Marionettes, Metrics, and Medieval French Lit: A Conversation on UX and Life with Leah Reich

Jim and Leah dive headfirst into a whirlwind chat that covers everything from the fine distinctions between puppets and marionettes to the equally delicate art of building great user experiences. Leah shares her fascinating journey from a Medieval French literature course at Berkeley to leading UX research at companies like Slack, Spotify, Instagram, and Mozilla. Along the way, they tackle why users often don't honestly know what they want, how to avoid building a product no one asked for (looking at you, Juicero), and why good design begins with understanding both people and teams. It's a conversation about people problems disguised as tech problems—with a few detours into bad movie references, car oil changes, and the mythical Trojan horse. Grab your headphones, settle in, and prepare to laugh, learn, and maybe rethink what "user experience" really means.

You can listen to Marionettes, Metrics, and Medieval French Lit: A Conversation on UX and Life with Leah Reich online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Marionettes, Metrics, and Medieval French Lit: A Conversation on UX and Life with Leah Reich is an episode from Private Equity Funcast by Jim Milbery.

This episode is 01:56:57 long.

This episode was published on Sep 30, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Private Equity Funcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.