Director of UX Research for Audible, Amber Davis, meet producer, Justin James Lopez, to discusses the importance of knowing your worth and how to negotiate effectively. Let’s hear her story...
Amber Davis currently works as a UX Research Director at Audible where she manages a team and bridges business goals with design research. She has been a key contributor to Audible’s global growth and new business strategies. Before joining Audible, Amber spent four years at McKinsey as one of the first team members on the design and innovation team, and she played an early role in scaling and growing their UX research team.
As a UX research leader, Amber believes in the importance of staying curious about customers to see around corners. She helps companies and product teams leverage research insights to inform their decisions. Amber has experience in product strategy, behavioral design, and mixed methods research across a variety of industries.
Amber went to college at Stanford and completed her graduate degree at Johns Hopkins. After finishing graduate school, she worked in public policy and then moved into tech.
Amber Davis:
Yeah. Yeah, it was scary. It’s terrifying. Every time I negotiate anything, I walk in, I have my hype music. I sometimes play it out with a friend or family member, see, “What if they say this and how do I react?” And yeah, so just preparation and guts, even if you’re terrified.
Justin James Lopez:
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories, where we highlight the stories of black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by Amber Davis as we discuss knowing your worth and how to negotiate effectively. Let’s hear her story.
Well, thanks for joining us on this episode, Amber. Really excited to jump into more of your space for a number of reasons, but before I jump into those, I wanted to give you the opportunity to just introduce yourself to the listeners here.
Amber Davis:
Yeah, absolutely. So very excited to be here as a guest on the podcast today. As Justin mentioned, my name’s Amber. I work in the UX research space. I’m currently working actually at Audible, which is an Amazon subsidiary. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, we do podcasts, spoken word audiobooks, and I’ve been there for almost four years. And prior to working at Audible, I spent a few years working at McKinsey, which was really fun. I would say that I guess my experience at McKinsey was my first tech job, my formal tech job.
Prior to that, I actually dabbled a bit in the public policy space before transitioning into tech, which was actually a pretty seamless transition for me. I think I was really lucky, but definitely have lots of thoughts and advice to share on making that transition into tech because it can be done, and we definitely need more people including diversity in tech.
Justin James Lopez:
Well, you know what? Let’s start there then. I mean, I do think that that’s a really cool space to explore because I think that the concept of being in tech can sometimes feel almost overwhelming for people, especially if you don’t come into it or work ... When you say working in tech, I think naturally a lot of people automatically assume that you have to be a software engineer or someone that knows everything about all these things. But as a genre, when it comes to businesses, it’s really just the field of what the company is doing, but there’s so many different roles that exist within that company that a lot of people could bring value to.
So what were your considerations say before you made that jump, and what were your fears in making that jump?
Amber Davis:
Yeah, so it was an intentional transition. It was like a career reset for me, and basically I was trying to figure out, what do I want to do next? Do I want to keep doing what I’m doing, which was working in public policy space in the US and internationally, or do I want to do something different?
So before I landed on tech, I considered a lot of different options, but I took a very, I guess, analytical approach. I had this great career counselor in grad school, and she introduced me to this exercise called the seven stories exercise. There’s other stuff floating around. One person in particular, a leadership coach, she talks about finding your superpowers and finding your kryptonite as a way to chart your own career path.
So I had basically gone through that exercise and figured out the things I’m really good at that give me energy and the things that drained me. And then I looked at all these jobs in different industries and different spaces, and I thought, “Which path do I want to go on?” And I stumbled onto the career path of UX research, which is one of the fuzzier tech jobs that you can have. I am not a software engineer, right? I don’t code. Well, I don’t really code. I code a little bit in R [inaudible 00:03:51], but I don’t count that.
But in any case, after doing that exercise, I realize a lot of what I’m looking for in a company, a lot of what I’m looking for in a team, a lot of what I’m looking for in a job directly aligned with entering tech and taking on a UX research role.
Justin James Lopez:
And what was the original jumping off point? Was it your current role or was it previous to this role?
Amber Davis:
My entry into tech, it was my previous role at McKinsey. But what was interesting is I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was working at the intersection of product research and public policy, but I wasn’t working in tech. I was working on some ... I guess the easiest way to describe it is if you think about Venmo in the United States or sending money through Facebook, I was working on similar products. The term that people use in international development is mobile money or digital financial services.
