Creating A CX Culture Through Sprints

Jasper Wu at UXDX APAC. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM4xhizW1fA

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.

Introduction and U-Next

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, this is Jasper. Today I'm going to talk about creating a CX culture through design sprints. My name is Jasper. I come from Taiwan, I am Taiwanese, and currently I'm working in a company called U-Next. I'm also the co-founder of a design consulting firm called Creative Mashimashi. If you're interested in my topic today, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

[00:00:23] Let me briefly share what U-Next is. U-Next is a subscription-based video distribution platform. We not only have video content, we also have music and book services. Basically, it's an all-in-one entertainment service: you can watch, read and listen on our platform. U-Next also has the largest market share as a local OTT platform in Japan.

[00:00:52] Today I'm going to talk about two things, CX culture and design sprints. I would like to share my experience at U-Next, how I am using the design sprint to create a CX culture, and the journey where we are trying to build a better collaborative and human-centered environment.

What CX culture is, and why frameworks alone don't create it

[00:01:14] Before I jump into the talk, I would like to ask you one question. What is the CX culture in your organization? Is it Post-Its everywhere? You have a lot of Post-Its, a team is doing brainstorming, doing a combined board, doing ideation. Or you have a creative space where people can generate ideas and create prototypes. Or you have a framework like the classic double diamond: build the right product, build the product right. Or you even have different types of frameworks, like Lean, Agile, design thinking.

[00:01:50] When you search on Google, you will find Lean, Agile, design thinking with this chart. Basically, the team uses design thinking to discover users' pain points and find needs, uses Lean Startup to quickly validate their concept, and uses Agile and Scrum to quickly ship their product, their service, the feature, get feedback from the customer, and iterate again and again.

[00:02:14] A lot of the time, when stakeholders or the organization invest in this type of framework, we try to have a different approach, a better process to solve the problem and quickly ship the product. However, there's no magic happening in those frameworks, and a lot of the time stakeholders cannot find the value of why we need to do it. We didn't even build a better product, or even build a better impact for the business.

[00:02:43] I think the part that's missing is understanding the maturity of UX and CX. You can also find this online. We separate it into four layers. The first one is awareness: is the organization aware of UX and CX? The second layer is whether the company is willing to invest: how much money they put into training, the budget for different types of frameworks, for hiring different types of designers, researchers and specialists.

[00:03:21] The third tier is how companies think about planning and strategy when they're building the future plan. Do they think about CX and UX together, or even DX? And the end of the maturity model is really about culture change. To make the culture change actually takes a very long time, and it's very hard to achieve because there's a part that is missing. It's about people's mindset.

[00:03:52] When you think about the definition of culture, I will briefly say it's the way we behave, the way we work, communicate and collaborate with our colleagues, and how we interact with each other in the organization, across the company. And also the values we believe in. It depends on how you decide your company culture. For me personally, I think a good CX culture includes these few things: human-centered, and also collaborative, iterative and innovative.

[00:04:24] One thing I just mentioned is the mindset. Changing mindset is very hard, and it takes a long time to change people's behavior. It's a long journey, and every company, every organization, starts from a different starting point. For example, you have a huge organization trying to do innovation. You are a small startup trying to ship your product, validate your concept, build and ship the service as soon as possible, test it in the market. Or you are a mid-size firm trying to improve your service and find growth for your product and service. Every company starts from a very different point.

[00:05:13] When we're talking about the mindset change, it's very hard for different types of organization, no matter which size of organization you are in. As I say, it's a very long journey, and there are many traps. On your journey, when you try to change the CX culture, there are many potential traps you might face.

Three traps, and the design sprint as a probe

[00:05:32] Today I am going to share and explain three types of traps that might happen in your organization, and how I used my experience with design sprints, different types of sprint, to solve these three problems. The first one is customer understanding. The second one is culture and office politics. The third one is speed and iteration.

[00:06:01] As I say, you need some probe to ignite this CX culture change, and what I use is the design sprint framework. You might have heard about the design sprint before. Basically, it's separated into six phases: understand, define the problem, sketch, decide on the idea, build a prototype, and test it to validate our concept. We schedule these six phases into five days. A lot of the time, when a team runs a design sprint, it really helps you avoid the barriers I mentioned above. I will explain in the next slides.

