Building a Strong Design Community and Culture

Cindy Chastain at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlk4LhQy1_8

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.

A slightly unconventional start

[00:00:06] I'm going to be a little unconventional for this one. Up to about five minutes ago we weren't sure if my slides would be available for screening, but it looks like they are, so that's a good thing. I'm going to sit down like I'm at my home. I have my water. I don't have my tea. I have to admit this is the first time I've actually presented since the pandemic, but I'm really proud of myself that I put on my hard pants and left my slippers at home.

[00:00:38] The other thing I was going to say: if you're okay with it, I would feel much more comfortable if I could talk to you through this. You think I'm kidding. Not really, okay. That was my one prop, a new little experiment. Anyway, it's great to see you all. Nothing like the rush of technology and what that may or may not bring, especially in a physical world.

[00:01:06] But I'm really excited to be here today, because two years ago I was with UXDX in Dublin, and today I'm going to talk about a subject that I've been really passionate about for quite a long time, and that is culture change. I know there was a panel before and unfortunately I was so distracted by the tech I didn't get to hear it, but I love that there's probably a possible tie-in here.

[00:01:35] I've been at Mastercard for almost eight years now, and some people would say, really? That seems like a long time. Most people in today's world, especially now, will jump to new roles after three to five years. That's just what people do. So why did I stay? Not only do I really like Mastercard as a company and what we're doing in the world, I'm really excited about the path we're on. I feel like I now have the advantage of a level of understanding that I wouldn't have if I had jumped ship after five years.

[00:02:12] And I love transformation. It's awesome. Most people say you're a total glutton for punishment. But change is hard and it takes time. So now I feel like I have the benefit of hindsight as well as a level of confidence and experience that will enable me to help take this cultural change that's been happening and move the needle into the next phase.

What Mastercard does, and why the business model matters

[00:02:45] First, a little bit about Mastercard, really quickly. Most people really don't know what we do, so I like to start with a brief introduction. Mastercard is essentially a technology company in payments. What we do is we connect consumers, merchants, banks, digital partnerships, governments and other organizations to enable electronic payments instead of cash.

[00:03:15] What's really exciting is that we're also looking at new innovations, in new areas and with new customers, that leverage our network into areas that extend beyond payments. For example, we're trying to figure out how to scale our network to solve for digital identity, a big problem. And we're also constantly looking for new business flywheels that are coming out of emerging technologies such as quantum computing and the metaverse that everyone keeps talking about.

[00:03:46] But essentially, and this is important for what I'm going to talk about today, we are a B2B2C company. What that means is we create technology and products for our customers that deliver value to their end customers. Consequently it's on us to create things that our customers actually need and that can help run their business. And because we're a B2B2C company, that comes with a whole set of other challenges, like how can we ensure that our customers are also delivering an effective experience. So even though we're a B2B2C, we sometimes say we really should behave like a B2C2B and really design for the end customer, even though their customers may be getting our APIs and delivering on something. So this is really important context.

What we mean by culture, and the idea of guilds

[00:04:38] So what do we mean by culture? Simply put, to me culture is about the shared mindset and common behaviors. It's the way we think and act in the day-to-day in our work. How many of you here are in product? Lots. How many of you are engineering? How many design, big-D design, inclusive? Okay, awesome, so it's a really mixed audience. I love that.

[00:05:12] What I'm excited to talk about today is how Mastercard is actually creating professional guilds within the company, and that is at the core of our cultural transformation. Guilds were around for, I don't know, five years in the company, but they were kind of limited to one corner of our company. And if you go back even further, I don't know if you have these in your companies, but the guilds have their root in the medieval associations where craftsmen would oversee their various crafts and trades. This is a quite famous Rembrandt picture of the Drapers' Guild.

[00:05:57] But what's really cool about what's happening now inside of Mastercard is we're establishing guilds for critical functions that are for Mastercard; they're not just one business unit. I'm going to talk about the customer experience and design guild, but we have also created a software developer engineering guild, we have a product guild, we have a biz ops guild. There are about eight in total. This is something that I'm so excited about, because we're only about one year into our journey, but we've really seen the tremendous impact that can have in the context of a culture within an organization.