And so I was doing product research for that, figuring out what the product should look like, figuring out what the marketing should look like, but I wasn’t calling it UX research, but it kind of was adjacent or very close to it. Very, very similar skill set. So I wouldn’t call that my jumping off point into tech, but I would call that role my jumping off point into product research.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. So what were some of the major or minor differences that you learned in making that jump from that research base that’s adjacent to UX research and then moving into UX research, say at McKinsey and Audible?
Amber Davis:
It’s so different. I worked on a grant that was funded by the Gates Foundation, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. So it’s just very different in terms of the ... I move a lot faster now than I did in previous jobs in terms of turnaround or research projects, potentially in a week as opposed to months or weeks, plural. That was one big difference.
I think the language that people use to talk about stuff is very different. If you think about public policy and international development, you have the people that are paying you, and then you have the people that you’re designing experiences for. And in tech you have the customer, or I don’t know, in UX research, sometimes we say the user or the people we’re designing for, then you have the business. And so there are very clear business outcomes and profit and all that stuff.
So basically when I was transitioning into tech, one of the things that I found really, really useful was basically trying to get that MBA language, I’ll call it, right, and really being comfortable with that and understanding metrics and profit and loss and return on investment. So it’s just different.
When you’re in the public policy space, you care also about are people financially healthy? I don’t work in the finance space anymore, but there, it was a lot about are households able to feed their kids? Hunger was one of the metrics that we were measuring, for example, and also sense of agency and decision making within a household.
Those are outcomes that I consider and talk about and plan for and try to uncover in my research, but in terms of this is what we take to leadership and say, “This is what a great job we did,” in that prior role, we talked a lot about more of those policy metrics. That was a much bigger part of my job.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. So taking a step back to the general trajectory, what was it about this space top down that made you feel like this was a path that you wanted to take? Not specific to UX research or product research, but just the concept of research in general. Why gravitate towards that space?
Amber Davis:
For several years, maybe decades, all the women in my immediate family, we were all researchers. So growing up, my mom did a lot of policy research and that’s how I got introduced to it. So I’ve been talking about questionnaires and since I was seven or eight, and I used to do work informally for my mom on the side, helping her plan for interviews and figure out how to get from point A to point B and how many interviews or questionnaires we can cram into a single day. And naturally, I just kind of stumbled into the field. So that’s how I got into research. I was an RA in college. I did several internships related to research, and then I had another career for a bit we haven’t talked about.
Justin James Lopez:
Okay.
Amber Davis:
I know, I know, I know. I’ve had several careers. But yeah, I eventually found my way back to research. I had a very brief interlude as a paralegal for a couple years.
Justin James Lopez:
Okay, let’s take a step back. So you have this kind of background. One, I love that, by the way. It’s like as a kid, you’re seeing these fields, this kind of path being fundamentally expressed in your household. You’re actively learning these principles, you’re applying these principles, which is really helpful. Then you go, “You know what? Maybe I want to do this,” and there’s a moment here that you just described where you go, “Well, maybe I want to do something else,” which I think is kind of adjacent and being a paralegal. But what triggered that kind of exploration for you?
Amber Davis:
Growing up, one of the career fields that I was exposed to was in the legal field, meeting friends of my parents who were judges or worked in the court system, and I just was really excited. I guess it was probably the career path I probably had the most exposure to after what my parents did. And I, for a while, really wanted to be a corporate lawyer, and then I wanted to be a public interest lawyer. But it was interesting. It was interesting, and I decided it wasn’t for me at that time. I might change my mind in 10 years. I don’t know.
Justin James Lopez:
That’s a thing.
Amber Davis:
But I had a really good time exploring that in college and doing things, basically trying to get a sense of what it would be like to work in the field, so participating in those curricular activities in college, and in my case, for the legal field, it was mock trial. I did that in high school too, taking internships in the field, working at a legal clinic, really trying to get a sense of the day-to-day of the field, building my network.
