We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors and exhibitors at this year’s Advancing Research conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions in the coming weeks that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about ResearchOps, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to Design and Research Operations professionals.

MARIANO SUAREZ-BATTAN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT MURAL

Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring the Advancing Research conference?

Mariano Suarez-Battan: There are millions of people out there just like you – visual thinkers, collaborators, storytellers, leaders, and facilitators – who want to change the world in big and small ways. It’s our goal at MURAL to connect the global distributed workforce and support enterprise brands in their cultural transformations.

MURAL has been a long time supporter of Rosenfeld Media and the events Lou produces covering timely topics relevant to UX, product, CX, enterprise design, and of course, research. By sponsoring Advancing Research, we intend to create more meaningful conversations with enterprise brands and account leaders before, during and after the conference, as well as drive attendance from those in our network interested in learning about the latest research methods.

Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about Research and/or Research Operations?

Mariano Suarez-Battan: Rosenfeld Media thoughtfully curates its events with inspirational leaders from such companies as Publicis Sapient, Capital One, Microsoft, Shopify, Workday, and Atlassian to answer the most pressing questions, who provide diverse opinions, and offer valuable takeaways conference attendees can start putting into practice right away. With the expansion of visual collaboration solutions around experience design, agile development and remote work needs, a conference focused solely on advancing research is absolutely necessary, where we can all come together to compare techniques and lessons learned.

Rosenfeld Media: What is it like for researchers and ResearchOps people to work at your company? 

Mariano Suarez-Battan: At MURAL, our team invests a lot of time into listening and observing how customers are using our visual collaboration platform, understanding where their pain points lie and funneling that feedback back to engineering and development. This directs our product roadmap for future features to come so organizing and synthesizing feedback and research is critical for us. In fact, we are growing our team by bringing on a full-time UX researcher in a few months so I encourage those interested to visit our jobs page and get in touch!

Rosenfeld Media: What is your company culture like, and who are the champions?

Mariano Suarez-Battan:

  • MURAL is headquartered in San Francisco and employs over 100 team members working remotely in six different time zones around the world, including hubs in Buenos Aires and Europe. As CEO, I empower my team to work from anywhere, or from one of our office hubs in San Francisco or Bueno Aires. Each team member is given the freedom and tools to do their best work from wherever they choose so keeping our workforce happy and engaged is vital, from across the room or around the world.
  • Remote work is part of our DNA, not just something our product enables, and is unto itself part of our mission and values. We strive to improve our ability to execute remotely at every step of the way.
  • Our employees over communicate and make a conscious effort to stay connected using collaboration tools like Slack, Dropbox and of course, MURAL. MURAL is a digital workspace for visual collaboration. We are our own customer in that we rely on MURAL everyday to research, brainstorm, organize, design, plan, and share ideas.
  • Within MURAL, we have various business divisions including operations, business development, engineering, customer experience/success, sales, product and people operations/HR. Divisions work together collaboratively and over communicate with each other daily while cross-team collaboration happens organically, either through online tools or our bi-weekly all hands meeting.
  • We have company-wide goals or objectives and key results (OKRs) to strive for within MURAL, which are tracked weekly to show incremental progress toward meeting goals annually. Our entire company believes in this process, so we’re all working together to meet key milestones. We’ve found managing by OKRs gives teams ownership and accountability for what they’re doing, empowering them to focus on the big bets and accomplish more than the team thought was possible. OKRs also helps our teams and individuals get outside of their comfort zones, prioritize work, and learn from both success and failure.

Rosenfeld Media: What benefits does your product bring to the practice and community? 

Mariano Suarez-Battan: MURAL is a digital workspace for visual collaboration. We are on a mission to inspire, enhance, and connect imagination workers globally. We believe work can happen anywhere — beyond physical limitations of meeting rooms and in-person workshops — as long as great minds connect and collaborate toward a common goal. An organization isn’t a hierarchical tree — it’s a network of conversations and the best ideas can come from the most quiet person in the back of the room. Constant dialog and communication are key.

With this mission in mind, we created a platform and services to enable innovative teams to think and collaborate visually to solve important problems. People benefit from MURAL’s speed and ease of use in creating diagrams, user journey mapping and personas, which are popular in design thinking and agile methodologies, as well as tools to facilitate more impactful meetings and workshops.

MURAL offers:
• Visual thinking digital workspaces to research, brainstorm, organize, design, plan, and share concepts.
• Tools for live collaboration to align teams and make decisions.
• A meeting facilitator to run better creative sessions and templates to structure online collaboration.
• Design thinking and agile frameworks to kickstart and help structure collaboration.
• Integrations to other collaboration and software tools, including Slack, Dropbox, GitHub and JIRA.
• Cross-platform multi-device collaboration through Mac OS, iOS, Windows 10, and major web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.).
• Best-in-class training and hands-on support from MURAL’s Customer Experience team who understand real-world problem solving at global enterprises.

We invite Advancing Research attendees to try MURAL free for 30 days! Jim Kalbach is our Head of Customer Experience and will be leading a session at Advancing Research.