Trap one: customer understanding and the research sprint

[00:06:46] The first thing is customer understanding. Nowadays, to be honest, there's too much data around the office. You can see that the stakeholders, everyone, the decision maker, the product owner, the PM, the business analyst, are always surrounded by a lot of dashboards, Excel sheets, tons of data. Most of the time, a lot of stakeholders are missing very important insights from this big data.

[00:07:25] Actually, when we are surrounded by this big data, it really pushes us farther and farther away from the real customer voice. This theory is called big data and thick data, proposed by Tricia Wang. You can find her TED Talk online. It's really awesome and very insightful. I really recommend it. She talks about how a lot of organizations, when they make decisions based on big data, ignore why it happened, the real user behavior, the user voice. It just makes everything farther and farther away.

[00:08:06] For me, getting user insight actually costs much less than investing in dashboards or big data. What you need to do is just set up: you can start a survey, start a user interview, set up a camera, observe your users, their behavior, how they interact, and listen to find their pain points. When you start to do that, you will find a lot of different things, different insights. And this is really helpful for creating a good CX culture, when you really care about the customer problem.

[00:08:46] However, a lot of the time, organizations hire a researcher and start to do research, but nothing happens. There's some part missing. What I want to say is that this is a very important part when I try to run research: how can we use the research data to let the decision maker understand the customer more, from a holistic perspective? The missing part is the sharing session. A lot of the time, when the researcher or the analyst finishes a report, they don't have a proper chance to share it with the stakeholders, and the stakeholders are surrounded by all that data. It's very hard for them to make decisions. When I was at U-Next, I found out the sprint can really help with that.

[00:09:38] Let me introduce the research sprint. When I joined U-Next in 2019, basically we had nothing. We didn't have anything like research. We didn't have the user voice. We didn't have interviews or user insight. So I started everything from zero. People didn't understand anything about it, and there was really a lack of awareness of the user and customer voice. So I decided I wanted to run a research sprint.

[00:10:12] What is a research sprint? Basically, a research sprint is a one-day sprint. The biggest purpose of the research sprint is to get the stakeholders to understand the customer voice and customer insight more holistically. We understand their viewpoint and we try to solve their problem together. A research sprint, of course, needs to start from research. Basically, I spend one to three weeks recruiting, doing user interviews, collecting the data, analysis, creating a report. After I finish the report, I organize the research sprint.

[00:10:49] The biggest purpose, as I say, is to let stakeholders get awareness of the real user voice. And the good thing is that we turn the insight into actionable ideas. This is very important for people to understand how a valuable insight can turn into a valuable and actionable idea. Basically, we focus on sharing. On the day, in the morning we do the insight sharing, a How Might We session, and we do journey mapping. The next part is Crazy Eights: ideation, brainstorming solutions, sketch, vote and pick at the end of the day. Again, this is not focused on building a prototype and validating it with the customer. The biggest purpose is to learn from our customers and view things from a different perspective.

[00:11:41] When is the timing to run a research sprint? When you realize there's a lack of awareness of the user voice around your organization, around your team, it's a very good time to organize a research sprint, gather people who are interested in this topic, discuss it, and show them what the real user voice is, what insight from data is, what the comprehensive data is, for everyone to do ideation and brainstorming together.

[00:12:13] What kind of topics are good for a research sprint? From my experience at U-Next, I think it's to find the biggest elephant in the room. Why do I say that? Because usually, with the biggest elephant in the room, it's really hard to find the insight in the big data. And this is the problem: people are unwilling to touch it because it's too complicated, too difficult to solve at the time. When you run a design sprint or a research sprint and you pick up these topics, it really helps the stakeholders rethink the problem from a different perspective. The research sprint really helps your team have a better understanding of the customer.

[00:12:55] This is the quote I want to share with everyone. It's a quote from Tom Chi, at the 2018 design sprint conference: nobody changes their behavior for a neutral outcome. I keep this in my mind. Every time I run a research sprint or any type of sprint, I observe the behavior: how the stakeholders are, what the room's ambience is, what the atmosphere looks like, which steps work, which steps don't work. So I understand how we could improve for the next or a different sprint next time.

Trap two: culture and office politics

[00:13:30] The second trap you might fall into on your journey to creating a CX culture is the culture issue and office politics. Office politics and culture issues a lot of the time really slow everything down, because with stakeholders it's really hard for us to find a consensus. There's a lot of bias, because everyone stays in a different perspective. A lot of the time, you need to wait for approval while you are in different communications with different stakeholders, or everyone has some politics going on. It really slows a lot of things down. You cannot move everything forward quickly with speed and have better teamwork.