It was really helpful when I was working in the field for a couple of years. But ultimately, I enjoyed being a researcher. I enjoyed constantly learning about people, their experiences, and mapping out how that looks inside a product or inside a public policy program, if I think back to my prior career.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. So my mind naturally wonders if being raised in this environment where you’re seeing a lot of researchers, you’re being exposed to a lot of this legal space, and this is really, really impacting your overall career trajectory and what you see for yourself, aside from you just experiencing that and then walking towards that light, if you will did you ever feel pressured to be in those spaces growing up? No? It was just completely up to you?
Amber Davis:
Yeah, it was completely up to me. The only requirement was go to college and move out after high school.
Justin James Lopez:
Get out of the house.
Amber Davis:
Yeah, which was good, which was good. It was great. I probably took it too far. I moved all the way across the country from my parents. It was a five, six hour flight, and they probably regretted being like, “Go to a great college. It doesn’t matter where it is.”
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. I did a similar thing. I went to school close to home, relatively close to home, but then the moment I graduated, I took a job that took me halfway across the country. I felt like that was the easiest way, because I grew up in not the best environment. We didn’t have a ton of money or a ton of resources, and the space itself was just kind of like a food desert and didn’t have any businesses or anything like that.
So as I was growing up, really the main source of consistency for me was having both of my parents, which was very rare in that kind of area. And they were instilling a lot of really good lessons, a lot of really important life lessons, and just being my moral compass for the most part. And they represented so much to me.
I know that that sounds, when I say that and you go, “Yeah, but you just said the first thing you did was leave them,” I think that was the easiest way for me to make that tough decision, was to just make it and go, because if I gave myself too much time to think, then I would think myself out of leaving because they had represented so much of my safety. From a psychological perspective and from a physical perspective, they represented so much of my safety for so long that I would’ve never left. How hard was that decision, or how easy was that decision? What do you think made it that way?
Amber Davis:
For me to go across the country to go to college?
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah.
Amber Davis:
It was easy. I mean, I was very sad to leave my parents of course.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, for sure.
Amber Davis:
But it was my dream college. I had wanted to go there since I was five or six. And so when I got in, my parents were very supportive, but they were kind of like, “Man, why couldn’t you stay on the east coast?”
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. As you started to navigate your career, when you think of being a researcher and that passion that you have for being a researcher, was there ever something that you felt like this is something that, aside from just the love of knowledge and diving deeper and learning, unpeeling the layers here, was there anything specific that you felt like, “I would really love to research this type of topic, this type of product”? And then on the flip side of that, was there anything that you worked on that you maybe felt like, “I’m just kind of researching this and I’m just collecting a paycheck”?
Amber Davis:
That’s a good question. So one of the reasons I was really excited to join Audible is because I love books. I’ve loved books ever since I was a little kid. I got my first library card, racked up a bunch of late fees, so many, hundreds of dollars. I got in a lot of trouble for that.
But the nice thing about my role now in doing research on people’s relationships with audiobooks, helping you get out of them, what brought them to the service, and you kind of already answered that for yourself, is I get to talk about books all day long. And it is so fun, one of my favorite topics, love to hear about what other people are listening to, love to hear about how people are connecting about books on and off the platform, whether it’s book clubs or Goodreads, also another Amazon subsidiary. So that’s kind of what brought me to Audible and made me really excited to be working in this media and entertainment space with a specific focus on books and audiobooks.
In terms of stuff I’ve done research on that I guess I was a little less excited about, I think the public policy space can be very, very powerful in terms of if you’re doing really awesome work to have a really positive impact on people’s lives or funding for public policy programs. I worked a lot in the democracy and governance space as well as finance, so it’s stuff like people can feel like they can vote safely, or how do we create a stronger democracy in X country? So important stuff.
But I think looking back at some of the projects I’ve worked on, there can be effects that are unanticipated that reinforce existing societal inequities, and that can be hard to navigate if you got into the field because you care about making people’s lives better, and there are all these unintentional effects that are happening. How do you navigate that? So I’ve been in situations like that. It was really challenging.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. I mean, I can imagine when I think about just conceptually what you’re describing when it comes to that idea of how, not just from a policy perspective, but from a products and services perspective, how are our products, our services, our policies disproportionately impacting different communities, and how do we plan to address that.
