Beyond Data: How to Get BuyIn

Jasper Wu, Preethi Mariappan, Nigel Yeo, Shaheena Attarwala at UXDX APAC. Video: https://youtu.be/1ZLNRLdmTyA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions

[00:00:00] Nigel: My name is Nigel. I'm a product manager at Xendit. Xendit is an Indonesian-headquartered but Southeast Asian-focused payments fintech company. I'm Singaporean and I'm based in Singapore. I'm a product manager at Xendit focused on our cards acceptance product, and I've been here for about three years. To be perfectly honest, everybody else on this panel knows way more about UX and design than I do, so I'm really just here to facilitate the conversation between them and let you hear their learnings and their insights as well. I'll now let the panelists take a bit of time to introduce themselves. Maybe we can start with Shaheena.

[00:00:35] Shaheena: Hi everyone, hope everyone's having a nice day. I enjoyed the talk. I work at Microsoft, where I lead design and research for emerging markets. We are solving for the unmet and unarticulated needs of the next billion users, as we say, specifically focusing on countries like China, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines and India. India itself has a very different demographic and cultural diversity, and that makes it more complex to solve for these people. That's what my work entails. It's very happening, and I completely enjoy it.

[00:01:15] Nigel: Awesome, thank you so much. Next up, can we have Preethi? Let's go to the ladies first.

[00:01:20] Preethi: All right, thank you, Nigel. I'm excited to join this panel. Hi everyone, I'm Preethi, and I head up the new product design team at Visa, where we build regional new products around commerce and payment flows. As most of you may not be aware, Visa is not a credit card company, as you might first think when you hear the name Visa. We're a payments and commerce company, and we work in a B2B2C space. Often we're looking to build optimal experiences, but with clients and partners, so we deal with a pretty matrixed and complex landscape when it comes to design buy-in.

[00:01:57] Nigel: Great, thank you, Preethi. Wow, today I learned that Visa is not a credit card company. Lastly, Jasper, please introduce yourself.

[00:02:05] Jasper: Hello everyone, my name is Jasper. I'm Chief Experience Officer at U-Next. We're a company based in Tokyo, Japan, and we are the third-largest OTT platform in Japan's market. We have a video streaming service, a book service and a music service. Really great to meet everyone here today, and I'm looking forward to listening to your questions and helping answer them. Nice to meet you.

[00:02:33] Nigel: Thank you, thanks, Jasper. For those of you on the call who may not know, Preethi and Jasper have both had individual sessions at UXDX as well, on topics such as design in the enterprise and creating a CX culture through sprints. For those of you who are more interested, if you have access to the conference, you should be able to access those talks as well.

The biggest myths about getting buy-in

[00:02:52] Nigel: Let's get our questions rolling. The first thing we want to ask our panelists today is a cheeky, open-ended question: in your experience, what are the biggest myths, M-Y-T-H-S, you've come across about getting buy-in for design, UX and CX? Maybe we can start with Shaheena for this as well.

[00:03:10] Shaheena: Oh, why is it me first always?

[00:03:14] Nigel: Don't worry, next time it'll be someone else.

[00:03:17] Shaheena: Yes, definitely. One of the biggest myths that I have heard is that you always, always need hard data to prove whether you need to go ahead with a design or not. That's one of the biggest myths for me, because I think there are many more methods and frameworks and ways that a designer or a product person can use to get by, to start with prototyping. The biggest myth is that data is the only thing that can open gateways for innovation or for building products.

[00:03:54] Nigel: What happens if you come to either a colleague or an upper management stakeholder, you're trying to propose something regarding design, and they say, "Okay, show me the data. What data justifies us going ahead and committing resources to this?"