[00:14:23] This is the concept, the theory, from the anthropologist Edward T. Hall. He has a book, Beyond Culture, talking about high-context culture and low-context culture. Low-context cultures are like American and Australian. High-context cultures are like China and Japan. I came to Japan in 2017, and I realized it's really totally different, the environment and the culture, from when I experienced America or Taiwan.

[00:14:57] Let me give you some examples. For example, the language difference. There's a very simple phrase you can hear in Japanese called "hai". When you use Google Translate, it's "yes". But a lot of the time it doesn't mean "yes, I agree with you". It just means "I heard it". It doesn't mean anything. The other one is "kangaete oku". When people say these words and you use Google Translate, you will find they want to say "I will think about it", but actually it's not. Most of the time when we use it, it means we are trying to reject you. In a polite way, actually, it's no.

[00:15:44] In this high-context culture, there's a lot of nuance in the conversation or in the room. Because of this, it's really hard for people to have better teamwork and communication during the development process, or when we try to have better ideation. A lot of the time we will say to people, if you don't understand the atmosphere, that you are "Kangaete oku" [?]: you cannot read the ambience, understand the nuance around the room. So it's very important to understand what should be noticed during a conversation in this high-context culture.

[00:16:22] The other thing is the decision-making process. This is one type of decision-making process in some cultures. When I was in a low-context culture, a lot of the time we would try to generate ideas and have some discussion. We just bring everyone into a room. We can negotiate, discuss and debate which one is right, which one is wrong. But a lot of the time, in different types of culture, before the official meeting, people start to have a meeting with these stakeholders, then another meeting with those stakeholders, and a third meeting with different stakeholders. When the official meeting happens, no one says anything in disagreement, because everyone just raises their hand and agrees with the proposal. The decision is already made before the official meeting.

[00:17:25] This is really time consuming. It takes a long time. And most of the time, with this type of decision-making process, we find the solution is a compromise solution based on every stakeholder. It's not the best solution for our customer.

The ideation sprint

[00:17:45] Because of the culture issue and the office politics issue, teamwork is really hard, and the sprint can really help with this problem. When I faced this problem in Japan's culture, I tried to organize a sprint called the ideation sprint. The biggest purpose of the ideation sprint is to generate ideas, from different stakeholders with different perspectives.

[00:18:11] I organized this two-day ideation sprint. First, of course, we need to conduct the research, gathering the data, the information, the insight we can find for the problem. We spend the first day trying to understand this problem deeply. It's very similar to what we have in the research sprint. The second day is the ideation day, focused on generating ideas.

[00:18:34] As I say, for the ideation sprint it's very important to gather all the stakeholders. Most of the time I will invite an engineer, I will invite the business side, a designer, a PM, to stay in the same room and try to figure out the most feasible ideas. When I talk about the ideation sprint, it's not really about impossible ideas or moonshot ideas. It really wants to find ideas that are actionable. So it is very important to invite engineers or the development team into the room, because it's really helpful for us to think about the feasibility part.

[00:19:18] What is the timing to run the ideation sprint? As I mentioned, when you find there's a kind of silo across the company, a lack of trust, or a slow process, when you feel teamwork and communication are very hard, I think it's really a good time for you to run an ideation sprint.

[00:19:37] What kind of topics are good for an ideation sprint? I think a topic that relates to most of the stakeholders, is mid-cost, can be realized in a very short period of time, and also has a big impact. Why do we need to pick something with big impact? Because you invite most of the stakeholders into the room, and we want to show them how much this sprint can create a different outcome than before. So it's very important to invite all the stakeholders and find a mid-cost project with a big impact.

[00:20:14] In the design sprint there's a feature called Work Together Alone. Most of the time when we do ideation and brainstorming, we work together: we stay in the same room, but we work alone. Work together alone really helps us solve the problem I mentioned about the language issue, because a lot of the time we don't need too much communication. We just generate ideas on our side, and we share our concept, what we think, with the stakeholders after we finish the ideation.

[00:20:52] The other part is silent voting. A lot of the time, to find the best solution, we need silent voting. It really helps us find the best solution for our customer, instead of the solution the boss really likes, or the highest paid person really likes, or a compromise solution. Of course, we let the decision maker have the final call, the final decision on the final ideas.