I had a guest on recently, Leslie Ann Knoll, who focuses all of her research actually specifically on how we as designers, as researchers, as creatives, but also as companies and organizations can focus more effort on designing equity into our products and services and designing oppression out of our systems and products and services and all of that stuff.
So it’s really interesting how your space specifically guides some of the output when it comes to, a lot of these things can be ignored if you don’t have the research, if you don’t have the data to prove that some of these things are happening. What part of your work do you find, I guess, most meaningful?
Amber Davis:
I think it would be building that understanding of people and then taking it to the decision makers and helping them paint that story of, in my case, customers or potential customers of Audible or in the past of the people who would be benefiting from the financial literacy program or a specific savings product, and really bringing those stories to life so that the decision makers are keeping them top of mind as they’re weighing all of these different considerations.
That’s probably the most meaningful part of my job is really being able to say, “Well, this is who we’re designing for,” or, “This is who we’re helping and this is what they look like, and here’s a specific story,” or, “Come with me into the field,” when I was working in the public policy space, or in this case, “Listen in on this interview,” so that they can really understand who we’re making decisions for and how the decisions they’re making are impacting or could impact those people. Yeah, that’s the most meaningful part of my job.
Justin James Lopez:
I mean, I think that’s super cool. I think a lot of people don’t even get that level of depth in the work that they do, so I think it’s nice to be able to ask that question and for you to be able to say, “You know what? I actually have an answer for that.”
When it comes to, I guess, looking back and just being introspective on the growth that you’ve had across the span of your career, what are some of the most important lessons that you think that you’ve learned that have helped you continue to develop?
Amber Davis:
One of the most useful things that I’ve learned is figure out what makes you tick and what makes you really tired, the things you don’t want to do, and find the job and company and team and manager that align with what you want.
Another thing I would say is every year, sometimes once a quarter, I basically do an inspiration board and I also reflect on what I’ve achieved, because in my case, my career journey has been a loop sometimes, or sometimes it’s straight, and it can be really a good learning experience for me to reflect on what I’ve been able to achieve and how it helps motivate me. I learn from that.
And then know your worth. People talk ... I mean, there’s so many podcasts probably about this or books about this, about how to negotiate and whether it’s starting a new job or getting a raise or getting a promotion and negotiating your title. I remember the first time I actually negotiated, I was 16 or 17, so this was not in an office job.
Justin James Lopez:
Oh wow. Okay.
Amber Davis:
It’s so funny. I was working at a sports bar at Atlanta as a hostess, and I thought that I was being undervalued. And so I went to my manager and I was like, “So I’m currently making $7 an hour and I’d like to make 7.50, and this is why.” And I actually got it, but I was really worried about how that would come off. Am I overvaluing myself? But then I really looked around at the value that I was delivering in my role, what the expectations were ... I still do this now ... and then went with a clear, very specific ask and the evidence to support it. And yeah, 7.50 was a lot of money in Metro Atlanta way back when. I won’t say when because I don’t want to give away my age, but a long time ago.
Justin James Lopez:
So this is interesting. I think that this is a topic that could help a lot of people. I had that wow response earlier because to me, it feels really young to even be considering this concept. Me at 16, I’m thinking most people don’t value me at all, let alone me trying to ascribe a very specific value to what I bring. It wouldn’t be until a lot later in life for me where I go, “You know what? I need to negotiate. I need to be able to feel comfortable with what’s being given to me in order to justify what I’m providing to this company or to this person.” So one, I commend you for that, and two, that must’ve been terrifying.
Amber Davis:
I was terrified.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. Okay.
Amber Davis:
I was terrified, because I had to pull my manager into the office and be like, “I have to have conversation with you.”
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah.
Amber Davis:
Yeah. I was a teenager, and I guess my manager at the time might’ve been late 20s, early 30s, so not that old, but this is a 16-year-old. I thought it was a lot older than me.
Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. As you’ve gotten older, I imagine those conversations get a little bit harder because you’re not just talking about 50 cents. So what are some of the things that you learned in that space, specifically negotiating your word?
