Naomi Grewal
Director of UX Research at LinkedIn
- Episode
- 118
- Design Leader
- Naomi Grewal
- Role
- Director of UX Research at LinkedIn
- Runtime
- 11:24
- Date Posted
- 12.2.24
- AI
- Research
- Leadership
Naomi Grewal was three months into leading UX research at LinkedIn when this was recorded, at the end of a path that ran through a cognitive psychology PhD, years of agency-side market research, marketing research at Facebook, global advertising research at Pinterest, and a people research team inside Uber's HR org studying employees instead of users. She returned to Facebook as it became Meta, led community product research through the pandemic, spent three years running UXR across Workday, and then moved to LinkedIn.
Her leadership approach is to run the same playbook she'd hand her team for studying members, pointed at her own job. Down and in on the researchers first, then across to peers in design and product, then up and out to the executives she needs to influence — studying each group the way she'd study a user. She leans hard on transparency, including about how difficult the last two years have been, on the theory that leaders pretending it's fine while layoffs move through every function in tech doesn't help anyone push through it. The line she keeps coming back to: the skills that got us here are not the skills that take us forward, and security now sits in the skills you build rather than the role or the industry you build them in.
On AI, she's specific about where the line falls. Literature reviews, data collection, surveys, even one-on-one interviews, statistical analysis — she expects AI to get 80% of the way there on the methodological work. What it can't reach is the so-what, and landing it with the right person in the right context, because no tool can absorb every meeting and every relationship a researcher carries. If she knows an executive wants the story shaped a particular way, that last 20% is the whole difference between a finding and a decision. Researchers' jobs aren't disappearing, but she thinks they're going more generalized, and that even her own broad research leadership path is more specialized than the market will keep rewarding. For anyone breaking in, including the PhDs she teaches in USC's applied psychology master's program: market yourself as a fast learner rather than a narrow specialist, and treat the shift as an opening rather than a loss.
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