[00:04:11] Shaheena: Sure. As a designer, one of the quotes I always, always use is by Kate, who's from Google Ventures. She says that if you go into a meeting and have a very narrow-minded approach and say design, design, design, you are very likely not to be taken seriously. First, because it shows the apathy that you have towards the rest of the people sitting in the room; it shows a very unilateral approach. The other is: what is the design that you are proposing? Is it just aesthetic, or is it actually solving a customer problem? If it is solving a customer problem, you might not necessarily have the hard data that says, look, if we do this, it will go from X to Y, or Y to Z, et cetera. But you definitely can show anecdotal evidence. You can show previous market research that has happened. You can show analysis. There are multiple frameworks you can show.

[00:05:14] One of the best that I use, and it's super simple, is called the pyramid principle, which focuses on what the problem is that we are trying to solve, and why this is a problem. If you take your designs into these three buckets, it becomes easier for the rest of the people to understand. Remember that selling your design, or getting buy-in, has very little to do with design and a lot to do with how you sell it, or how you portray it as a customer problem versus your own aspiration. That's why you don't need to be married to the design and say, I need to get this published. You need to speak from the customer's perspective: this will benefit the customer, and this will probably increase our NPS, for example.

[00:06:04] NPS has got nothing to do with revenue, but designers always get stuck with that: this is revenue, this is revenue. I think there are multiple metrics that you can track. One is just the happiness of the customer. One is just delight as well. It's not measurable, but how do you talk about it? That's where you need to develop business acumen and more market understanding, and maybe a little bit of storytelling skill as well, because if you're not able to sell it, then you're dead on arrival.

[00:06:35] Nigel: That makes so much sense: basically reframing it, not just using the word design, but coming at it with all the other interests that stakeholders might have. Thanks so much. Maybe we can jump to Jasper. Jasper, the question was, what are some of the biggest myths when it comes to getting buy-in for design, CX and UX? Any thoughts on that?

[00:06:52] Jasper: Thank you for mentioning storytelling. I totally agree: storytelling is a super important part when you try to bring up any discussion with any stakeholders. For me, the myth is about how I think about getting buy-in. It's not an event, like just doing it one time or two times. It's a long-term process. It's not about events; it's more about consistency in talking, discussing and communicating with stakeholders. The most important thing for me is not just that you have a wonderful design for the first time, but that you need to continuously, repeatedly keep gathering and working on what you are working on. I think passion for what you are working on is very important. If you are the change maker inside the organization, it definitely takes some time, so be patient. I think that's a very important thing.

[00:07:46] Nigel: It definitely does, and I got that sentiment from watching your session around creating that CX culture as well. Preethi, any thoughts on any other myths, besides the overall bigger myth, which is that you don't always need data to get buy-in for design?

[00:08:01] Preethi: I think maybe one of the myths in a large enterprise is that you can only impact design change top down, and that's not true. A lot of design change can be impacted by designers bottom up. If you can find ways to work collaboratively, in sprints, to Jasper's point, that's really important. Don't look for change as a single event. Look for change by setting near-term objectives. What change do you want to impact with your stakeholders? Look at a three-month window. Look at your environment and understand what kind of change you want to impact. We look at things like, for instance, we want to make our prioritization better [?], or we want to engage clients upstream, early on, for validation. These are small changes, and when you impact them step by step, they can really ladder up and create the kind of advocacy you need, create the tribe you need, and get the support you need to move up very quickly.

Customer happiness and business results

[00:08:52] Nigel: Thanks, Preethi. Related to that, we've got a question from one of our audience members, Ludwig, who's asking: if customer happiness doesn't lead to measurable business results, why is it important?

[00:09:05] Preethi: Is this question for me?

[00:09:06] Nigel: It can be for anybody. I think all of you addressed that a bit as well.

[00:09:14] Preethi: When we look at how we would quantify customer happiness, you can quantify customer happiness via retention. In my opinion, there is a direct business connection. When we look at the growth and scaling of any product, there's a direct correlation to customer happiness and product success, and then the business metrics attached to that. I would say that for measuring customer happiness there are definitely business metrics. You might not necessarily correlate them, because you're looking at revenue numbers and business KPIs, but there's a way to translate that back into customer success metrics.

[00:09:51] Nigel: Yes. And to be honest, if your customers are happy but you're not actually translating that into tangible business outcomes, there may not be a problem with design. It may be a problem with the business model as well. Shaheena, any thoughts on that?

