and learned so much along the way. And there came a point where, well, first of all, Facebook was getting pretty big. And I just like had this like itch to like do it again, knowing everything that I know from that first, you know what I mean? Like I wanted a second chance.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't we all. Right.

Christina Janzer

Totally all right. And so I, so I knew that it was time to like find a smaller company where I could have an opportunity to build from scratch again. And one of my really amazing mentors from Facebook, I pinged him and I said, I'm thinking about moving on. Do you have any ideas for what companies I might want to be looking at? And he happened to be involved with Slack. was on the board at the time and he said, yeah, check out Slack. You gotta check out Slack. It's this really amazing company, a great culture. And so that's what brought me to Slack.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, pretty new, pretty new as well, right? It hadn't been around that long.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, mean definitely bigger than when I joined Facebook. I think there were around 600 people when I joined Slack. But one story that I always tell people is, you I had my first interview with Slack with what was, who was then their chief product officer, this woman named April Underwood. And I will never forget that conversation. It was a 30 minute conversation and like,

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Christina Janzer

It had nothing to do with the product. The product was cool. Like we weren't allowed to use it at Slack. So I hadn't, or sorry, at Facebook. So I hadn't really had like direct experience using it. But after that phone call, I was like, I will do anything to work with April. Like there was, she was so incredible. She was such an incredible leader. Our conversation was just so exciting and motivating that that was sort of like, once I had that conversation with her, I was sold and I think that's been sort of a theme where I just want to work with great people. And she sort of introduced me to sort of a string of really great people that I've been able to work with at Slack. So yeah, that's how I sort of made that transition.

Liz Gerber

Thank you. So maybe related to this, it sounds like meeting April was a career defining moment. I'm curious if there were other career defining moments, either success or maybe failures that surprised you and led you in a different direction.

Christina Janzer

Mm-hmm. That's a great question. So I think some of my most career-defining moments are when people saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. So have you ever done the Enneagram?

Liz Gerber

Yeah, totally. Will you explain what it is?

Christina Janzer

So the Enneagram.

Liz Gerber

And why you're laughing. would like you to explain it and also explain the giggles.

Christina Janzer

So I love these types of, so it's like a personality test, is that the right way to describe it? There's a number of different personality tests. I think this is one that has really resonated with me, but, it's an exercise, you take a test, you take a quiz, and then it tells you sort of what number of an enneagram you are. think there's one through eight. And it sort of helps you understand a little bit more about what drives you, what motivates you, just different attributes about your personality and how you show up at work. And it's a test that I have done a few times with different teams. And it can be really useful in helping to understand how to work with other people. You can understand why you are the way that you are.

Liz Gerber

Absolutely.

Christina Janzer

And if I have the language to understand why you get bothered by this thing or why you're motivated by that thing, it helps us work together better. But it also helps me really understand who I am. But anyways, one of the things about an Enneagram 3, so Enneagram 3 is like, love it, I love that I am an Enneagram 3, but it's also, it's like a very ambitious, is all about ambition, but also like, what's the right word that I'm looking for? Like I care a lot about achieving and that can also be, if you don't find the right balance, that can be a bad thing, right? Yeah.

Liz Gerber

Well, for all of these, right? mean, for all strengths, there's kind of a weakness associated. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, one of the things that I remember about an enneagram three is that sometimes I don't see things that are happening to myself until somebody points them out.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Christina Janzer

And so like, maybe I'm like burning the midnight oil and I don't recognize that until a really good colleague will pull me aside and say, Hey, you need to slow down. Right. Or I might not recognize a strength that I have until somebody calls me out and then I see it. And I think about some of my amazing mentors and managers over the past, you know, two decades who have recognized something in me that I didn't see until they pointed it out. And once they pointed it out, it was like the world just opened. And I think about this even in terms of starting the user research team at Facebook. That wasn't necessarily something that I would have picked for myself, like in retrospect it makes a lot of sense based on what my passions were and what my skills were, but I didn't really know what it was as a craft or a practice or a team, but there was a very important mentor and manager at Facebook at the time who sat me down, asked me what I was interested in, asked me what I was working on and said, okay, I'm gonna have you go start the user research team. And that sort of opened my eyes to this opportunity and this career path. But I think about that with other ways that my job has stretched over time. So one of the things at Slack is I started by managing the researchers, but then I always felt really passionate about how research and data science could work more closely together. And in many companies, very separate, right? The researchers are all the qual people.