[00:06:41] So what I'm going to do is take you through five steps. Not necessarily sequential, but maybe five things we did in order to start to shift the culture inside of Mastercard as it relates to customer experience and design. All right, I'm going to take this moment to sit so I can chat.

Step one: figuring out who the guild members are

[00:07:04] The first thing we had to do is figure out who our guild members are. We had to establish the people that we wanted to have in the guild. The beautiful, complicated thing about Mastercard is that design had grown up pretty organically as a company since I'd arrived, meaning there were, I'd say, four larger teams that worked on multiple products and services in a partnership relationship, and then there was a smattering of what I call cells or pods that were embedded in product teams for specific products.

[00:07:48] The problem with that is that there were about as many ways of working as you can imagine as there were teams, and also the level of maturity within those teams was varied. So the first thing we needed to do was figure out how we are going to govern. The idea of creating a guild was really wonderful, because we had also not had a single sponsor at a leadership level for all of design. What the guild enabled us to do is have the ability to govern the practice all across Mastercard. And it was meant to be a community, driven and governed by the community.

[00:08:28] So the first thing that we did to see this is we created a governance structure. This was what we decided would be the best way to organize and to make decisions, and really make this feel like it was a community-driven thing. We have a board, just like you would have a board of directors, comprised of the senior-most leaders in various disciplines. We even have people who are hired in to be discipline leads. We have someone who is a VP for content design; she is responsible for ensuring that we're driving best practices, along with her team, across Mastercard.

[00:09:06] And then we have a core team. The beautiful thing about this is that these aren't people who are doing this as a hobby or a volunteer effort on top of their day jobs. They have time carved out. We have one person who is a full-time program manager for the guild, but the others have a specific portion of their time carved out to play a specific role in their area. So this is important: we needed that governance structure.

Defining the disciplines and job families

[00:09:37] What we did next is we had to figure out what our disciplines are. In one area, in my team, we had codified these job families, as they're called in Mastercard, but we needed to do it for the company, because it was all over the place. There were designers who were labeled software engineers just because no one knew where to put them. I see someone shaking their head. Designers were in product development, and that just didn't help anyone really, nor did it help the practitioner.

[00:10:07] So what we decided to do is move away from the catch-all phrase of UX. Part of that was, and I'll be quite honest, I had a lot of baggage inside of Mastercard, they had a lot of baggage, because people perceived the UX team as the folks who worked on the screens, versus how it works and the strategy and all of that.

[00:10:31] What we did is we defined three primary job families, which are the ones that you see at the top, and they're probably recognizable. Product experience design would be the generalist, the person who's really thinking about the overall how it works as well as the functionality, closer to a UX generalist. But we thought it was really important to call it product experience design. And then content design, which I feel is woefully still underrepresented within companies today. I don't know if you see that as well, because it's so important as a discipline to drive an excellent experience.

[00:11:11] Then we have three secondary, and these people, there are fewer of them, but it was important to have people focused on experience strategy, really looking at market landscape, partnering with product about customer value propositions, looking at early-stage needs discovery, things like that. And then we have a smaller number of visual designers, and then design ops, which is pretty nascent.

[00:11:38] But the beautiful thing is we didn't intend for this to be that everyone has only one role. There are some people where all I do is experience research, which is great, but we also have product experience designers who have experience and can also do research, and we love that too, because we want to create what I would refer to as T-shaped people: people who have depth as well as breadth, especially as they go up in the world.

Building a career framework

[00:12:04] So once we codified our job families we needed to help people figure out what it means to be in this role and what they do. The first thing I wanted to call out is this idea of interdisciplinary teams. One of the other biases, that I'm guessing I'll see some shaking heads around, is that someone needs a designer and they want a unicorn. One person, I just need that designer. Okay, but you probably are not going to get the best value out of that, nor will that person want to stay and work for you very long. This is a really competitive market, and people want great conditions. They want to work within teams, they want to work collaboratively with people they can learn from.

