Building Customer Intuition Across the Product Lifecycle

Marine Palamutyan, Morgan Davis at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/rGepTNWEOeY

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.

What does customer intuition even mean?

[00:00:09] Morgan: Hello. Thanks for that great introduction. We're super excited to be here today.

[00:00:12] Marine: Yes. Thank you.

[00:00:12] Morgan: It's our first time in Berlin. We don't mind the weather, but it's been a great time so far. Okay. By a quick show of hands, how many of you know what customer intuition means in the context of product development? Wow, no hands. Okay, cool. How many of you have no idea what it means? Great. Well, you're not alone, because we didn't either.

[00:00:38] When our new chief product officer joined, one of the big asks of the research team was to help build a stronger customer intuition for the organization. And we were like, what does this mean? How do you build intuition? How would you measure intuition? And what would success even look like? We had some pause, of course, and some, you might call it, analysis paralysis, but we had to start somewhere, and we had some fresh ideas. We were ready to get started on our mission, and it was a challenge accepted.

[00:01:20] Where we started was giving it a working definition, to give some structure to what felt like a pretty ambiguous task. This is the definition that we landed on: the ability to understand and anticipate the customer needs, pain points and behaviors throughout the product life cycle. But let's be honest, even with a definition, this was still a daunting task, because to truly understand and anticipate customer needs, we had to understand and anticipate the needs of nearly 1.7 million customers.

[00:02:01] To put that in perspective, that's more than the population of San Francisco. In fact, we actually looked it up last night: that's also more than the population of San Francisco and Frankfurt combined. So it's a massive scale. And DocuSign has more than 1 billion users. That's more than the population of all the Americas combined, with signers on every continent. Yes, even Antarctica. And this is what AI thinks one of those users may look like. Is it even a talk if we don't mention AI? We had to, but we'll let you be the judge of that.

[00:02:39] Okay. In addition to our scaling user base, the company was also evolving over the years, from an e-signature company to an intelligent agreement management platform. This new AI platform helps our customers unlock all the data in PDFs and helps accelerate their business decision making. So we had a combination of things. We had product evolution. We had massive scale of our customers, which meant that we had to build customer intuition for a range of use cases, industries and geographies.

[00:03:17] We had a couple of things going for us. We had leadership support. We had a definition of customer intuition. So everything was stacking up neatly, and we had the perfect plan. Right, Mar?

[00:03:30] Marine: No, actually we didn't. Because the reality is our worlds aren't perfect, and that's okay. It's messy. How the plan really started is we had these puzzle pieces and some sense of direction, but not that perfect pyramid that Morgan just shared. We had to figure out how to put all the pieces together so it made sense for our business, our teams, and ultimately the customers we serve.

The strategy document and its components

[00:03:59] Morgan: So how did we build customer intuition? Well, like any good project, we started with a strategy document, and we even named that strategy document our vision of building cross-functional intuition. That cross-functional intuition piece is key. This became our North Star, and we wanted to make sure that this document wasn't just something that we wrote and forgot about. It really grounded us and it grounded our team. It helped us identify and prioritize all the key components that we wanted to focus on to transform customer intuition into a breathing part of how we work.

[00:04:44] Marine: First we had to tackle the insights life cycle, or reimagining how we bring insights to the business to help make decisions, incorporate the insights and ultimately innovate. We did name it the insights life cycle because it gave us this fresh lens to think about how we make those improvements and what that looks like.

[00:05:04] But it wasn't just about collecting insights. It was also about amplifying them. We needed to provide different modes for our partners to learn those insights and ingest and digest them. We needed to make sure the insights were not only helping teams that were actively building, but we wanted to spread them broadly in the organization and up into executive leadership.

[00:05:32] We also knew that we couldn't just focus on things that are on the roadmap. We had to scout out new opportunities, think more than one to two quarters or even six months out, so that we can follow where the business is going, where customers are needing. So we had to scout out opportunities.

[00:05:50] Morgan: Additionally, we had been building this cross-functional muscle and partnerships over the last few years, and we had seen the value that these partnerships bring to our projects. So we knew that we had to incorporate this as a major component of building intuition across the company.

