Leader Spotlight: Curating physical and digital museum experiences, with Simone Polgar
Simone Polgar is Senior Digital Product Manager at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF). She began her career as a bid writer for Innovative Interfaces before becoming a web content editor at Exponential, an advertising experience platform. From there, Simone joined content at Gracenote before transitioning into product management. Before her current position at FAMSF, she served in various product roles at ProQuest, TiVo, and Elsevier.
In our conversation, Simone talks about how her team at FAMSF is working to optimize both the digital and in-person product experience for users exploring the museum. She shares how her lean team serves a vast audience, both across visitors physically stepping into the museum and browsing the website. Simone also discusses mobile strategies FAMSF is currently undergoing, especially since visitors are often phone-in-hand as they browse the museum.
Common goals and expectations
Across your career, you’ve worked both in high-tech environments, like TiVo and Gracenote, and in mission-driven institutions like ProQuest and Elsevier, and now the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. What drew you to the challenge of digital product at a museum?
I have found that mission and interest-based roles, in which I have great empathy for the user and, in this case, the museum visitor, are naturally motivating and fulfilling roles. At FAMSF in particular, I've had a smaller team and began working with outside agencies as well. The organizational structure is quite different from my past experiences. It’s been great to influence how product is performed at an organization that is not inherently technical, while also learning some flexibility. Even without the typical resources, it's possible to ship successful products with so many highly engaged and driven colleagues.
As a frequent museum visitor myself, and given that I have spent time in the FAMSF galleries over the years, I’ve observed various interactions between visitors and staff. I’ve had the privilege of being able to correlate those real-time observations and interactions with data. I have learned from observing visitors, first-hand experiences, bringing my own guests, and speaking with staff that the majority of visitors share common needs and expectations. At the same time, many of them have unique needs that we need to meet to provide an equitable experience.
For instance, a combination of coordinated digital (online information) and in-gallery (signage and supportive staff) solutions prepares visitors with differing disabilities for their visits, and, once at the museum, they can navigate with greater ease and comfort. User and visitor advocacy is always at the forefront of my mind in product development.
You mentioned working in product at an organization that’s not inherently technical. What have you learned about communicating product value across non-technical departments?
Even when an organization is not universally aligned on the same project management methodologies or frameworks, transparency and communication go a long way. I have found that colleagues can appreciate data, evidence, and storytelling that support and elucidate product decisions.
In every organization that I have worked in, I’ve found it helpful to offer insight into how product development is prioritized and executed. Let's say a colleague approaches with a request that could result in a feature-level effort. As a product manager, I will have to validate the need, estimate the work, and prioritize against an existing backlog and roadmap. This leads to discovery and collaboration to understand the problem the stakeholder is interested in solving, the expected outcomes, and how a prospective digital solution fits within organizational strategy. Sometimes this also leads to a "no," because an ask may be unfeasible or unsustainable.
Although other departments may not be practicing product themselves, it is helpful to remember that we share strategic organizational goals and can collaboratively support decision-making with evidence.
A lean team serving a vast audience
Can you talk more about working with a smaller product team? How does that affect your day-to-day tasks?
Not all museums have a dedicated product team, so museum tech has a broader international community with many helpful seminars, conferences, and open communication among staff across other museums. There are some agencies and vendors that have also developed expertise in museum technologies and use cases. Working with agencies provides expertise and even mentorship opportunities that organizations may not have in-house.
In my current role, I implemented a highly adapted version of scrum for a small product team, aligning on a sprint cadence with our key agency and building a relationship with the agency that makes breakout projects easier to kickstart. This is a great, lean way to feel like you're working within a much larger team and able to tap into resources that may not have been available otherwise.
You serve both a digital and in-gallery audience. How do you prioritize features or initiatives when the needs of those audiences diverge?
Ongoing discovery efforts, including internal and external research, often surface what is most important to museum visitors, as well as to our website users who are most often planning a visit. So, for instance, serving visitors and also internal stakeholders can help to gauge the degree of interest or need in new products or features. We learn how we may make an adjustment to better serve the user or visitor. Analytics tools and firsthand observation also surface pain points and bottlenecks.
Receiving ongoing internal stakeholder feedback through various communication paths, like a ticketing system, internal meetings, and direct interaction, helps us determine what is critical and what may not have much impact. Coming from past product roles where I worked on a scrum team, I’ve found it helpful because it’s so flexible for a small digital product team. It works well to force prioritized backlogs, have actual sprints, and collaborate with agencies on the same cadence for development as needed.
Organizational KPIs and limited resources
In a cultural setting, like a museum where financial ROI isn't the sole metric, how do you articulate and measure success to your stakeholders?
Even in a mission-driven setting, as a product manager, I'm tasked with providing a good experience for the end user or visitor. I'm also challenged to meet organizational KPIs. In this type of organization, success metrics can be product or project-based. The source of funding and stakeholder tolerance or appetite for experimentation can help determine the types of outcomes.