[00:12:52] So we started to talk about this idea, and we also aligned it to what's called our studio framework, which I'll talk about a little later. Our product guild and another team are really looking at how we're standardizing our go-to-market process to de-risk our investments, with product councils at every step of the way. That's now called the studio. It's not meant to be a process but really a framework. Basically we're saying there's a mix of these disciplines that should be present, and it doesn't mean that every dot is a single person, but a mix of disciplines, and it could change depending on the size and the complexity of the effort, as many of you know.

[00:13:35] And then I think I have to stand up for this one. We had to create a career framework for each of the job families. I can't believe we just didn't have that, as long as I've been in Mastercard, because it was kind of defined within teams. What does it mean for me to get promoted from a senior to the next level? What am I expected to do in my role?

[00:13:57] So what we did, and I don't know if this is going to work because this is a small video, so I might have to talk through it: this is an example, the career navigator. We have all the functions on the left, and not all these functions have guilds, but there is customer experience and design, we have a guild, and those are the six job families. If you are a person who's just joined Mastercard as a product experience designer and you want to understand what you can do... oh, it's working, hooray.

[00:14:32] So I've got product experience design. I can see the trees for an individual contributor or a people manager. What does it mean to be a director? I can see everything that's expected of me, job-specific experience as well as skills. They call them technical skills; I don't like the nomenclature, but it's really the things that you do. One of the skills that we've listed, and there are skills for each of the job families, is concept ideation and solution design. What does it mean to be advanced? What does it mean to be an expert?

[00:15:06] This was a great way to level-set all of this stuff across Mastercard, because even within my team, because we're a merger of multiple teams, there were not consistent expectations around what we should be doing. The other thing about this career framework is it was somewhat aspirational. I mentioned our business model and the challenges that Mastercard has. We can't just pick up and do what Spotify does really well; that will not work for Mastercard. We can learn from all sorts of examples out there, but we needed to find and identify the skills that were important for what we're trying to do, and how we're organizing ourselves, and how we're trying to operate as a company.

Step two: the skills inventory

[00:15:49] Okay, so that was the first thing. The second thing is, now we have to find out, okay, we have a guild, we have card-carrying members as we like to call them, so what can they do? What skills do they have? And why is this important? Well, first of all, we wanted to understand how to strengthen the guild. I firmly believe that our maturity as a community in Mastercard is key to driving business success. Creating products that will actually get used and scale in market, we need to have mature, highly skilled teams.

[00:16:31] Also, we needed a baseline, because we needed to show our leadership why we needed to invest in learning and development, what skills gaps we needed to close. And then the third thing is we wanted to show the guild members that we were listening to them: we actually hear you, and we want to help you grow. Because what I've been hearing is that one of the most important things for people nowadays when they're applying for jobs is, what are you going to do for me? What learning and development are you going to provide?

[00:16:59] So this part was super important. But what we decided is that we didn't want to call it an assessment. We didn't want it to feel like a test, because that would feel really weird, and we didn't want people to feel that there'd be negative repercussions for having gone through this. So we decided to call it an inventory, which is a little bit safer. It's about asking people, hey, of these skills, based on the career framework, how many times have you done it? A few times, never, or you've done it so many times that you can actually lead teams doing those exercises. That's pretty safe, so that people aren't being over-optimistic about what they can do. It just gives us a read. It doesn't tell us about the quality, but it tells us what people are doing.

[00:17:43] This is an example of the readout that came back just for product experience design. Those are the six skills, within which there are a number of other things, and I'll talk about one that came out low. This is a five-point scale. Most of it wasn't bad. One of those that came out low was customer journey management. Now, we struggle with this name. This is what's getting closer to service design, but we didn't want to call it service design because it was too big and we're not ready for it, I don't think, yet. But it's really about understanding the customer, the end customer, in such a way that you can make strategic decisions, you can bring insights to bear on that journey, you could keep managing the journey over time and measuring. There's lots of applications for it inside of Mastercard, all the way through commercialization.

