Judd Antin

Judd Antin built the UX research practice at Facebook and led research at Airbnb, producing a diaspora of research leaders now running teams at Figma, Notion, Slack, Robinhood, and Duolingo -- giving him an unusually wide lens on what makes individual researchers effective and how team composition amplifies or wastes that effectiveness. Their core argument: T-shaped is the ideal -- but it is a team design principle, not just an individual one. Build five tools as an individual; compose deep expertise across a team to fill all the gaps. The evidence is specific: Antin's research teams at Meta and Airbnb: composed of T-shaped individuals whose deep skills complemented each other. Furthermore, the research alumni diaspora: Matt Gallivan (Slack), Janna Bray (Notion), Celeste Ridlen (Robinhood), Louise Beryl (Figma), Hannah Pileggi (Duolingo) -- all products of this team composition model. The interview technique: give a juicy, open-ended research question and evaluate whether the candidate proposes multi-method approaches at different time horizons. In Judd Antin's own words: "You have experts who are t-shaped, but maybe deeper in one or several of those ways. But when I built a team at Meta and at Airbnb, that was my goal, is individually as researchers build up those tools and then as a team build deep expertise that would fill all the gaps." (On composing T-shaped individuals into teams with collective depth.)