And the data scientists are the quant people, right? Obviously, I don't believe that, but that's oftentimes the silos. And I always felt really passionate about how can we work more closely together because what inevitably happens is the data scientists will discover something in the behavioral data and the next question will be, well, why is that happening? And they'll say, let's go talk to our research friends over here or vice versa, right? And I was like, why aren't we aligning? Why aren't we working together so that we're sort of proactively answering what we know is going to be the next question And so I just was really passionate about that That was like one of the things at Facebook that I felt didn't really work well at the time I'm sure things are very different now, and I wanted to do differently at slack And so I was really you know I was really excited to just like build that really great relationship, and I was really just focused on how can we break down silos? How can we work together and then my manager at the time was like?

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Christina Janzer

Okay, I'm gonna give you the data science team. We're gonna have them actually report to you too. And I had never thought about this as like an org structure. Let's like change the nature of like how the organization works and is structured and management and all that kind of stuff. It was more just like, no, no, no, this is like, I just want this to work better together. And I think that was like another example of, no, I think you have the ability to lead a bigger team.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Christina Janzer

I wouldn't have necessarily recognized that in myself. I don't have a data science background. That is not my strength. And I think that those have been some really career defining moments for me where people have had to see something in me that I wasn't able to see myself.

Liz Gerber

Sure.

Yeah. So is the takeaway from that, ask mentors what they see in you or what's the, how did you, how did you, how do you get those kinds of people and how do you encourage them to tell you what they see?

Christina Janzer

that's such a great question. I mean, I think the takeaway is like, find amazing managers. I don't know that that's always easy to do. But I think, I do think like having those opportunities to reflect with somebody maybe it's not your manager. Maybe it's not your mentor. Maybe it's just a co-worker that you really trust and just like I I think that the Taking the time to reflect is one of the most valuable things that we could do and I think it's so easy to like push it off like who has time for that, but just taking the time to reflect on What motivates you? What are you excited about? What's not going? Well? What do you want to change like I think those?

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Yeah.

Christina Janzer

I think some of that, like if I had done that more, maybe I would have seen some of that in myself, you know? But I think if you can find like an accountability buddy where it's, whether it's your mentor or your manager or a coach, right? I've worked with a lot of career coaches over the years that have been really helpful in this as well. But I think people are always willing to help if you just ask them and you ask them those pointed questions about like, what could I be doing differently? What do you think my strengths are? What would you like me to be doing more of? You know, I think you can probably get it out of people if you don't happen to have like the luck that I did to have these amazing managers.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, well, you're going to call it luck, Christina, but I also think you attract amazing managers. You're not just falling into their plates, right? Like you, they see something in you and you see something in them. So it's not just one-sided. would, that's what I would guess.

Christina Janzer

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I do think about that a lot in my role as a manager, right? Which is like, how do I sort of create those opportunities for my people and how do I sort of help them stretch in ways that they might not necessarily think to do themselves? Like, that is one of my favorite parts of my job now is the people that I manage and like, when they thrive, it's just, it's the most amazing thing.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, I love that smile on your face. I get it. Like it's just, it's joy. It's to see people. Yeah, that's great. I love that you're used to the word stretch too. I think that's a really beautiful, beautiful way of describing growth.

Christina Janzer

It is. It's so cool. It's so cool.

Liz Gerber

Okay, thank you very much for that. Moving on, curious, let's get hyper, hyper focused on today. What are you excited about that you're working on today, or in another way we like to ask this is, what are you nerdy now on and why?

Christina Janzer

So we talked about research and analytics as part of my job and then workforce lab as part of my job. Workforce lab is the research group that really focuses on sort what's happening in the broader world of work. Where is work going? How is work changing? it's been changing radically. that's like...

Liz Gerber

And it's been changing radically in last five years. Yeah.

Christina Janzer

It's wild how things, I mean, you you think about sort of everything we went through during COVID and that's really when this group sort of formed was like, okay, COVID happened. Everything's different. People are working remotely that maybe didn't work remotely before. They don't know how to, they don't know how to work anymore. What can we learn about that? What are some of the upsides and downsides of remote work? And then, you know, that sort of settled ish. And then, you know, AI is like this.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Totally, right. Yep.

Christina Janzer

So I get really excited about understanding what the role of AI is going to be. I think, so there's a stat that I always like to share that we got from one of the surveys that we do. this survey is of global desk workers around 10 different international markets.

And it's that people spend about a third of their time on what I would call work of work, right? So this is like low value, mundane, repetitive tasks, right? We all, can probably list 10 things that we did today that would like fall into that category.