[00:06:11] Marine: In parallel, we had also started developing this culture of measurement to make more data-driven decisions. So we combined measurement and intuition. We thought it was a no-brainer, and actually our counterparts did a deep dive talk on this last week in New York. So if you're interested, make sure to catch the recording of that.

[00:06:32] Our company uses OKRs, and this is how we plan and commit to the work that we are doing. So we finalized this strategy, got aligned, turned it into a shared commitment with our broader team, and made it part of our OKRs for the year.

The customer intuition pyramid

[00:06:51] Morgan: All these efforts naturally started to stack into this pyramid, and into three main categories that really became the backbone of our approach. The first layer was foundation and intuition. This was really where we focused on creating a shared understanding of who our customers are, their needs, their behaviors and their pain points. We wanted to make sure that intuition wasn't just a buzzword, but that it was rooted in something that we could return to again and again.

[00:07:27] Marine: The next was building together. We got really intentional to figure out how we embed intuition into the product development process, because we didn't want insights to be this static thing that lives on a deck, the ones you've seen and then never looked at again. We wanted it to be a live collaboration where cross-functional teams are making decisions together and solving problems.

[00:07:53] Morgan: And at the top of the pyramid, and this will come up again and again, are these cross-org partnerships. This is really the secret sauce to building intuition, because customer intuition is everyone's responsibility. The more connected you are with your cross-functional teams, the stronger the decisions become. These partnerships help you scale local efforts into broader ecosystems, and that really gives much more of a push to the work that you're doing.

[00:08:28] These were the three categories that really gave us structure. But what we really liked about this model was that it gave us flexibility, because we were able to identify which aspects of these levels we wanted to focus on. So we had different experiments, and we adapted and focused our energy on certain categories that were important to us, that we felt were gaps and opportunities.

[00:09:00] But building intuition doesn't happen in a pyramid like that, in that kind of framework. It happens across all stages of the product life cycle. Those three intuition-building components that emerged from the work really map to how we build products at DocuSign. Take the first one here, foundation and intuition. This is where foundational knowledge comes from just listening to customers and their pain points. Those pain points inspire the briefs. Those briefs become more formalized plans, and then as those plans evolve through the product life cycle, the building begins, and then we release product.

[00:09:48] As we build together through different stages, we incorporate the customer's voice and the insights that we collect in each stage, and we work cross-functionally. Again, it seems like a theme that's going to keep coming up: there is power in working cross-functionally with other teams. So it's an ongoing process of building and nurturing those relationships.

[00:10:10] Marine: Essentially, this is an alternative view of the customer intuition pyramid we showed, one that shows how each layer is used while we build. So now we'll dive into specific examples from each of those layers.

Foundation: customer coffee chats

[00:10:24] Morgan: First up is that base layer, the foundation and intuition. We already had some great foundational tools in place. We had personas, we had Jobs to be Done frameworks that helped us understand our users, and that really gave us a great starting point. But they didn't quite give us the human connection that teams were really looking for. We wanted teams not just to know about our customers; we wanted them to actually hear the customer voices, listen to real stories, listen to those pain points directly. One of the impactful ways that we started doing that was with a new initiative we called customer coffee chats.

[00:11:16] Marine: These are bimonthly, 45-minute virtual fireside chats to which we invite customers from different industries, experiences and backgrounds, and we have honest conversations with them. We ask how the overall experience is going, what's working, what's not working. We even collect their wish list items through those conversations. By design, it's product agnostic. We don't focus on a specific feature or a roadmap item; we try to let the customer naturally drive the conversation to what's top of mind for them at that point.

[00:11:47] We actually extend the invite to other teams: product, engineering, marketing and sales. Everyone who wants to listen directly to customers is welcome to join, because the goal is to make listening to customers a regular habit. As a result, so far we've had over 600 people attend the various chats we've had. We're researchers, so of course we collect feedback, and they found all the content valuable. It also inspired us to spin up other versions of similar interactions with customers, where we target specific personas and invite those individuals and customers to share their experience.

[00:12:37] Morgan: And these chats are not only led by research. There are product managers that lead these chats. There are designers that lead them. So it's really been inspirational for our partners.

[00:12:50] Some successes with customer coffee chats, and some tips. Seek inspiration. We talked about seeking inspiration earlier, and in this case you don't have to start from scratch. There's inspiration everywhere, whether it's something that you see on social media or networking at an event like UXDX. So keeping your eyes out for inspiration is always a great starting point.

