Leader Spotlight: How customer success made me a better designer, with Chanel Fetaz
Chanel Fetaz is Director of Product Design and UX at Apartment Therapy Media, where she leads UX and digital product design across the company’s portfolio of brands. Her path to product was anything but direct: she began her career in customer service at Eventbrite, earned an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and rebuilt her design skills through freelance work for nonprofits before moving through roles at Dow Jones — where she worked on the Wall Street Journal — and Hearst Magazines. Along the way, she gained something most designers don’t have: firsthand experience as the person on the other end of the phone.
In this conversation, Chanel talks about how starting on the customer side — before any formal design training — shaped both her approach to UX and her cross-functional leadership style. She discusses the difference between what customers say and what they actually do, how she brought a startup mindset into the organizational complexity of Dow Jones, and why she designs for architecture before aesthetics. She also reflects on the research practice she’s building at Apartment Therapy Media, and why she believes anyone at a company should be able to talk to users.
From customer support to product design
You began your career on the customer support side before moving into product design. What went into that decision, and what was the experience like?
With my first job being in customer service in tech at a startup, I was able to understand a lot of roles of the business, and I started to get curious about the design side and the UX side — but I didn’t have any formal training. So I decided to go back to school and go to New York and get my Master’s in Communication Design. It was a very research-based program, very exploratory, no design focus in particular.
It was actually challenging to get back into the digital design world. The field had changed even in a matter of two years — titles were called different things, the tooling was different. I really had to rebuild a lot of skills, and I did that through a lot of freelance projects for nonprofits. In that process, I was really able to see this trifecta of my experience: customer service is the research side and the user voice side; I still have that design part of my background of understanding aesthetics and brand guidelines; and my schooling — both undergrad and graduate — is the strategy side. It was seeing how my untraditional background could really lead to this, what product design is becoming.
A lot of people who come into product through another avenue talk about having the hard skills first and then having to learn the human side. Do you feel like your experience was the inverse — and has that been an advantage?
I think now I understand the benefit and I’m glad I’ve gone this direction. When you are on the customer side, you need to learn all sides of the business — you have to know the tech, why it works a certain way, the pricing, why are we positioning ourselves this way? It helped me understand partnerships, and less about the silos of “this is my expertise.”
And I think that’s what’s led me into my leadership style as well — a customer doesn’t see all the different departments, they see you as one company. So that’s how I like to lead cross-functionally: if a customer comes to you with a problem, it’s not a specific team’s problem, it’s cross-functional. As a leader who took a nontraditional path, I always encourage other leaders to take a chance on someone who also doesn’t have such a direct trajectory into the industry.
Thinking holistically: Startups and enterprises
You’ve worked at both startups and larger, established companies. Was the product design process similar across those environments — and did the startup experience shape how you work now?
It really does. The startup had me think of things holistically. At Eventbrite, I could talk to the engineer who built the feature, see the whole picture — you move really fast, it was easy to just go over the fence and talk to them.
But then when I went to larger organizations like Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, it got harder. I was there during the pandemic working on a project about shifting our print process and how our customers got their newspaper, because a lot of things were changing. In this project, there were 10 stakeholder departments — it was just so much bigger. I couldn’t have as much visibility. But my startup mindset still worked there: little by little, going to someone in each of those 10 departments, mapping out the entire customer journey, and bringing everybody together. I also went to the customer service team and got call recordings of people calling in like, “Where’s my newspaper?” — and I played those short clips for everybody in the room.
The startup mindset doesn’t go away. It’s definitely a challenge of how you build that connective tissue — it’s a little bit harder. But you can still find a way to bring a startup edge, even at a place like Dow Jones or the Wall Street Journal where people have been there a long time.
What good UX actually means
You had a very direct view into user experience because you were talking to people experiencing issues all the time. Did your definition of good UX change as your career developed?
It did. With customer service, you’re not going to hear a lot of praise — people call to complain. What that taught me is that people want to be heard. If you’re doing something good, it’s very rare that someone’s going to call and say, “Hey, I love this new feature so much. Okay, bye.” They’re not going to wait on hold to give a compliment.
Good UX isn’t about what users say — it’s what they do. They have ideas, they think they know what’s going to improve whatever issue they’re having. But good UX has taught me to also look at the numbers and get more into the data of behavior patterns, watching screens without being in the room with people, and thinking you have to read between the lines — not just the explicit feedback. You have to remove a little bit of that subjective voice, but still give people a place to be heard.