[00:18:35] People were good at journey mapping. Yeah, most people can do that, not that everyone understands the same meaning of what that looks like or what good looks like. But where we saw gaps were blueprinting, mapping front and backstage interactions, using mapping to identify opportunities for differentiation, tying it to research and data. Not so great. So that was an area of opportunity for us.

[00:19:05] Then, we've learned so many things about this. We had about an 89% response rate, which was pretty incredible. And what we found is really interesting too. That top graph is basically showing the mix of people in a particular job family. Overwhelmingly, most of our population are product experience designers, which made sense too. We have fewer dedicated experience researchers, fewer experience strategists with that title. But the second, bottom graph shows that there's a bigger mix that goes beyond what people have. That was super interesting, and actually didn't surprise us at all.

[00:19:53] We cut the data in so many ways, but some of the other takeaways were: there are a lot of additional competencies, yet they're often limited in nature, maybe more like a sprinkling of additional things versus true expertise. And we realized that almost everyone would benefit from learning new skills. I don't think anyone could say that they can't, but at least the skills inventory enabled us to say that. And then finally, the lack of skills progression is not clear in some org structures. But everybody wanted to learn, 100%, and there was a whole list of things that we looked at. I hate to call them soft skills, but they're more like human leadership skills, that people also wanted to learn as well.

[00:20:47] So I have to say this is probably one of the best things we did, because it gave us that baseline, and it will set us up for what we want to do in this year, which I'll talk about a little later.

Step three: establishing a vision

[00:21:01] All right, the third thing: establishing a vision. If you think about it, communities are the glue of culture, really. But a community is something that also has at its foundation, needs to have, a shared purpose and vision. How many of you have read the book Team of Teams? Anybody? It's my boss's favorite book, so I had to read it. I listened to it, read it, whatever that's called. It's one of those books, but it's really interesting. The things that enable autonomous, interdependent teams who work together and can make decisions without top-down instructions are the teams that have shared visions.

[00:21:56] It's super important, and I think that goes within integrated product teams. So, taking a cue from that notion, we spent some time really thinking about what we are doing. At the highest level our vision is pretty simple. We want to strengthen and grow, and not just grow our people but grow our numbers as well. And we want to accelerate: by doing so we're going to help Mastercard move faster in this cultural change, so that we can create experiences that will fuel our business. Because it's not enough that we can sell things. They have to get used. That's the thing we keep saying over and over again.

Clarifying the scope of design

[00:22:39] The other piece of the vision, the secondary level, is clarifying the scope of design. Now, I don't know about you, but I've seen it inside Mastercard, I've seen it in places I've worked before Mastercard: there's not always the common agreement in terms of what design does, should do, how they function. A lot of people will bring their perspectives based on where they worked before, where they've worked in other places of Mastercard. So clarifying the scope, and the role in the relationship, is really important.

[00:23:11] How many of you talk about the three legs of the stool? Sometimes people call this the balanced breakthrough model. That's it. Anyway, this is really important to me because at the end of the day it should be a partnership. There should be literacy across the board. So those of you who are in product and engineering, you should ideally have a design lead who's at the seat of the table with you. Why? Because design is what will ensure desirability. Design for us, in partnership with product and engineering, will ensure that products get used.

[00:23:52] And so when we think about the scope, at the highest level it's not getting into we create journey maps and we do wireframes and stuff like that. No, at the highest level it's that design is going to help us make sure that we're building the right things. Why? Because we're bringing in the right research to validate our hypotheses and identifying problem spaces to go after. It's going to help ensure, in collaboration with product and engineering, that we're building and designing things right, because we're actually doing experimentation, we're learning from research in the process of prototyping and deeper design. What are the right features? Are we creating an experience that's great?

[00:24:39] And then finally, this is unique to Mastercard: are we making it easy to deliver through our customers? So it's not only the interactions that Mastercard has with our partners in that go-to-market process, but it's about ensuring that they can successfully deliver, and what things do we need to help them with, because they're all different. Traditional banks, they need a lot of help. Fintechs less so. And so we have to look after that.