Liz Gerber

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Christina Janzer

And you just think about like, gosh, like we're wasting so much time. We're wasting so much time and imagine if we could like reuse that time to work on things that give us joy and things that get us excited and like how much better work could be. And then I think about, you know, AI and hey, what is the role that AI could play in augmenting and replacing and reducing some of this like work of work, right? And then what would that do? What would that do for people? Like how could that, you know, stretch us or enable us to do things that we never thought we could do before. But then are we, are we wired that way? Are we wired to actually like take advantage of this? Are people ready for it? Are people scared by it? So I get really excited about the emotions, like people's emotions when it comes to AI are very complicated.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Speaking of any bringing it back to the Enneagram, I believe you have like a character or you have a great quiz that Slack put out, which was to figure out where you were on the AI comfort scale. Am I am I right on this one? And the AI's personas and I did that with my students and they love they got a huge kick out of it. Yeah, because they're very strong opinions. Very like people have.

Christina Janzer

Yes, yes. The AI personas quiz,

I love it. I love it. They're, yeah.

Liz Gerber

really different. What do think that's about? Why do think people have such strong opinions about AI?

Christina Janzer

Well, think it's just like, I'm currently in Silicon, in San Francisco, in the Silicon Valley area. Like we are also like all in on AI. AI is going to transform. We're in this sort of bubble, right? But if you just step outside of this bubble, like people just have different feelings about it. And I think there's a few things going on. I do think that there's some fear, right? Which is like, and some of the narrative, like you look at some of the narrative in the media and it's like AI is going to replace this and replace that. like it's positioned as this replacement versus this augmentation. And so people see it as a threat instead of a tool, right? And so one of the personas is like the rebel persona and like their primary fear is that AI is gonna be a threat to society. They feel like it's gonna take over their job. They feel like it's going to like do bad things, right?

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Correct.

Christina Janzer

But I think there's also just like this lack of, some of this is just because things are moving so fast, but there's just like this lack of understanding of like what this technology really is today and what it's going to be in the future. And I think there's this huge opportunity. What I think a lot about is like, how do we bring people along this journey? How do we help them feel like they're like in the driver's seat versus this technology is happening to them?

Liz Gerber

Boom, yeah.

Christina Janzer

Right? Like I would love for everyone on my team to think about like, this is a tool in your toolbox. This tool is going to make you more effective. It's going to make you happier. It's going to make you have more joy at work. But like you are the one who is deciding how to integrate it. Right? It's not like this AI tool is just suddenly going to like be here and be, you know, that's just not how it works. But I think if we don't take the time to understand like people's emotions and their feelings, we're not going to meet them where they are and we're just going to leave a lot of people behind, which I think is kind of what we're seeing in some cases.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, I think I'm going to connect this back to the thing you said about the importance of reflection and really understanding the self. I think it's there's the speed of the technology and things moving so quickly. And if you don't have a good sense of what brings you joy, what parts of your job you like to do, what parts of your job you would like to outsource in some way, I think it can feel really overwhelming. The speed, the speed at which this is being introduced.

Christina Janzer

Yeah.

Liz Gerber

So I think reflection is, reflection in some ways I think is part of the response that's needed to this. Yeah.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, I think it's reflection. I 100 % agree. And also, I think there's this mindset of experimentation. just play full. Just play with it. And just have fun with it. if what you try it out for doesn't work, then try something else. it's changing so much that it's not going to be this you implement it and then like, forget about it for six months, right? Like it's changing every single day and so you have to keep sort of learning about it and experimenting with it and figuring out maybe it's not working for this use case today but it's probably gonna be working in a month, so.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Well, that brings us to our next question, which is more future-oriented, which is what is something you still want to do in your career or what's something you want to see in the future of design and technology? So I'll let you take it either way, either personally or in the broader field. We're looking at remote work, then we're looking at AI. What do you look forward to in the future?

Christina Janzer

That's a great question. I guess there's a couple things that come top of mind. One is more like, one's maybe less futurey. But I do think a lot about the balance of, and this is something that we were thinking about a lot during remote work in COVID, but thinking about like,

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Christina Janzer

Productivity and the employee experience. And I think many times those feel very disconnected. It's like if you focus too much on wellness and you're not gonna be productive. And I believe that those are very hand in hand, right? If you are taking care of yourself, if you are able to like...

be healthy and thrive, you're going to be more productive. But I just think about, if you think about the future with AI and the ability to give people more time to focus on what they care about, what brings them joy, what humans are really uniquely suited to do. So like as a researcher, I'm really excited to connect with people and to interview people and to spend time with people and to bring those insights back to stakeholders and to brainstorm what we're building. And like, those are all very human-y things, right? Maybe some of the analysis can be like automated. Maybe some of the reporting can be automated. like, you know, what am I gonna do with that time saved?

