ASK’EM’s blueprint

(Post 2 of 2) Empowering product teams to make data-driven decisions

From lagging metrics to data-driven decisions

In product development, feedback isn’t just a tool—it’s a compass guiding teams toward meaningful, user-focused improvements. Yet, traditional metrics often fall short of providing the depth teams need to act confidently. Many are lagging indicators, describing what has already happened without offering guidance on what to do next. I created ASK'EM to change this. Built to address gaps in customer feedback systems, ASK'EM is prescriptive, providing forward-looking insights that not only explain the "why" behind user behaviors but also guide actionable decisions to address them.

ASK'EM didn’t emerge overnight as a go-to tool for product and engineering teams.—it made its way through grassroots effort, a fair share of skepticism, and a journey that often felt more like a Kafkaesque odyssey than a straightforward project. Empowering data-driven decision-making wasn’t a tidy narrative; it was messy, relentless, and occasionally absurd, full of data tables, debates, and those “are we really doing this?” moments. This post explores how ASK'EM evolved into a system that empowered teams to prioritize what truly matters, align with customer needs, and scale impact effectively—proving that progress is rarely linear, but always worth it.

Adapting Google’s HATS framework

The ASK'EM framework drew initial inspiration from Google’s HATS framework—Happiness, Adoption, Task Success, and Stickiness—a robust system for understanding user satisfaction.

While HATS provided holistic insights across general experience categories, ASK'EM took this foundation further, customizing it for product development needs at Indeed.

ASK’EM’s Critical differences from HATS:

Context-specific focus: Instead of broad evaluations, ASK'EM hones in on pivotal moments in the user journey, capturing nuanced insights tied to key customer interactions.

The framework combines quantitative scores with qualitative feedback, delivering insights that go beyond describing the past to guide immediate and strategic next steps. By considering both the summative experience and the confluence of specific touchpoints, ASK'EM allows teams to understand the contributions of individual outcomes to the overall customer picture.

Goal alignment with durability: ASK'EM measurement is connected to durable, customer-defined objectives and success criteria, ensuring that the framework remains relevant even as systems evolve. This approach provides consistency in measurement while offering teams the ability to adapt based on shifting operational contexts.

Rigor and predictive power: Guided by a philosophy of maximum explainability with minimal input, ASK'EM employs advanced statistical techniques to build confidence in its findings.

These methods uncover relationships between variables, providing prescriptive insights to predict future outcomes, identify anomalies, and offer in-product guidance. This level of rigor empowers teams to prioritize effectively and understand the nuanced trade-offs between customer preferences, transforming data into actionable, forward-looking strategies.

How ASK’EM shapes product and engineering decisions

ASK’EM isn’t just a feedback system—it’s a deliberate choice to bridge the gap between user needs and actionable team priorities. I created ASK’EM to address the common frustrations of generic metrics that failed to translate into meaningful outcomes. By providing a robust, targeted approach, ASK’EM empowers teams to align their efforts with real customer impact.

Here’s how it shapes decisions across critical areas:

1. Setting measurable product goals

ASK’EM redefined goal-setting by grounding objectives in tangible, user-driven insights. It connects feedback directly to OKRs, ensuring that every metric supports clear business objectives while addressing genuine pain points.

For example, teams improving hiring and matching algorithms can pinpoint exactly which factors matter most to users when screening candidates.

This isn’t about adding to the abyss of data we collect; it’s about creating a system that turns feedback into actionable priorities. By giving teams the tools to measure and act on what matters most, ASK’EM transforms how goals are set, shifting the focus from assumptions to evidence-based outcomes.

2. Prioritizing resources with high-impact outcomes
One of my core motivations in building ASK’EM was to help teams see where their work would make the greatest difference. Through granular feedback tied to specific product features, ASK’EM illuminates the areas that have the strongest influence on user satisfaction.

This clarity replaces guesswork with precision, enabling teams to allocate resources more effectively and deliver results that resonate with users. The ability to focus on high-impact areas isn’t just efficient—it’s transformative for the teams relying on ASK’EM to guide their efforts.

3. Ensuring representativeness through sampling and segmentation

ASK’EM’s carefully designed sampling strategies ensure data quality while avoiding respondent fatigue. By capturing a representative cross-section of customer types and linking responses to key segments, ASK’EM allows teams to make confident inferences about broader trends, confirming that decisions are scalable and deeply aligned with real-world experiences.

This approach involves balancing high response rates with minimal respondent burden, guaranteeing data quality while avoiding survey fatigue. ASK’EM's sampling mechanisms capture a true cross-section of customer types, linking these responses to key segments of our user population.

The representativeness of ASK’EM data is critical for making confident inferences about broader outcomes. For example, insights gathered from specific survey respondents can be extrapolated to understand customer-wide trends, enabling teams to address broader customer needs with precision. This allows for product decisions that are both scalable and deeply aligned with the real-world experiences of our users.

4. Shaping roadmaps through feedback

ASK’EM isn’t just about immediate fixes—it’s a cornerstone for long-term strategic planning. By balancing quantitative data with qualitative insights, ASK’EM gives teams both the numbers and the context they need to make informed decisions.

ASK’EM insights consistently surface which features and outcomes users value most. This guides roadmap adjustments with confidence, ensuring that every decision is rooted in user preferences. By aligning roadmaps with actionable feedback and representative data, ASK’EM helps teams focus not just on delivering features but on delivering value that resonates deeply with users.

For example, when ASK’EM data showed that customers placed high value on specific search and screening functions when finding candidates, engineering teams prioritized enhancements in these areas, leading to measurable improvements in satisfaction, adoption, and engagement.