[00:13:26] Gain leadership support. This one is critical, because having leadership support gives you more visibility and gives you easier access to customers and resources. In this case, we created a one-pager about our initiative and shared it with our chief product officer, and they attended the very first, inaugural customer coffee chat and welcomed the customer to the event. So that was a great win for us.

[00:13:57] And finally, it's important to make it fun. We want to have fun when we're doing our work, and the same is true for customer coffee chats. So we had custom branding, we had custom Zoom backgrounds, Slack emojis, and we even created a theme song using AI.

[00:14:20] Marine: Yep. That song is still in my head right now.

[00:14:24] There are some pitfalls that could be avoided. For example, the recruiting criteria. We all know getting customers to come and spend the time with us is already a heavy lift, so keeping the criteria open helps keep it broad, and you can invite essentially anyone to speak because they're all our customers. Don't strive for perfection. The first few, if you do decide to do them, will be choppy, and it's okay, you learn from it. The important thing is to just get started and do a few, then you can make iterations. And don't give up. There will be resistance and some blockers, but there's tremendous value in continuously hearing from customers. So just keep advocating for that.

Building together: insights to action

[00:15:11] Okay. We touched on the foundation layer, and now we move to the second layer. This builds on that foundational knowledge and takes it a step further. This is where we really start encouraging the teams to use that customer intuition while they're building. So this is the active motion, and one of the key initiatives that we introduced for building together is something that we called insights to action.

[00:15:40] Last year we made the deliberate shift away from traditional research reports and readouts. Has anyone attended one of those, where the researcher just drops a lot of knowledge on you and then you have to go figure out how to take action on it? Yes. Okay, cool. We converted it to more of an interactive workshop, where the researcher is facilitating and bringing the cross-functional teams together to make decisions, prioritize solutions and really take action. Because we deliver the insights; we want the team to make a decision on them and make changes.

[00:16:17] It has resulted in a lot of great impact so far. For example, there are specific insights that have now been turned into a Jira ticket. So there's a way to draw a line to how the research made an impact, because there's now a tangible ticket that someone's working on to make that improvement. And there are more discussions. The stakeholders really had the space to ideate, leverage each other's strengths and expertise, and really make a decision and solve customers' problems. So it's been a game changer so far.

[00:16:50] Morgan: A few takeaways, the dos on this one. Listen and adapt. This was really key to this project. Marine mentioned the traditional research model, where the researcher is sharing insights and it's a one-directional activity. Well, we received some feedback that those one-directional activities were feeling a bit passive, that they were feeling a bit too academic. That feedback can be a wake-up call not to get stuck in the way that things have always been done, and to really have a growth mindset and find new ways to have impact.

[00:17:34] Second is start small. When we experiment and try different techniques, we pilot and start with one team or one use case, then we develop a case study, and then we start shopping that case study around and gain momentum with it. And then trust the process. Behavior change is hard, and some partners were coming to those workshops expecting to sit and listen to insights. So there was some skepticism at first, but once they joined the workshop and started seeing how quickly we were able to turn insights into action, they were in.

[00:18:22] Marine: And a couple of things to avoid. Again, don't get stuck in tradition just because you've been doing it the same way for a long time. If it's not effective, then it's time to make a change, so be open to that. But you don't have to over-rotate. We don't have to scrap everything and start from scratch. There are components of the current process that work, so preserve them and then add whatever the team or the business needs at that point.

[00:18:48] And finally, don't overcrowd the workshop. It's going to feel tempting to invite everyone, but the challenge is that if there are too many voices and they're not decision makers, it actually slows the progress. So make sure the key people who are able to make those decisions and prioritize solutions are the ones in the room.

Cross-org partnerships: betas at DocuSign

[00:19:11] Morgan: All right, so we made it to the top of the pyramid here. This is where things really start to come together, where cross-org partnership is highlighted. This is where all the hard work that you're doing at the project level, or on those initiatives, and those deep cross-functional partnerships that you've been building and scaling over time, help you scale that initiative and help it grow in the organization.