Do you think product and design teams can better leverage the insights that customer-facing teams already have?
I always say it’s the qualitative and quantitative — you really have to sink your teeth into both sides. You can look at the data to see why a feature isn’t performing, and you can go into the customer service logs and see if you’re getting calls about that certain thing, listen to some of it, do session recordings, look at clicks unmoderated and moderated. It has to be both of those working together.
How do you decide whether something is a design issue in the product versus a customer behavior issue where users need to be pushed into learning how to use the product correctly?
I really learned this when I was at the Wall Street Journal as a UX architect. You start to look at foundation and then layer in design system and aesthetic and brand voice. We were having a newsletter signup issue on the website — at first glance, people thought it was a UI problem: they’re not completing the signup, they’re not clicking the right button. But stepping away from that and mapping out the entire user flow, it was architectural: we missed a step in the process where they were registering and making an account.
By having this blueprint, by looking at the architecture, I could go to the engineers, run this by them, and they could see the layer of technicality — we weren’t even validating them. You could have a crack in your floor and put a rug over it, but that crack, you’re going to keep stepping on it. It might look nice because it’s covered up by a nice rug, but you have to take that rug up and see what the foundation is.
When design shapes strategy
Do you see scenarios where design insights actually alter the strategic direction of the product?
At my current job, one of our brands, The Kitchn, we launched a membership initiative to get more people to create an account and sign up. We needed a signup page — we looked at competitor sites, direct and indirect, and our own design aesthetic. There was a lot of variation and debate, and I decided: let’s run an unmoderated user test. Let’s get this design in front of people in different variations and just get feedback. It was unanimous: people said, “Make it easy to sign up. That’s what this page is meant to do.”
So we stripped back the fluff and the color. The strategy was to get people to sign up, and in this case, adjusting our design aesthetic helped us get to that strategy. By getting actual user feedback and watching those short videos, we could end the debate about what the page should look like. That page is now getting 50% conversion — a little bit of qualitative data there to help reinforce the strategy.
Do you encounter situations where people outside design are more focused on aesthetics, and you have to push to keep functionality at the top of the conversation?
Yes, but I feel like lately I’ve seen a shift — maybe in the industry as a whole, but also in my company. Things are going simplified. People want it to look like Apple, they want “the Netflix of media, the Uber of ...” — familiar patterns. I heard this quote in undergrad from Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original.” And I think my challenge now is remixing things.
We’re moving toward an industry where maybe aesthetics are feeling a little less important — a lot of things are looking like other things, especially with AI, and a lot of aesthetic is becoming similar because of that. But I think it’s bringing up a new challenge: how can you delight and surprise through function? Maybe it’s not with design, but it is with function.
Building a research culture
What were you seeing at Apartment Therapy Media that made you feel a research initiative was essential — and what was the process of building it and getting support?
When I got to AT Media, the product team was super hungry for it, super curious. There was a lot of openness to understanding it more. They were already doing surveys and using Hotjar for session recordings, but wanted to push further. The gap I noticed was actual user conversations — starting moderated and unmoderated sessions.
In at least the first quarter of starting, I did moderated sessions with users and had the CEO sit in and watch, along with people not even on the product team. It was eye-opening — a lot of the company jumped on board: “Oh yeah, this is really helpful to see.” We’re in the room looking at our website every day, and to zoom out and watch someone who doesn’t know us navigate it — “Oh my gosh, they don’t understand this part, this is confusing” — getting us to talk to people who don’t know us, and people who do know us. There was a lot of excitement, and there still is.
How has it changed the way the team works — the confidence in decision-making, the sense that the product is functioning better?
It cleared up circular conversations that I think were happening — different departments having different opinions — and it kind of ends that circular debate. Now more people across the company are even asking, “Did we do user research on this?”
My approach to research is also to democratize it. I think anybody can and should talk to our users — it doesn’t need to be formal. Recently a PM did an internal user research session watching our editors use our internal publishing tools, and it was super illuminating — the crazy workarounds they’re doing, the processes they’ve just accepted as “yeah, it’s kind of like this.” Having her do that is this customer service focus in action — the editors are like, “I feel seen now.” A lot of times you’re focused outward: “We need to launch all these features.” But we also have internal tools for our team, and it’s exciting to see how research is growing and being used in different ways.
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