[00:10:04] Shaheena: Yeah, definitely. It's been 25 years that companies have been building tech products, and they're traditionally moving on from just building and shipping. Now they've realized the importance of design, because design is not just what it looks like; it's actually adding to their competitive advantage. If you look at some of the best companies that have been very, very successful, the competitive advantage that they have is design: the quality of the product, the communication, how they are reaching out to people. For example, Nike. Nobody even needs to talk about Nike. Why are they one of the most successful in the shoe business? Because they're not selling shoes; they're selling something else. Similarly, when design becomes a competitive advantage, you cannot ignore it anymore.

[00:10:53] Coming to customer happiness, as Preethi very rightly mentioned, if the customer is not happy, he will simply leave the platform. He will simply leave your product. If you see that happening over a period of time, then you realize they are not happy, but you don't need to wait for that. There are multiple frameworks that you can use to measure that retention. One of the things that we at Microsoft do is being constantly customer obsessed, reaching out to our customers. We constantly keep connecting with them on a monthly basis. We have customers that we go back to and constantly take feedback from: hey, is this working for you or not working for you? Because a certain pool of customers will actually give you a sense of whether your product is helping them and whether they are happy with it or not. These are the things that can actually have an impact.

[00:11:42] Why do you think companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google today are talking about this very common phrase, customer obsession? There's a science behind it, because it actually impacts the numbers. Not directly, indirectly, but given a good enough time frame, you will definitely see the impact. Rather than waiting to see those numbers crumble or increase, you sustainably work towards it in a pattern that's healthy, looking at the long term. Customer happiness is not something that's one month or two months. It's a life goal for the company, for as long as the company exists. If customers are happy, that's the only reason a company would exist, unless it's a monopoly or the government, which is a different thing. But if you're in a competition, that's the only thing that separates you from the rest of the competition.

[00:12:23] Nigel: Thanks so much, Shaheena. While we're on you, our audience member also asks: what were the three parts of the pyramid model you mentioned again?

[00:12:36] Shaheena: The first part is the what. If you're going into any meeting, break it down simply, similar to design thinking. What is the problem that you're approaching your stakeholders with? Write down a bit about it, and how is it even a problem today? For example, one of the things that we do, if we're trying to build a prototype in a particular segment, is we say: this is what we think the problem is. Why we think so is because this is how people are trying to solve it, and they're actually frustrated. You might want to build two or three videos of people frustrated. And here, this is how we're trying to build it, we've tested it out, and this is what they're happy with. That sets you up for success on day one and opens up the conversation. You break the ice immediately, showing you've done your homework, and that you've not come with a unilateral design saying, hey, this is what I've designed and, based on my intuition, I think we should go forward with it.

Tips for getting buy-in without data

[00:13:30] Nigel: Got it. Awesome, I hope that answers our viewer's question. That segues nicely into our next question. We've been talking about the myth that you always need data to get management buy-in for design, CX and UX. We want to ask our panelists: what are some hacks, tips or tricks that you use personally and have found effective for getting buy-in, for resources to be allocated to design, or for your proposals or requests to be approved, especially when you don't have the data? Jasper, I want to start with you, because in your session I really liked the quote you mentioned by Tom Chi: nobody changes their behavior for a neutral outcome. That makes a lot of sense. The question would be, how do you prove that you can get a positive and not a neutral outcome without the data, and what are some tips or tricks that you bring to your stakeholders to try and get buy-in from them?

[00:14:24] Jasper: I think maybe everyone knows there's a framework called proto persona, or ad hoc persona. A lot of the time, when we start a new project, I believe every stakeholder is thinking about a different target. Marketing people think about the target like this, product people think about the target like that, and the strategy people are focused on someone else. Everyone's thinking about a different person, a different audience, a different target. At this moment, I try to facilitate a workshop, like an ad hoc persona or proto persona workshop, because I want to make sure everyone is thinking about the same thing and gets to consensus inside the meeting. I think it's super helpful for people who don't have the data. We just need to bring every stakeholder's brain together, using what they are thinking, for discussion and ideation together. I think most of the time the organization doesn't have a chance to bring everyone together for an open-minded discussion. If you don't have the data, or you are in a very small startup, you can use tools like the proto persona framework. It's really helpful for you to understand your customer first.