[00:21:23] One thing I think we really need to be careful about, especially in a high-context culture. This is a phrase that comes from transplanting a tree. When we try to transplant a tree, we need to be very careful about the roots. When we move the tree from position A to position B, if we don't take care of the roots, the tree may lack nutrition and might die in the end in the new place.

[00:22:04] When we try to change the culture, when we try to have the organization's mindset change, we need to think about this. Especially in a high-context culture, we need to be careful about what we do. We need to spend more time communicating with the people who really care about the problem, who care about the issue. This is a phrase called "nemawashi" in Japan. When we try to do some culture change, some big project, we spend a lot of time explaining to stakeholders and trying to get their support for what we want to do. It's very similar to how you transplant a tree: you want to protect the roots when we try to have a culture shift, a culture change.

Trap three: speed and iteration, and the full design sprint

[00:22:45] The last thing I want to talk about is speed and iteration. From my perspective, this is the cause for everything. When we try to have a better iterative culture with good speed, most of the time we are waiting for feedback. Even if your organization has Scrum and ships your product, your features, on a biweekly basis, we need to evaluate it. We need to collect the data and get user feedback, maybe one month or three months later.

[00:23:26] When we try to get feedback on a monthly basis, it's really hard for us to make an iterative culture. A lot of the time we are waiting for the next meeting to get quick feedback, quick data from the customer, from the stakeholders. I think the sprint can really help you solve this problem.

[00:23:51] The last sprint I want to share is the normal design sprint. In the normal design sprint, we focus on making ideas happen, quickly validating and learning from our customer. This is the five-day sprint framework. Of course, we need to spend some time, one to three weeks, on research for these topics. We spend day zero on problem framing, trying to figure out the biggest problem we're trying to solve. Then we do information sharing, sketching, storyboarding, ideation, and then we generate a prototype and test it.

[00:24:29] This framework is Design Sprint 3.0, designed by the Design Sprint Academy. You can also find this resource online. It's really helpful if you're trying to run a full design sprint, and I think Design Sprint 3.0 is really helpful for your organization to generate ideas and then quickly validate them with the customer.

[00:24:48] When is the timing to run a design sprint? As I say, at the beginning of a big project, when your team doesn't know where to go: should we go this way or this direction? Run the full design sprint. It helps your team learn from the customer, get feedback quickly and be more iterative.

[00:25:13] What kind of topics? For me, when you have a big bet with a big budget, like a big project, or a big renewal or redesign of an existing project, it's really helpful for the team to stay together in the same room without any distraction, focus on solving this problem, bring the prototype, and validate it with the customer at the end of the day.

[00:25:40] The most important thing is that the design sprint has time control for each step, each day, each process. We also have a very strict timeframe: on the last day, the user is waiting to test your prototype. So most of the stakeholders will feel the pressure: I need to do this by the end of the day, I need to build something, I need to come up with ideas, I need to build something to share with my client or the customer. This time control is very important. It really helps the team move forward quickly, make decisions quickly, build a prototype and get data as soon as possible, and then we can pivot or move on to the next steps.

Conclusion: be as water

[00:26:23] That brings us to the conclusion. When you try to have a CX culture change or a culture shift, when you try to be more customer-centered, more collaborative, better at teamwork, more iterative and faster, starting with the design sprint is really good for you. It's a good probe to start the culture change. Today I talked about three types of sprint. The first one is the research sprint, the second one is the ideation sprint, and the third one is the design sprint. They really help the team be more customer-focused, with better teamwork and quick validation.

[00:27:14] When people ask me how the design sprint can change people's behavior, to be honest, based on my personal experience in Japan, I have to say one design sprint can't change anything [?]; you have to do it often. As in the quote I mentioned in the previous slide, no one changes their behavior for a neutral outcome. So try to observe how people interact with each other and behave during the sprint, and try to improve every time you have a new sprint.

[00:27:47] Based on my personal experience in Japan, because of the culture issue and the language issue, I rearranged some components inside the design sprint and designed the research sprint, the ideation sprint and also the full design sprint. It's very important for you to think about what your culture is and what the context in your organization is, and try to customize it inside your organization.

[00:28:17] The last thing I want to say is "Be water, my friend." This is about my experience in Japan: I customized it a little bit based on different purposes. I think those tools and frameworks should be more flexible, depending on the culture. I hope you can learn from my experience how you can customize things. Thanks for your attention. My name is Jasper. Thanks for your time. Thank you.