[00:19:39] One powerful example that we have of this was our Betas at DocuSign program. Our beta operations team was in the process of solving for an inconsistent go-to-market beta process. There were unclear roles, undefined processes and some opportunities to improve ways of working. That team was looking for a way to establish entry and exit criteria for betas, and they found out that our team was developing a culture of measurement and was working through this challenge on our own.

[00:20:23] Marine: Through the culture of measurement, we established what I was referring to earlier, the experience scorecard, which allowed us to systematically measure the usefulness, usability and satisfaction of experiences, and we documented those results. That was the opportunity for us to partner, because the betas team was looking for a rigorous process, and this became one of the tools that they were able to incorporate in the process.

[00:20:53] Morgan: Together we aligned on clear entry and exit criteria and built a repeatable framework that added structure and clarity to betas. This meant that we weren't just testing for bugs and stability in our betas; we were testing whether the product was actually ready to be shipped, whether it was meeting the criteria of usefulness, satisfaction and usability. And if it wasn't, then we had a shared understanding to pause and decide what business action should be taken.

[00:21:25] By formalizing these checkpoints with our beta operations team, we moved from gut checks to data-backed decisions, because releasing products and features to millions of customers and billions of users is not something that we wanted to leave to guesswork.

[00:21:49] Some examples of the impact this partnership had. We had products that sometimes did not pass that criteria, and as a result the team did pause, evaluate and make pivots before moving into general availability. A second is that going through this process, we realized there was a gap in how research was supporting betas, to the point that we increased our research support for the beta program.

[00:22:39] Marine: And here are a few things we learned along the way. Be ready, meaning when these opportunities to partner arise, you have to be ready. Come prepared with context and data, and figure out how your work connects to theirs, so that we can make mutually beneficial decisions and partnerships. Seek larger systems. Don't just think about the problem in isolation. Understanding the bigger picture and how we can all work together to solve it is going to be beneficial for that cross-org partnership. And add value. When you approach these partnerships, don't come to the table with "what can I get out of this?" Think more about how you add value, and that opens up opportunities to build deeper partnerships across the organization.

[00:23:28] Morgan: Yeah, and building on that point, you can't push your agenda. When it comes to partnerships, you have to find equal value. You have to bring something, and your partner is bringing something, and you have to be flexible in order for cross-organizational work to happen. You can't walk in with too many expectations. You have to be open to different outcomes. Those outcomes might shift as the teams start talking about what really needs to happen, so you have to be open to pivoting based on that. And lastly, and it plays along the same theme, you can't be too rigid. Coming into a partnership with a rigid approach is generally not going to work well. You have to be flexible with processes and timelines, and that will increase the potential for success.

Where does your team sit?

[00:24:25] Marine: In the interest of time, we were only able to share a few of the examples, but there's a lot that we experimented with, implemented and continue to explore to strengthen customer intuition across our org. The foundational layer's customer coffee chat is just one of them. But the beauty of this framework is that, depending on where you are in terms of maturity or company size, there's a version of this that could work for you. So you have to figure out what the company and the team are ready for and tackle that first.

[00:24:57] Morgan: So think about where your team sits in this pyramid, whether there are categories that you might want to strengthen with your customer intuition, and what's one step that you could take today to get closer to your customers and bring the organization along with you. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:25:23] Host: I guess I'm going to stand in the middle here. Okay. I love this so much, because I like it when research acts entrepreneurial. I think that's the secret sauce for this: being entrepreneurial and also anticipating. So much is looking backwards, but that's not how we get to be creative and do cool stuff. All the stories we tell each other come from that. So I'm going to put one of you on the spot. I have led a few entrepreneurial things disrupting companies. It's not always smooth sailing. Can you give us a good example of some roadblocks you hit, something you had to overcome? You could do that or you can sing the theme song. It's your choice.

[00:26:00] Marine: I'll take the theme song, because there are too many roadblocks to go through. I'll pick one.

[00:26:04] Host: Pick one. Although we would love to hear you sing.

[00:26:09] Marine: I'll probably pick the insights to action workshop. The blocker with that, again, is just changing that culture of "we're just going to come and sit and listen" versus actively contributing. So there was definitely some pushback of, "Well, where's the deck? I need the deck." And it's like, well, what are you going to do with the deck? Are you going to take action? Let's make the space to solve for the problem, versus you just listening to the insights and then having to go schedule another meeting with product and design and ideate how to solve for it. But I think it was just having a few brave souls who were willing to do the pilot with us, and having a use case that worked well, and then everybody else was open to it.