Amber Davis:
So I’m a researcher, so I also do my research nowadays. So if I could go back to 16-year-old me, I’d say, “Oh, what do hostesses at restaurants make in Metro Atlanta?” and use that as a way to figure out what you’re asking for to make sure you’re grounded in reality. It doesn’t have to be the average or even the median. It can be the high end, but just so you’re not asking for something that’s never been asked for. You can do that, but it’s much tougher.
So now as a working professional, I use resources like TeamBlind and Levels.fyi and Glassdoor, of course, and also conversations with people in my field. Salary can be a bit of a tricky topic to bring up, but for those people who you’re friends with who work in the field, getting a sense of what their salary was, what they were able to negotiate, that’s actually really helpful, not just what you got, but what you started with and how you were able to negotiate up. So I’ve had some conversations with friends from college about pursuing these topics, and it’s been really, really, really helpful.
The other thing that I learned too is it’s not always just comp that you want to negotiate. You want to figure out what is important to you. Maybe it’s some other type of benefit. Maybe it’s the length of time before you be considered for promotion. In this age of working from home, maybe it’s working from home a certain number of days. But yeah, just think about what’s important to you. It might not be money, it might be something else.
Amber Davis:
I know that’s certainly been the case for me throughout my life where sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to negotiate on money,” or, “I’m going to negotiate on something else,” but yeah, those are the kind of tips that I would give.
Justin James Lopez:
The most creative thing I saw someone negotiate during their hiring process was actually here at Amazon. Someone negotiated on my team years ago. They negotiated for a panini press to be placed in the kitchenette. It wasn’t for them. It’s not like my panini press. They were like, “No, we need a panini press in the kitchenette for people to use,” and they got it.
Amber Davis:
I mean, a hot sandwich, cold sandwich. I mean, it can taste completely different. It’s like if you had a cheese sandwich and then you made it a grilled cheese.
Justin James Lopez:
Oh yeah, drastically different. I was very young in my career at that point, and I was just like, “What?” It blew my mind. That’s why I’m still really, really impressed that at 16, you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to look this up. I’m going to have this value proposition,” even the way you’re describing it. But I think it’s really important because it can feel sometimes like the work that we do is solely like a one-way conversation with our employers sometimes where it’s like, “Well, no, they’re telling me what I’m worth,” or in psychology and communications, there’s the concept of the looking glass self where we learn who we are based on how the world interacts with us. And it’s not until later, and this is at a young age, so it’s not until later in life that we start to develop our own perception of how do we want to portray who we are to the world.
Naturally, when you were describing your experiences, I’m like, I can see how a researcher and someone that understands law and is interested in learning more and just this lifelong learner would naturally gravitate towards taking these actions. But 100%, I am really proud, and I would just wish I can go back and go, “Justin, know your worth. Know your worth.”
Amber Davis:
Yeah. Yeah, it was scary. It’s terrifying. Every time I negotiate anything, I walk in, I have my hype music. I sometimes play it out with a friend or family member, see, “What if they say this and how do I react?” Yeah, so just preparation and guts, even if you’re terrified.
Justin James Lopez:
Even if you’re terrified. So what’s next for Amber? If you project out into the next five years, where do you see yourself growing?
Amber Davis:
I’m not going to know until I see it, I guess. It’s not like what I was talking about earlier where I said, “Oh, my dream college. I got in and I went. It was great.” I don’t have a dream job or a dream company or anything. I just have certain non-negotiables and things that are ideal that I’m looking for, and that I’d like to have 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road.
Justin James Lopez:
One thing that I learned is a difference between planning and goals. From my understanding, I’ve always put a stronger emphasis on having a solid goal than having a solid plan, mainly because plans usually go to shit. But ultimately, the most important part is getting to where you want to get to. What is the ultimate goal? And then you’ll learn what the best way for you to have gotten there based on the current situation along the path. But if we stick too closely to our plan, we sometimes end up sabotaging our growth.
So I think that it’s nice to hear that from you. I was like, “You know what? I know that these are very critical aspects of what I want and what exactly that looks like, we’ll build it along the way.”
Amber Davis:
Yeah.
Justin James Lopez:
But I wanted to thank you for joining us on this episode. It’s been really enlightening. I need to go check my negotiation tactics, but thank you again for joining us.
Amber Davis:
Yeah, of course. This was fun.