Liz Gerber

Yes, what are you gonna do?

Christina Janzer

Am I going to just like do more work? Right? Or is it gonna give me an opportunity to work on things that are maybe better for my community or things that are more related to my kids? And like, that actually going to achieve more balance in the long term in a way that we haven't really like

talked about as much, right? Because I feel like productivity is such an end goal. And so I would love for that sort of productivity, wellness, and then what are the other big world problems that, how cool would it be if some of the people in tech are more focused on strengthening their community or strengthening healthcare or whatever those other big problems are or like the climate, right? I don't know. I think a lot about like how are we going to actually make the most of this AI thing in a way that's not just getting people to do more work.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, yeah. I'm really fascinated by the idea of community. Like, I feel like there's so much opportunity for local communities to be really powerful. And so that would be my hope is that that's how we would spend the time is really getting to know our local community, connecting with people and acting locally. But that's.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I feel like when things get, just personally, when things get kind of overwhelming globally or with the world, I find myself just focusing on, okay, what can I do in my community, right? And like right now it's all about fundraising for my kids' school because that's something that like I can like make a direct impact on. And that like I love it and it's I love it and it's so cool.

Liz Gerber

Great, yeah, and that's wonderful. And how wonderful that you can work at that hyper local level and also be creating software and productivity tools for people throughout the globe. I love that you can work on those two, like a global level and a hyper local level. think that's really a wonderful, I think that's really beautiful. Think about.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, yeah. But the other thing I was going to say, which is less future facing is, and this is like a bug in my ear just based on how I've been spending my time over the last couple of days. I think a lot about, and this is something that I'm just like personally interested in is one of the big challenges that I see as a researcher is like we have so much data and we have like.

Like Slack is swimming in data. There's behavioral data, there's research data, there's survey data, there's so much data. And it's never that we don't have enough of what's happening. It's surfacing the data in a really scalable way and storytelling and surfacing the right insights at the right time. And I feel like that's something that researchers always really, really struggle with.

And I'll sometimes see people on my team share a research presentation with their stakeholders, and it's like 20 slides.

And they're like, well, why, it's like that poor stakeholder just doesn't have time to read those 20 slides. I mean, I wish that they did, but how did we just have that like one nugget that's presented in a way that's so compelling that tells this really like memorable story? It's like, you know, that one, like if it's like an Instagram post, like what would be on that Instagram post? Right. And I just think that there's so there's, there's like, we just haven't solved that problem. Like I've been doing this for 20 years and we haven't solved that problem. And I just think that there's like there's just something fun there that I just like get about. Like I just don't have, yeah.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Christina, let's talk because I've been developing a class over the years called Communicating Your Research. And it came from a frustration of a lot of PhD students who were really smart, but couldn't synthesize their idea down to the key idea and also didn't understand their audience and were so mired in the data and had the curse of expertise, as we call it, right? They knew too much that they couldn't just deliver.

Christina Janzer

Totally. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Liz Gerber

The very simple idea. And so I've created a course that's like here are the top, here are the basics. Here's what you need to know. And in 10 weeks, it's really exciting.

Christina Janzer

I love that.

Liz Gerber

We get these students coming from knowing way too much and trying to communicate everything to like getting it down to, like you said, like the Instagram post. And you can still dive in and get more. But the Instagram post is the invitation to learn more versus the the tome of data and findings. So. I'd love to talk with you about that.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, I love, yeah, I'm so excited to learn more about that.

Liz Gerber

It's been super fun because that's not my, I mean, to your point, like that's not my area of research, but I just found it to be such a practical problem, communication, right? Like how do we communicate these really smart people who have brilliant ideas? How do we get the research really making impact in the world? So that's been, yeah.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, I love that you're doing that. think that is like one of the biggest challenges that we see in industry. It's not that we don't have the data. It's not that we don't have the insight or the point of view. It's storytelling. Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. It's communicating it. It's storytelling. Okay, let's talk. Okay, we're gonna round out here with, I love this, with the piece of unexpected advice that you'd like to share with our audience. For those entering into design and technology, what's a piece of advice you would share?

Christina Janzer

Okay, I guess it's hard to just have one.

Liz Gerber

You can have, I'll give you a couple. You can give a couple.

