COLLABORATION
I facilitate high-trust collaboration.
General / Cross-Functional
Simplifying complexity.
Making sense of anything. Distilling what matters for the work. Retaining only what’s essential. Translating it to others.
Facilitating alignment.
Perhaps my greatest skill. I can navigate a group of people though chaos to agreement … while generating goodwill.
Cross-functional collaboration.
Start with a deep care for motivations and needs. Learn and show enough to garner mutual respect. Stay in your lane.
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Krista is one of my favorite collaborators — a fantastic researcher, bright strategist, and masterful at facilitating conversations that encourage everyone to make their voice heard. Krista leads with both smart and heart. I trusted her to lead some of the most difficult projects — the ones where a high degree of emotional intelligence was needed. I respect her thoughtful approach and most of all, her way of challenging both the status quo and me, pushing for the best outcome possible in her uniquely subtle and pointed way.
Robb Fishman | former VP, Salesforce
Executives
collaborating with
Be informed.
Know what they care about. Prepare with their staff.
Be clear & efficient.
To the point. Clear meeting purpose. Carefully honed context.
Want their input.
Never expect a rubber stamp. Be prepared to adapt real-time.
Be transparent.
Tradeoffs, concerns, where you need support.
My experience:
Leading countless meetings with C-suite and senior executives, both internal and external — aligning, refining, presenting.
Collaborating as Director of Research with directors of other departments to align on cross-functional strategy recommendations before aligning with SVPs and above.
Krista can simplify complex situations without losing the important elements. She’s really good at understanding her audience and adjusting her message to truly connect, and she can do it in real time during meetings. This has enabled us to really connect with executive stakeholders and inspire with visions that turn into transactions.
Ron Acker | Global Account Manager, Salesforce
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collaborating with
Product
Be curious and flexible.
Product is at the nexus of many concerns. Be a good player in the game of double-dutch.
Be data-centric.
PMs always have metrics in mind. Know what they care about.
Be open-minded.
Share opinions, but be open to approaches that you wouldn’t take.
Enable direct experience with users.
Make sure PMs have access to be deeply familiar with user needs.
My experience:
7 years working directly with PMs and product leadership as Director / head of Research.
PMing and leading a rapid prototyping team for a year — backlog, experiment definition, cross functional alignment.
Reporting to the SVP of Product.
Data Science
collaborating with
Be clear.
Crystallize your hypotheses. Be specific.
Respect the data.
Error bars overlap? Taller doesn’t matter.
Collaborate on tradeoffs.
Need certainty? Need to take a leap? Work together.
Stay humble.
Assume you might be wrong — pre-mortem to improve experiment design.
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My experience:
Running a rapid prototyping team that included a data scientist. Deep, daily collaboration on experiment design, enactment, and interpretation.
5 years working directly with data science as Director and head of Research.
Writing enough SQL to genuinely understand how the data connect in a given environment (and do my own dirty work).
When working in an ambitious place, it can sometimes feel like everyone has an agenda. Krista has an incredible ability to break through those barriers and create teams with deep psychological safety and trust.
Tina Yeung | former Staff Data Scientist, Omada Health
collaborating with
Design
Understand their ambition.
Be curious: What is their mental model of our users? What do they believe will improve the experience?
Understand the systems.
Design systems enable scale. Be aware of them. (Don’t let this stop you from making recommendations, but know the context.)
Enable direct experience with users.
Help designers feel the complexity and reality of end users.
Understand the research they’ll trust.
Designers may value one method of research over another, one type of output over another. Consider this when working together.
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My experience:
7 years working with designers and design leadership as Director / head of Research.
5 years working as a UX designer at LUNAR Design, working on interaction design for both physical and digital products.
Working with Krista is every designer’s dream. Her ability to deeply understand the problem, the customer, the teams’ shared goals, and, above all, you as a person, translates into a magical collaboration experience that produces the best results for everyone.
Jean Jiang | former Designer, Salesforce
Engineering
collaborating with
Share goals before solutions.
Start with what you want to accomplish vs how you imagine accomplishing it. Devs often have faster, better approaches.
Understand the type of dev.
Some want a clear ticket. Others want to understand the why. Figure out what they need and be the right partner for them.
Enable direct experience with users.
I’ve found interested devs to be extremely grateful research attendees.
Ask why and listen.
Every “no” or large estimate can lead to a better mental model of the development environment.
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My experience:
Running a rapid prototyping team that included a part-time engineer. Co-designing fast, easily reversible engineering scopes.
5 years working directly with Engineering as Director and head of Research + 3 years as Director and head of Content
Facilitating massive content system redesign conversations — Build? Buy? How much future-proofing can we afford?
Krista played a critical role as the voice for our members going through our CBT programs. The key insights she'd share served as the starting point for our collaboration sessions where we would identify the most impactful things we could work on and define how we could measure success. This way of working allowed us to learn quickly in a data driven way and deliver meaningful solutions to our participants.
Miles | former VP of Engineering, Omada Health
Sales
collaborating with
Understand the goal.
The goal is always sales — however, some sales environments or customers require a transactional approach, and others require more careful relationship-building.
Learn from them.
Sales teams often have nuanced insight into what is driving customer (and consumer) behavior.
Use qual to understand the sales environment.
The same skills that help you understand users can help you — and the sales team — better understand customer execs.
Use qual to bring their customers and consumers to life.
Many customers lack solid qual. Even light, quick qual can be a magnificent tool for sales.
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My experience:
2 years in the Sales org at Salesforce, facilitating pre-sales efforts to increase scope and confidence in the sale.
Meeting with C-suite customer teams to develop and solidify their consumer strategy — many millions in incremental sales.
Frequent interaction and qualitative research efforts with the sales team at Omada Health.
I look at Krista as a true part of the [Salesforce customer] account team. On top of leading multiple successful innovation consulting engagements, she’s contributed to the account strategy and stakeholder management.
Ron Acker | Global Account Manager, Salesforce
you
collaborating with