[00:27:01] Host: Early adopters exist in companies. That's for sure. You've got to find them and you've got to treat them really well. Let me follow up on that really fast. Do you think that some of that "where's the deck" is code for "don't change my way"? Like, this is a kind of rubber stamp. I'm exaggerating here, but I listen to you researchers a little bit and then I go away. You're looking at Morgan.

[00:27:28] Morgan: Yeah, I'll tell the truth. Actually, our teams are really hungry for the insights. What we found was that when we brought the insight themes and they started actively working and seeing how quickly we could make commitments to what we wanted to fix with the product, we saw the action and the outcomes. Those case study successes help move any naysayers. They start seeing it, and then they start seeing their teams also doing it, and then it becomes part of the culture.

[00:28:09] Host: It's amazing. Go.

[00:28:12] Marine: I was going to say, it is a little bit of a checkmark: here, we've talked to the customer. But let's take it a step further and actually take action on those insights, because if you learn something and you don't do anything about it, then what's the point?

[00:28:24] Morgan: Yeah. Then you're stuck in the foundation phase, and we want to build customer intuition throughout the product life cycle.

[00:28:32] Host: I'm reminded of what Rory said in his earlier talk: don't give me more work. Part of our intuition about human beings is that internal users are also users. They can be a little lazy sometimes. Let's go to the group. "Tremendous value from coffee chats and tasks. How is it measured?" You can tell that lately everybody's worried about measuring ROI. How do you feel that it was valuable and the ROI was good?

[00:28:57] Marine: As I mentioned, we do surveys after each coffee chat. One of the questions we ask is whether you found this valuable, and then there are some follow-up questions to understand why and how. But outside of that, there was one-off feedback too. We would get Slack messages like, "Can you keep doing them? Please don't stop doing these." And there were actually benefits to the sales team too, because there are some questions that we ask that they might not necessarily have the time to dig into with customers, to uncover what the true problem is and how our product would solve it. So just attending those coffee chats, even they found it super valuable. It was beneficial across the org and different teams, and engineering got to hear from and be more connected to customers.

[00:29:45] Morgan: And what I would add to that is what we covered during the talk: it was also measured in terms of the culture shift, the new iterations of the coffee chat in the form of meet an expert, and those meet an experts were led by product managers or by designers. So it's also measured by the initiative growing and spreading to others.

[00:30:14] Host: I saw a question here that disappeared. It was one of the latest, and it was a little bit provocative, so I'm going to go ahead and ask it. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something like, "This all sounds pretty basic. What are you really innovating here?" I love how design and UX conferences are starting to become really tough. Maybe it's the AI. I don't know.

[00:30:36] Marine: The AI song? I thought we'd covered that. I think it's all basic stuff, but then how do you put it into action? Actually influencing that behavioral change comes when you put it in a package and say, okay, we are working towards organizationally truly understanding our customers. So that's what I would say.

[00:30:58] Morgan: Yeah. And Rory was talking about process. These initiatives have to scale, and for them to scale, we operationalize them. They are repeatable, and that's what really gives them legs and helps them grow. Sure, you could do one-offs, but we're trying to spread it throughout the organization, and that's where I think the details come in: operationalizing and scaling.

[00:31:28] Host: This reminds me of people who criticize fast following of features, just doing them really well. People always said Apple already does that. It's like, do it at that level of quality, actually do it. But no shade on the person who wrote this.

[00:31:41] Marine: It's like that disclaimer on the cigarettes. Smoking causes cancer, but people still do it. We know we have to really understand customers, but we don't do it often enough and we don't do it well enough, because we get bogged down by the timelines and the sprints and the releases. So it's really driving that change organizationally. And I would say insights to action was innovative, at least for our team: navigating away from readouts of just "here are the bullet points, go figure out what you want to do with this" to "let's work together to solve it." So then we're actually acting on insights.

[00:32:17] Host: Which, in a world of AI where we can prototype quickly, maybe those workshops could actually have a deliverable at the end. I could talk to you both all day about this, but thank you very much.

[00:32:25] Marine: Thank you. Thank you everyone.