[00:25:04] Now, the great thing about this is that we have a common language. People are starting to use this inside of Mastercard and starting to talk about the three legs of the stool, and because of our partnership with the product guild and engineering, quite frankly they're saying the same thing. So it's not just us doing it, not waving our flag and hoping that people get on board. It's becoming a common framework, if you will.

The studio framework and what guild members do

[00:25:31] Now, to take it a step further, to talk about what we do: this is our studio framework. At the highest level it looks like a process, but it's really the stage gates where things go through product council to make sure that we're de-risking investments at the next stage. Because we have a ton of things, like all the things that go to the product council, we want to kill things early on, because there's no point in building or spending time on a product that's not going to be successful, or that's going to only be adopted by four customers in the world. That doesn't make business sense.

[00:26:04] And so when we talk about what we do, again we have a detailed list of activities and deliverables and all of that stuff, but at the highest level, what do guild members do? Well, we actually help support concept development and value proposition design. And then why? We want to validate desirability in the product value proposition. Why? We want to ensure that the experience is differentiated. That's really important, and this is something that just speaks to everyone. No one will say we don't want that. They do want that.

[00:26:41] But it also gives the team, wherever they sit, whether in those small cells or the bigger teams, when they're partnering with product teams, because sometimes you get pushback. I don't know if you've heard this, but: no, we don't have time for research, sorry. Well, if you don't have time for research you might end up spending 100 times more later for not having done that research. And so it's really important to arm your people with the ability to be a partner and say, hey, I think we probably need to do this, and that's why, and this is how we're working in Mastercard. No one can argue.

Step four: building a community people want to engage with

[00:27:20] So creating that vision is really key, but at the end of the day you also need to build a community, and you need to build a community that people want to engage with, where people see value in the community. We wanted to really create something that was not just a community in name. The idea of community can seem a little nebulous. A community, we're a community of scientists, or we're a community of practitioners. But how can you build a community that actually has real fellowship, that learns from each other, that actually is invested in building things together? That's a very different kind of community, and so we thought a lot about that.

[00:28:12] Going back to the Team of Teams thing, we created, and we'll see if this video works, I'm going to try it out, we decided we'd need some values. What are our team values? So we did what designers do, and they went off and got input from people, synthesized the results and created a manifesto for the teams, for the guild. So let's see if this works.

[00:28:36] We deliver innovative yet practical solutions with passion and pride. We believe design thinking is just plain thinking. We are visionaries. We believe that design goes deeper than an interface, and curiosity should be rewarded. We are strategic minds. We are not afraid to have difficult conversations, because asking hard questions builds stronger business. We are guardians of customer experience. We celebrate individual contributions and expertise, but we share our success. We know it's our responsibility to create a more inclusive, supportive and authentic workspace. We are each other's community. We are Mastercard CX and Design.

[00:29:33] That's so nice. Oh, thank you, I didn't expect that, but it always is touching to me whenever I see that. Anyway, so that was good. We have to keep coming back to the values. You just can't share it once, but it does start to seep into consciousness.

Ways to engage: spotlights, mentorship, committees and a conference

[00:29:53] So what are the ways to engage? These are just some of the things that we set up. One of the things that I'm most excited about are our spotlight series. We have that every six weeks or so, where guild members come and share case studies, something new that they learned, a new method, et cetera. It's a great way for people to come up. We actually have friends of the guild, and we have more friends of the guild than we have guild members. So we encourage product and engineering and others that are, I would call them, CX or design curious, to join as well, and they pop in because they want to learn.

[00:30:25] We also have a fantastic mentorship program. About 40% of our guild was participating as a mentor or mentee, for people who wanted to learn from someone across the organization or within another team.

[00:30:40] We also have committees. This is really important, because we established committees that also were part of our governance structure. So if it's a guild run by people, we have a tools committee, we have a community engagement committee, we have a learning and development committee, we have a best practices committee. Each one of those committees has a lead, and then there are members that they meet, I don't know how often quite frankly, but they actually make decisions, and they bring ideas forward in those key areas.