5. Adapting in real time to support agile workflows

The continuous monitoring capabilities of ASK’EM make it a dynamic tool for addressing emerging challenges. Teams can spot satisfaction dips as they happen and respond quickly, ensuring that issues are resolved before they snowball into larger problems.

This real-time adaptability is particularly valuable in an agile environment, where speed and responsiveness are paramount. ASK’EM allows teams to iterate faster, armed with the confidence that their adjustments are grounded in actual user feedback.

For me, this was one of ASK’EM’s most rewarding outcomes: watching teams become more proactive, collaborative, and user-centered in their approach to problem-solving. It wasn’t just about measuring satisfaction—it was about creating a culture of continuous improvement that kept the user at the heart of every decision.

6. Optimizing feedback mechanisms for maximum signal

ASK’EM is about collecting the right data with the highest possible impact. Through exploratory analysis, correlation, and regression modeling, we refined the suite of feedback mechanisms to achieve the minimum necessary inputs while maximizing explainability of variation.

This means we could extract the most insight from the fewest survey questions, reducing respondent fatigue while maintaining a robust signal-to-noise ratio.

This optimization was crucial for several reasons:

• Data quality: By minimizing the number of inputs, we reduced the cognitive load on respondents, which helped maintain high response rates and prevent survey fatigue that could degrade data quality.

• Efficiency: A streamlined feedback process ensured teams could focus on high-quality, actionable insights without getting bogged down in unnecessary or redundant data points.

• Explainability: By ensuring that each question captured a meaningful component of variation in user experiences, ASK’EM provided teams with a clear and concise understanding of which factors mattered most.

From a data perspective, this approach maximized the utility of every response, creating a feedback loop that is both efficient and effective. For the teams using ASK’EM, it means they can act with confidence, knowing that the insights are not just precise but also highly representative of user needs and behaviors. By integrating these advanced analytical techniques, ASK’EM doesn’t just capture feedback—it optimizes it, delivering a system that balances depth, clarity, and practicality to drive better decision-making at scale.

The power of the ASK’EM team

ASK’EM’s success is a testament to the power of a diversely talented, empowered team working toward a shared goal built through collective ownership. Product leads translate the vision into actionable roadmaps and manage the productization of ASK’EM. Engineers build in-app mechanisms, data pipelines, and monitoring systems, while product scientists and BI analysts handle complex analyses, sampling strategies, and experimentation. UX researchers and designers ensure the user’s voice remains central throughout the process.

I recently reconnected with a few members of the ASK’EM team still at Indeed, and here’s what they shared,

Eric Riedel, a Senior Technical Product Manager, highlighted:

"The most valuable part of ASK'EM is influencing the prioritization of work among Product and UX leaders. It validates hypotheses about user problems, backed by quantitative and qualitative data."

Ivan Fuentes, a Sr. Director of UX and Product Design, shared:

ASK’EM is a best-in-class UX metrics program that sets organizational OKRs and prioritizes roadmaps. This customer-centric approach introduced Jobs-to-be-Done, customer segmentation, and critical user journeys to the organization."

Christopher Garrison, a UX Lead, added:

"Senior leadership can clearly understand why satisfaction matters to the business and how to improve it. ASK’EM created tools that increases customer awareness and access to feedback across the company."

Driving ownership and impact

At its core, I built ASK’EM to create a feedback loop that didn’t just inform but empowered. Its impact went beyond metrics to foster a shared sense of purpose among teams—uniting product, UX, and engineering around the goal of delivering meaningful user value.

As Adam Hagerman, a Director of UX Research, summarized:

“ASK’EM consistently influences the highest levels of leadership with compelling stories about the user experience. This work transformed the business, putting the user first."

For leadership, these connections paint a clear picture of how user sentiment influences revenue streams and retention, offering data-backed justifications for investments and strategic shifts.

For product teams, ASK'EM is a tool to understand not just what users need but why, allowing for the prioritization of solutions that drive both user satisfaction and business impact.

This holistic view offers insights into the relationships between customer experiences and broader outcomes, enabling teams to predict future trends, identify potential risks, and optimize user journeys. By tying customer-defined success criteria to operational metrics, ASK’EM delivers prescriptive recommendations that are actionable at every level of the organization.

For me, ASK’EM represents the intersection of information and action—a system that equips teams to make data-informed decisions that benefit users and the business alike. It’s a philosophy I continue to champion, built on the belief that when data is tied to outcomes that matter, every decision becomes an opportunity to create lasting value.

What’s next: Bringing ASK’EM to your organization

Building systems like ASK'EM takes investment, but the payoff is immense—more informed decisions, better-aligned roadmaps, and, ultimately, products that resonate with users. Here’s how you can set your team up for success:

• Audit your metrics: Identify gaps in your feedback systems. Are they delivering actionable insights or just overwhelming you with data?

• Define moments of truth: Pinpoint critical touchpoints in the product experience where targeted feedback will make the most impact.

• Design actionable surveys: Go beyond satisfaction scores. Combine quantitative data and behavioral data with open-ended questions to capture the “why.”

• Connect feedback to goals: Align measurement with product, UX, and engineering OKRs. Ensure every data point supports clear, strategic objectives.

• Establish continuous monitoring: Track feedback in real time to stay aligned with evolving user needs.

• Create collective ownership: Bring product, UX, and engineering together to analyze results and prioritize actions based on shared insights.

ASK'EM isn’t just a system; it’s a mindset—one that prioritizes user value and drives sustainable growth. By building frameworks tailored to your team’s needs, you can create a feedback loop that empowers better decisions, happier users, and more impactful outcomes.

‘Til next time, I’m Bianca

You can find the original article by Mary K. Pratt here

References

Data-driven decision-making case study: Indeed, Pratt, 2024

Google UX Research. (2017). Happiness, Adoption, Task Success, and Stickiness (HATS) Framework