[00:15:34] Nigel: Awesome. And Preethi, in your session I think I saw a whole range of tools described, from immersion sessions to co-ideation [?], to designers speaking business, to feedback loops. If you were to choose your tried-and-tested, surefire, most effective method out of all of these things that you've implemented at Visa, what would you say it is for getting management buy-in, especially without data?

[00:16:01] Preethi: I think there are three things that have worked for us really well; maybe I'll talk about the top three. The first is demystifying design for a lot of non-design stakeholders. The way we approach it, we always think about how to tell a business story with design as your hero. How would you pitch it if you had to think about it that way? That's really useful, especially in the immersion sessions that we set up, because they come in because they're interested in the product for the business, and design is really an instrument within that. That's how we approach these immersion sessions, and that's been really effective for us in terms of being able to engage a wide area of stakeholders. Generally we always try to lose the jargon as much as possible and make the frameworks invisible as much as possible, so we're talking about the content.

[00:16:48] The second thing that's been really effective for us is feedback loops. We have systematic feedback loops that we put in place as part of our product design process. We do feedback loops with all our stakeholders every quarter, for instance. We do this through a call, and we also do a survey, and that's been really effective in helping us understand how to get better at engaging our stakeholders for buy-in. But we also do a lot of instant feedback. We'll typically encourage team members to reach out to their key product stakeholders. If it's someone in tech or risk or legal, whoever that might be, reach out to them and have a conversation, even if it's five or ten minutes. Cultivate that relationship and get that dialogue going. That's also been super helpful.

[00:17:28] And generally, and this might be a bit controversial for designers, the way we approach this is by not being very precious about our design methods. If you look at how design thinking as a methodology works, or any kind of design process, the customer sits at the center, and your instinct would always be to say, let's focus on solving for that customer problem first and come back to the technical solution. But often, when you work in a large enterprise, you might hit a wall with that kind of approach. Sometimes what we do is actually solve for the technical obstacles that might be bigger first. We know that we're going to get to the customer experience, but we're flexible about that. It's thinking on your feet in terms of how you flex your design process to work around an organization that may have some non-negotiables. I think that's also been very effective. It's not taking it off the table; it's knowing how to approach it in a way that's non-linear and flexible. I think these are the three things that we've seen be very good for us.

[00:18:31] Nigel: That's very strategic. It's almost like looking for the path of least resistance, whether that's from business, from technical or any of the teams, and identifying what the biggest obstacle would be. As you mentioned, if it's the technical team that needs help first, designers break past the wall of thinking, okay, I'm just going to think about design or business, by actually approaching the technical team and saying, hey guys, what can we as designers do to work together with the tech team to get past that obstacle, and then leaving the rest to work itself out.

[00:19:03] I must say that as a product manager, all of the things you're talking about regarding how design interacts with product are very relevant to me as well. I see it at Xendit all the time. When I look at my designers, I don't just see them as a bunch of designers who I farm off design requests to. Especially with thought product leaders, when you read books like Empowered or Inspired, they see designers as integral and essential to the product design process, such that the author even recommends the PM and the designers sitting together regularly.

[00:19:35] We want to bring this conversation to Shaheena as well, related to tips and tricks, or your surefire methods for getting buy-in. It's actually nice to tie in a question from one of our audience members who's directing this to Shaheena, around the pyramid model. She's asking: how do you begin the research and design in the first place, to convince your stakeholders that this is a viable issue to look at and that solutions should be built? Your answer can tackle both my question and her question at the same time.