[00:31:13] And we also, what I'm really excited about, is that three weeks from now we're going to have our first ever internal conference. I know a lot of companies do this; this is the first time we've done it. But we are so excited about this, because it's going to kick off our learning and development program for 2022, focused on three of the key skills that we pulled out of the inventories. We have blocks dedicated to those skills, and we're so excited about the programming that we're going to open it up to all guilds, or anyone who wants to come. Because we've also found that it's really important to drive literacy and understanding amongst our partners to drive better collaboration, and so there are things to learn and understand that we think will be really valuable for all people.

[00:32:04] And then, what are the outcomes for this so far? So we haven't done an employee engagement survey or a guild survey yet about sentiment with the community so far, but the numbers really speak for themselves. For this year we're really aiming for clear, measurable outcomes in terms of the number of people who are attending events, increasing our mentorship program, as well as improving the skills. So we're going to go deeper into the skills development to be able to measure cohorts from their baseline going forward.

Step five: tools and ways of working

[00:32:47] And the last one: tools and ways of working. You can't forget about tools. Everything up to now just required the board, the core team, partnership with HR, and participation by the community. It didn't require any budget at all, which is fantastic. Just a lot of people, a lot of sweat equity going into it. But when it came to tools, and ways of working or learning and development, we had some investments we needed to make. And the great thing about what we were doing is that there was sponsorship from the top. They knew we needed funding.

[00:33:29] And so there were many conversations had around, well, what's the baseline set of tools, because in order for people to collaborate and to share files and to move from one team to another you want to have a common suite. So this is just an example of how we were kind of sharing the story to leadership. It's not the final final list, but you have to help people understand what tools you have and what they're for. And so we have research tools, and we have tools such as our proprietary design system that everyone's using, and we have tools for collaboration. And what we realized is a lot of these tools could actually be used by folks in product and engineering, and so that made it an even stronger business case when it came to the investments. It was just a question of how much.

[00:34:14] The great thing about having a common suite of tools, in terms of the outcomes there, is that one, the design system, which we've been working on for several years, this has made it a 100% use for those who would need to use a design system, but it's reduced their time in production by 30% or 40%, giving them more time to be creative and to innovate. We have credits for the whole guild for a research platform. It's been a really great partner, and they don't have to ask for money to do some studies, and they can do them more quickly. And so that's just unlocked a whole bunch of things. And we're also moving to Figma, which is really exciting.

Learning and development

[00:34:58] So then, learning and development. I'm probably most excited about learning and development because I just think it's so important, and I think people have been starving, quite honestly starving, for the last two years, because for us everything's been flat. It's hard to do things online and people just want to grow. And so now we have a foundation for doing that.

[00:35:19] Our goal is twofold. We need to level-set skills across the guild, because as I mentioned before, based on the skills inventory, they're quite uneven. And two, we want to strengthen and extend. We want people to be able to get new skills and to grow from there.

[00:35:39] And so we are doing a couple of things related to our learning and development program. With our best practices committee, they are starting to unleash best practices that can be used to level-set and, frankly, keep people from having to reinvent the wheel. We have a really great one on how to do friends and family interviews, replete with a Mural board and information around how to synthesize the information. And by the way, anybody could use this. We consider this agnostic. If you're a product person and you want to start doing interviews, fantastic. Because we all need to come together and figure out what skills are missing in that team, not just within the design team but across that cross-functional team working on a product initiative.

[00:36:27] And the other thing, to strengthen our skills: this is just a framework, I'm not going to go into the messy details, but we really thought comprehensively about how we can do this in a way that's effective and measurable. And so we thought about the learning journey from awareness, to top-line education, to immersion, and then application. So after a cohort goes through, let's say, a deep focus on experience research, they would go apply what they've learned in one of their day-to-day jobs and then come back with a cohort and talk about what they learned. Did it work? Did they do anything new, and that sort of thing. They need that application piece. And the great thing is, when we create these materials, a lot of things we're creating in-house and sometimes some within partnerships, but we feel like we can syndicate those through the studio to set up best practices that go beyond the guild as well.