In some cases, success may be based on qualitative data, like positive user or visitor sentiment. And in other cases, financial ROI is carefully considered. This often involves gathering various data points to benchmark, project, and then measure against. Wearing many hats in a mission-driven organization, you may find yourself or others stepping into various roles, like that of a data analyst.
How do you approach stepping into multiple roles when resources are limited? Have you built any scrappy but effective ways to collect and interpret visitor data?
Calling on past experiences in product and the types of experts I worked with and/or relied on, I often consider the best practices — both past and present — and the types of tools that were used (or built!). Basically, I ask myself questions like, “How did the user research team support product at company A? How did a team of data analysts support product at company B? How did I work with a robust QA team at company C? And how can I now do that with the resources and budget available to me?”
Having several analytics tools available to me first-hand allows for quick assessments and deeper dives, but often, essential data is available elsewhere. Maybe data isn't centralized on a BI dashboard, but the cross-departmental, team-level, and individual relationships that have been established over the years guide me to leverage the expertise of my colleagues. I can ask a colleague in another department to generate reports from their managed systems or to discuss how prospective product decisions could impact operations.
It is a different kind of resourcefulness and human-centric approach to work. More recently, I've even hit the floor of the museums myself to intercept visitors for a user research survey!
Can you walk us through an example where you had to define success metrics from scratch, or in an unexpected way?
Recently, I was interested in solidifying an understanding of usage rates for an in-gallery product and also identifying the variables that can affect usage. To benchmark typical annual use across a history of different exhibitions and external factors, such as museum closures during the pandemic, changing economic conditions, and product availability, it was important to assess what types of data were readily available and examine that data closely.
I was able to collate sales numbers, pickup rates from some of the non-paid in-gallery experiences, and unique engagement data for at least one of the products. Part of this approach was because we were using several* different products to do the same thing, suggesting that a success metric might actually be uniformly *tracked metrics as part of the next iteration of the product! Now, the future of the product itself will streamline success metric monitoring around sales and engagement. Continued user research will help to track qualitative success metrics like user delight.
Combining physical and digital experiences
The whole point of going to a museum is to experience art on the wall. What have you found most effective in capturing actionable insights from visitors without disrupting their visitor experience?
Without disrupting their experience firsthand, I've still found that spending time in the physical space observing visitors has been one of the best ways to understand how they're interacting with products, like audio tours, that may require using a QR code or an email link to access. And often, even passively standing around with an identifying badge visible on my person invites visitors to approach and ask questions.
Other times, intercepting visitors to answer surveys has led to good results as well. Even when they've declined, often, they will have some immediate feedback to share. And I do include that feedback in any qualitative data that I gather.
It's also very helpful to perform discovery interviews and check in with the staff who spend their time interacting with, observing, and resolving issues for visitors. Many behavior patterns begin to surface. I also like to test in situ to try to get a feel for the visitor experience and catch any environmental issues, like low-visibility signage.
How do you reconcile the qualitative feedback from these in-person interactions with quantitative insights from digital analytics when they point in different directions?
We often approach things with a hypothesis. And in this case, it makes sense to deliver a link for a digital product at the point of purchase. It's an expected experience and well mapped for a lot of users. Nevertheless, it's quite clear from a combination of digital analytics and more recently gathered qualitative information that our visitors are not easily finding links for digital audio tours in their emails. This has come after changes to that platform, the emails themselves, and the visibility of those links.
It's definitely necessitating a pivot into how we help people onboard at the time when they need to do so. That's been a really interesting combination of trying to understand why that's happening and what we can do to fix it.
As you shift to mobile, how do you define success for the mobile experience in the gallery, where overuse could detract from the physical art, and how do you test for hitting the sweet spot of mobile use?
Many museums are dealing with this question right now, especially in terms of incorporating AI. Audio tours are ubiquitous, and visitors often are phone-in-hand in the gallery. It is an open question how to help visitors focus on the physical art in the gallery and not have to overly depend on a mobile device.
I think that the way to define success around that is to gauge the sentiment of the user, focus on their needs and expectations, and ensure that the resulting experiences are not distracting to other* *visitors. It may be that the success of the mobile experience may extend into post-visit use as well. I have learned that visitors are interested in accessing additional information about the art they are experiencing and are curious about how to engage with that art. As we continue to move forward in this area, we will continue to try to find that balance.
Art is inherently subjective, and museum visitors experience the art in their own way. Does that play into how you think about and build the mobile experience?
Absolutely! While there are some basic standards and expectations for the types of experiences visitors can depend on in a museum, like digitized maps or audio tours, it is important to consider the holistic experience. The exhibition design, how visitors are onboarded to mobile experiences, and whether those mobile experiences are essential, supplemental, or purely optional, all require a case-by-case assessment. Part of making a product sustainable is to create something that can satisfy most use cases but be flexible enough to adapt to unique circumstances.
Another incredibly important consideration is also the artist or the artist's estate, who may also have specific requirements that may impact the mobile experience as a condition of sharing their art.