Behind the scenes of “Creating Inclusive Customer Experiences and Product Teams with SEQ”
Every now and then, you give a talk where everything just clicks. In August 2023, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a session for Zoom’s internal speaker series alongside my brilliant teammate, Milly Schmidt.
Our topic:
Creating Inclusive Customer Experiences and Product Teams with SEQ at Atlassian.
It began with a warm introduction from my longtime friend Annika Elias, and thoughtful support from Ross Mayfield, who curates Zoom’s guest speaker series. They encouraged us to bring our whole selves to the conversation—and we did.
Collaborating with Zoom’s Research Team
Ahead of the talk, Milly and I met with Theresa Alexander, Zoom’s UX Research Manager. That conversation grounded our approach.
Theresa offered insight into the evolving research culture at Zoom—what’s established, where teams still face challenges, and how to frame SEQ in a way that would resonate. She helped us understand the nuances of research visibility, prioritization, and uptake across Zoom’s R&D teams.
Thanks to her guidance, we positioned SEQ not just as a usability tool, but as a lightweight, scalable framework—something any team could use to advocate for experience quality, with real customer signal behind it.
The Talk Itself
The session flowed like one of our best team critiques: thoughtful, conversational, and human.
We started by sharing our backstories—Milly’s cross-disciplinary career in design, engineering, and leadership, and my journey through product, brand, and strategy. Then we dove into:
- Why the Single Ease Question (SEQ)—a 1–7 rating on task ease—became Atlassian’s core metric for usability
- How ease of use became a key result in our OKRs
- A case study from Atlassian Analytics, where SEQ helped justify delaying a launch to improve the customer experience
- How DEI and usability are deeply connected, and why we can’t separate inclusion from quality
The audience was fully engaged—questions rolled in, the chat lit up, and people leaned into the idea that even simple measurements can create space for better conversations.
What We Heard After
The feedback reminded us why this work matters:
“You made usability feel like a strategic asset—not just a design concern.”
“I’m already thinking about how to introduce SEQ to my team.”
“The dynamic between you two made the story feel real and actionable.”
Annika later shared that SEQ helped visualize subjective tensions—like speed vs. quality—in a way that inspired action rather than defensiveness. That reflection stayed with me.
Behind the Metrics: A Moment of Recognition
After the talk, I remember sitting with a quiet but powerful feeling:
We’re pioneering something.
At Atlassian, we were helping shift how people think about usability—not as an afterthought, but as a first principle. And we were building a repeatable, scalable way to make it visible across teams.
In an industry that often rewards shipping fast over shipping well, this approach gave us a new kind of leverage. It gave us language to advocate.
It gave us space to delay a launch if it meant doing right by customers.
And it gave us a reason to say: this matters.
SEQ became a rallying point—for product, design, research, and engineering—to center quality and inclusion, together.
📺 Want to Watch?
Final Thought
This wasn’t just a talk about a metric. It was a story about changing how we work—together.
To the Zoom team: thank you for the space and the curiosity.
To Annika and Ross: thank you for the platform and encouragement.
To Theresa: thank you for your thought partnership and candor.
To Milly: thank you for being the best kind of co-conspirator—clear, curious, and fearless.
And to anyone trying to raise the UX bar inside your org:
Start with one good question.
“How easy was that?”
Sometimes, that’s all it takes to shift the system.