Speaking the decision maker's language

[00:20:06] Shaheena: Sure. I think one trick that's always worked: firstly, you have to understand who you're going to talk to. Who are those people, or who is that person, who is the key decision maker, and what is his or her OKR? What is driving that person? The moment you understand that, it's about speaking that person's language, because otherwise it's just a foreign language to that person. Even if you do a monkey dance, it doesn't work. You have to be very practical in terms of who that person is and what their motivation is to say yes to what you're proposing. The other is the return on investment. If you're asking him to invest his money or his time into this, then what's in it for him, and what's in it for the organization?

[00:20:56] Here I'm saying very categorically: understand the people you want to influence. Sometimes it's easier to influence people who have an understanding of design and how design has impact, and sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes you're talking to the finance officer, and how do you convince them? Because there are multiple stakeholders that designers have to go by. Now, return on investment talks specifically about revenue. For example, in one of my previous organizations we had to build a design system. Building a design system is a long activity. It requires multiple people's contribution and multiple people's time. Time is currency in any organization, especially in an engineering-first organization.

[00:21:44] If you can say that 10 engineers are wasting 50 hours of the week replicating the same assets that they could ideally have used from a design system, it would have saved them X amount of time, and that X amount of time is actually so many dollars or rupees per month. Accumulated across 10 engineers wasting that time, it means some lakhs of rupees, or whatever in dollars. Once you start calculating the cycle of return on investment, it becomes easier to convince, because then you're speaking their language. They're like, oh, this is our language, this seems familiar.

[00:22:27] Whether we like it or not, humans have biases. We cannot eliminate them completely. One of the biases is familiarity bias. If someone comes and tells us, hey, I worked in Sketch and Figma, our eyes light up. But if they say, I was doing something in Excel or some other Tally tool, it won't excite us. So what excites them? Money, revenue, profits. That's absolutely okay. Talk in their language, build that business acumen, and just make it very simple: what, how and why. The moment you put these three in buckets and propose it to them as numbers, it becomes easier to move people.

[00:23:07] Negotiating with non-designers is very important, because sometimes the person you directly want to influence actually gets influenced by three or four other people on the side, and you might want to influence those people first. A CTO will probably get influenced by a principal tech lead or a senior engineering manager, so try and build that rapport. We need to be very realistic and practical: we are the new kids on the block. We've just arrived, and just because we've arrived doesn't mean the engineers who've been working in this product field for 20 or 30 years are going to listen to us. You have to come to a common ground. You have to bridge that gap, and you have to be proactive in learning their language. And communicate the trade-offs, risks and benefits. If we do this, then this is the benefit. If we don't do this, then this is the cost. Hey, I am giving you all the options; now you decide whether you want to take the loss or the profit. I'm being very crude here, but that's sometimes the reality.

Change management after buy-in

[00:24:14] Nigel: Whatever works to get what we want to achieve in terms of success outcomes for the company. What you've raised, Shaheena, around speaking the language of the people we're trying to convince, is extremely relevant to what we want to talk about next, which will be the final topic on this panel. Let's say we've already gotten that buy-in. How do we then facilitate change management to adapt to the initiatives or proposals that you've already gotten buy-in for, and cause the rest of the people in your organization to also give you that buy-in? Let's say you've got management buy-in; now you need to convince the rest of the people in your organization to follow the proposal.

[00:24:54] On this, I want to start with Jasper, because in your previous session you talked about the Japanese concept of nemawashi, which is preparing the roots of a plant before the plant grows. I think that's really interesting. In the context of Japanese culture, and an organization in Japan, how would you facilitate change management to bring effect to what you've already gotten buy-in for?

[00:25:22] Jasper: Thanks for mentioning that. In Japan's culture especially, people sometimes care about organizational relationships more than whether the product is good or bad. The product is very important, but relationships matter most, because in Japan's culture people might work in one company for their entire life, so maintaining a good relationship is very important to them. For me, on how to convince and get buy-in, the first thing is to do as much communication as you can. I think that's very important: understanding and listening to each stakeholder. The second thing is to show the proof. I think showing proof is very important: accumulate some small successes and then show them step by step. That's what I mean when I say it takes time; it's not an overnight thing. Work on a small project, work on small successes with the team you can work with and have already convinced, and then grow bigger and bigger to the people surrounding you. That's the approach I would like to take, and maybe in different types of culture you can try this way too.

