Ep. 302 – Michele Ronsen on how the key to Asking Better Questions is Tied to Developing Better Listening Skills and What you can do About it

My guest today is Michele Ronsen, principal and founder of Curiosity Tank.  Founded in 2010, Curiosity Tank is a design research and strategy firm that identifies customer insights and put them into action by digging into your problem space and charting a path forward. Prior to founding Curiosity Tank, Michele worked for top design firms and gained experience working in Fortune 500s, academia, and start-ups. Find Michele Online:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michele-ronsen-0a55233/  Website: https://www.curiositytank.com/  Find Us Online:  Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch  Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp  Website: www.happymr.com  Music: “Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com This Episode’s Sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by Lookback. Lookback provides the tools to help UX teams to interact with real users, in real-time, and in real contexts. It’s Lookback’s mission to humanize technology by bridging the gap between end-users and product teams. Lookback’s customers range from one-man teams building web and app experiences to the world’s largest research organizations, collectively ensuring that humanity is at the core of every product decision. For more info, including demos of Lookback’s offering, please visit www.lookback.io.  [00:00:03] Jamin: Hi, everybody, this is Jamin. You are listening to the Happy Market Research podcast. Hope you're having a wonderful week. My guest today is Michele Ronsen. Michele, how are you? [00:00:13] Michele: I'm great. Thanks so much for inviting me. [00:00:16] Jamin: Michele is the principal of Curiosity Tank, a UX specialty shop based out of the heart of San Francisco. We're gonna dive in a little bit more about her background momentarily, but before we do, Michele, I've got this standard question that we ask. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up, your parents, and how that's informed your career. [00:00:36] Michele: Sure. I grew up right outside of Manhattan. Both of my parents were fourth generation native New Yorkers. And they very much influenced both my brother and me. I'm a classically trained designer and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say. My mom was an interior designer, my father studied architecture and later became an entrepreneur. And my earliest memory is of driving down the freeway, or back then it was highway because I was on the East Coast, with my dad and he asked me to look at the McDonald's sign. And he handed me a crayon and asked me to draw what I thought the gear inside the little golden arches looked like, that little device that made the sign spin. And I was about 3 years old. And I just remember, my brother and I talk nowadays that we were just tortured with that kind of stuff. We were tortured to think about how things work and to build things and to take things apart,