Christina Janzer

I think, know, okay, so I mean, I was just gonna say I hadn't thought of this before, but we talked about reflection, and I actually think that that's like a really important practice to just sort of build into your routine. And that has just been like really, really life-changing for me. So we talked about, you know, I feel like I have a very unique career path. And sometimes when I share my story,

the response is like, okay, how do I do that? How do I have that same thing? And I actually think that I am the exception. am not the role, right? And I actually don't think that this is what I would suggest to people. And I think there's this sort of this bar, like you have this idea that you're gonna get your first job is gonna be your dream job and it's gonna be like the rocket ship and that just very rarely happens and I think that's the wrong goal.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Christina Janzer

And so I think there's this pressure that you have to find the perfect job. And the perfect job rarely exists. But every job has something to learn. Every job is an opportunity, right? And I think it's just sort of letting go of that pressure and really sort of articulating, okay, here's where I am. What can I learn from this opportunity? What are my goals from this opportunity? What are the connections that I can make? So many of my opportunities have come from these connections that I've made, have come from just like working really hard and being a great employee on something that maybe wasn't what I thought I was going to be doing, but ended up being like such a great experience. And I think a lot about also just like so many of the soft skills that I've realized are so important. Of course the craft is important, but like I...

Like I'm thinking of somebody on my team who's an exceptional, exceptional researcher, but probably what I love most about him is his positivity, his adaptability. It was like just willingness to just figure it out. Like I know that I can go to him with any problem and he's going to be like, I got it. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to be resourceful, like that attitude is so infectious. And those are the people that I want to work with.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Christina Janzer

I think it's also just like the soft skills are really, really, really important too.

Liz Gerber

Okay, those are wonderful. I've asked you so many questions. Are there any stories we're gonna round out here? Anything I didn't, you just are dying to share or things that came up that you feel this would not be complete if you didn't share? Or any seminal story you find yourself always telling the people you manage or your children. What's the story they'd say, yeah, mom, we've heard that story a million times. For me, I tell my kids, I never planned on doing a PhD, but it was the right thing at the right time. It goes with your point, right? It's like, this was not my plan, but the steps, things fell into place and it felt like at the time that was the right thing.

Christina Janzer

But I think my message there would be just get rid of your plan. You know what I mean?

Liz Gerber

Get rid of your plan, is that what you said? Oh yeah, yeah.

Christina Janzer

know what I mean? I mean, no. I think it's so great to have goals and ambition. And I've always been a very ambitious person. I'll give you an example. After I graduated from Stanford, I applied to get my master's. was the Coterm program. And I...

Liz Gerber

Sure. Like a fifth year's masters. Fifth year master, yeah.

Christina Janzer

Fifth year, yeah. And I was not accepted to the program and I thought my life was over. And... no, but like, but I'm so happy that I didn't, right?

Liz Gerber

That shocks me and their loss, but yes, I know that. I know that feeling my life is over. Yeah.

Christina Janzer

My life is over, that was my plan. And my dad's biggest advice to me is you gotta always have a plan B. And I think my takeaway, you always have to have a plan B, just things never happen exactly how you think that they're going to happen, but you can make the most out of every opportunity and experience. And there's always a learning there, right? And I think as much as you can sort of take the time to reflect on like, what is the learning? What is like, you know, this thing was, this door was closed, but there's another door open here. And for me, it's like the other door happened to be like a really amazing job that opened up for me. But I think it can just be, if you have your heart set on like one thing and that doesn't happen, that can just feel really defeating, whatever the word is.

Liz Gerber

You can feel defeated. Yes.

Christina Janzer

You can feel defeated, yes.

Liz Gerber

Yes. Heartbreaking. It can be heartbreaking.

Christina Janzer

Heartbreak. Yes. Thank you.

Liz Gerber

I understand. Yeah, it really is. We can get kind of focused on one, a single thing and then when it doesn't come through, it's life can feel like it's ended. But in reality, it may have opened new doors that you haven't quite realized.

Christina Janzer

I may have opened new doors or if you take a time to reflect, it's like, I must have learned something from that. What is that? Something a lot easier to say in retrospect, of course, but.

Liz Gerber

I was about to say, yeah, it can hurt in the, one of my favorite colleagues used to say, failure sucks, but instructs.

Christina Janzer

I love that.

Liz Gerber

And I thought this was brilliant because it can hurt. It acknowledges the pain of things not working out, but it also shows you the opportunity for learning. yeah.

Christina Janzer

Yeah, I love that. That's I'm gonna gonna remember that one.

Liz Gerber

Well, thank you so much for taking your time to share your stories with us, Christina.

Christina Janzer

Thanks for having me.

Liz Gerber

This has just been such a joy and to get to learn from the inside what's happening. And thank you to our audience for listening to the Technical Difficulties Podcast produced by the Center for Human Computer Interaction and Design and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.