[00:26:41] Nigel: And on that note of different cultures, Preethi, at Visa you work on an APAC scale, a regional scale. How have you approached change management for some of your design initiatives, not only in an enterprise but in a regional company?

[00:26:57] Preethi: One of the things that we learned early on is to engage teams sitting in our markets, especially when we're working on products. If we're working on a product and we have, let's say, India and Australia as priority markets, we engage them from day one. I think that's made a massive difference to how we've been able to get acceptance and adoption for that initiative right from the get-go. What we typically do is speak to our product leads in the market and ask them for folks that we think are relevant. We take a squad approach: we get into a huddle, we usually pitch this to them, get their input and set up for success. That way the initiative is not just a design initiative; we're talking about a product and business initiative that the market has a stake in now.

[00:27:44] But, to Jasper's point, along the way, think of the halo effect you want to have. I might be speaking to maybe 15 people who are actively engaged, but you have 1,500 or 15,000 people to reach. We definitely do a lot of structured communication and reporting. We have bi-weekly reporting to certain groups, monthly to other groups, and quarterly to a third group, and that's been helpful. We regularly host what we call product demo days, so we do a lot of show and tell. We show progress, we demo, we get feedback, and we do this with multiple circles.

[00:28:23] It's not an easy thing to do. I think everyone needs to understand that this is an enormous amount of time and effort: constantly thinking on your feet, understanding and responding to the situation, and being able to orchestrate. I think street-smart skills, along with systemic skills, are very important to be able to drive and facilitate that kind of change management. For us, we typically adopt, at all three levels, frequent communication, frequent reporting and frequent show and tell, and then keep that running in an ongoing loop. That's been helpful.

[00:29:05] Nigel: Thanks so much, Preethi. And finally, we'd love to keep the conversation going, but it's the end of our session, so we'd just like to ask Shaheena to talk about her experience facilitating change management at Microsoft, focused on a country as large and diverse as India, with those cultural phenomena. Shaheena, go ahead.

[00:29:25] Shaheena: I think the mantra of the team is that change is the only constant, and change is the name of the game for us. For people working in my team, especially in emerging markets, there's so much uncertainty and ambiguity all the time. Embracing ambiguity is one of the resilient aspects a designer must have, and not getting married to anything that they're building, because that's going to be one of the biggest aspects that determines your growth. If you're married to a design or a product that you're building, then you will get obsessed with it, and your growth mindset will start slashing off.

[00:30:06] Again, if any individual is getting buy-in, you should be immediately detached from it from that date, because you don't own it. The way it should play out is that you make your team own it. Everybody should own it. The moment everybody feels that they own it, with, as Preethi mentioned, beautiful things like show and tell, frequent communication and structured communication. It's a new project because you have proposed it, but people should not be feeling that because she has proposed it, she's trying to make us work and take the credit. Human psychology plays a very, very important role. You have to make people own it. Whether it's third parties or customers, you have to learn to build with them. Make sure that they feel they are owning part of it, that they are the decision makers, and that you take a back seat. Because eventually, no matter how much you are invested in it, if others don't feel invested, they won't work towards making it as successful as you want. So relationship building should be your co-priority from day one.

[00:31:08] Nigel: Thank you so much, Shaheena. We've covered so many themes today: communication, relationships, getting buy-in and going beyond data. We want to again thank our amazing panelists, Shaheena, Jasper and Preethi, for their time and effort in coming to share their experiences with all of you. We see that there are many questions left for the panelists on our UXDX platform. We will ask the panelists to get to those when they have time and can see the questions, but for now we've got to end today's session. If you have any more questions, you can find each of our panelists' LinkedIn profiles linked on the UXDX website and reach out to them there. We hope everyone is staying safe, and have a great rest of the day, as well as a great rest of the UXDX conference.