Key takeaways

[00:37:24] So I'm getting to the end. I think this is good timing, right? Okay, I'd lost track when we started. I just, so I said this, we're about a year in, as I said a little over a year, and I think by 2024 this is going to be really solid.

[00:37:46] But when I think about the key takeaways right now, because I know it's been a challenge, one of my sort of naivetes before having done this is that you think from wherever you are you can start to drive cultural change, you can bring teams on board. And it's really hard. You can influence a team or a corner of the organization, but you can't do it at scale.

[00:38:10] And so doing it at scale, no matter what size your organization is, to me requires first and foremost that you have a coordinated effort. It doesn't have to be a guild, it could be something else, with sponsorship from leadership. And you also need to have people who are going to work on this as part of their job. What I often have seen is people creating toolkits and things like that outside of their day-to-day, and that just doesn't work in order to make it effective. And you need budget to be able to do that, and sometimes for the people.

[00:38:52] And then finally, or almost finally, it requires partnership and collaboration. We could not have done this if we were doing this in a silo. We were really lucky that it was not just a customer experience and design guild, but we were standing up a product guild, and an engineering guild kind of started before we did. And we're looking at how we share things across the board. We're putting something in the product guild's newsletter so they hear about what we're doing, and vice versa. And that's really helped drive that common narrative and the story that is so important for reshaping our own culture at Mastercard, as well as our operating model and how we better collaborate.

[00:39:38] And then it goes without saying, you've got to get past passion and participation for the team. And what I've found is I think this has kind of really energized people in a way. We probably have more work to do, but there's a core where it's like, all right, we're headed somewhere, this feels good. And I think that's really important when it comes to just overall satisfaction.

[00:40:03] So I hope this was useful in some way and that you learned something practical that you can actually think about, because I do think doing this is really hard. And the idea of cultural change, your culture I should say, is no longer the thing that is heard in the halls of HR, or the check box fulfilled by putting a couple of pool tables somewhere on your open plan. Culture has become a boardroom, CEO-level topic. But not all people know how to get there. I didn't know how to get there, but after having gone through this I see how it can change in some ways. And so that's my story. So thank you, everyone.

Q&A

[00:40:58] Host: Thank you so much, Cindy, that was incredible. We're doing some of these things at LinkedIn that I'm really excited to chat with you about, but a lot of it I also was inspired by, so many of the ideas. And one of the things that I noticed too is how beautiful your slides are and how much that helps in the presentation.

[00:41:14] Cindy: We almost didn't have slides.

[00:41:17] Host: Yeah, but I'm sure also internally, using them internally to communicate what your team has done and what you've done, is really inspirational. I am assuming there are tons of questions in the audience. I have time for one if we want to do that. Okay. There's a throwable mic and I don't want to throw it, but someone will. Here, I see a question in there.

[00:41:46] Audience: Hi, thank you for sharing your knowledge and your story. Something that called my attention was that the third point that you mentioned was setting a vision, and I would have imagined, or I would have thought, that that would be something that comes up earlier in the process rather than as a third or later in the process. Can you explain sort of the rationale behind that?

[00:42:19] Cindy: Yeah, and that's a good point, because I did have one small point that I wanted to make, and I'm glad you're bringing this up. I wanted to emphasize these were not the sequential steps. Quite frankly, we were doing steps one through four simultaneously. It was just that we did have to start with, what are the job families, what's the career framework, assign the job families, and then once you get it, you're actually in our HR system, then you know you're guild, you have the data. Once we had the guild members, then it was the vision and the community and all that stuff, that were kind of happening at the same time. But I would agree, you have to start with that. So in our kickoff we had a vision that we then started to evolve as we learned more.

[00:43:08] Audience: Thank you.

[00:43:12] Cindy: But yeah, I agree.

[00:43:12] Host: Thank you, I really appreciate you taking another question. Another round of applause for Cindy, please.

[00:43:15] Cindy: Okay, thank you.