Strategic Alignment by Design - Short Term Fire Fighting versus Unified Directional Leadership

Donal O'Mahony at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/_apLwiqKv0U

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.

Verizon Connect background

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. This is going to be a little bit of a walk into the past, a very grateful walk into the past. It's been an amazing four years. And also a look to the future, which is my very clever and wishy[?] "strategic alignment by design", because that's the topic of where we're going now for the next couple of years. Please connect with me, please connect on LinkedIn or Twitter, or whatever way you'd like to pick up the conversation after this as well, and obviously live on air as well, that'd be brilliant.

[00:00:32] Okay, so a little bit of background on Verizon, and Verizon Connect in particular. Basically, in a nutshell, we connect a mobile workforce, and at the time four years ago it was classically around GPS telematics, full visibility and utilization of a fleet. But now the true breakthrough of IoT and our SaaS product is that we've now broken into a hugely exciting area of computer vision, and obviously you can see that there's a huge area of safety and coaching, and really a phenomenally exciting area with a huge amount, actually as with the previous session, of AI and machine learning.

[00:01:13] It's been a phenomenal ride as the product has matured and we really have been extending out the experience. I'm not going to talk so much about that, because that was the last topic in 2017. This topic will be more about organizational transformation beyond the UX team, and that's, I think, what hits every UX designer as they mature in their career. So let's stick around for that, because that's really what this is going to be about: transforming an entire organization. Okay, so that's the context of the product and the company.

Why unify around the customer journey

[00:01:48] I do get this question quite a lot, and it's not in a passive aggressive way, it's in a very interesting way at the moment, and this is really what our team is really pushing for. The question is: why do we need to unify around the customer journey? There's a huge interest in it, and now there's a huge education program throughout Verizon Connect and wider Verizon. But the answer is strategic alignment.

[00:02:15] I think there's a really great visual now that we can show here. Without strategic alignment around the customer experience and the customer journey, you get this, which is the classic multi-year throwing spaghetti at a wall. It's kind of fun for a while, but then it gets really messy. And everybody is trying their best in every company. It's probably not as common, might be actually, in startups, but in any large organization, and particularly the Fortune-size organization such as Verizon, you have a lot of programs and initiatives around tackling the same problem.

[00:02:57] Obviously what we're trying to tackle is that the great initiatives are all trying their best but they're potentially going in different directions, and that's very common, there's nothing groundbreaking about that insight. But products may be tackling it one way, sales, GCS[?] which is our support or customer success, finance, marketing, and on and on.

[00:03:15] And really the way to align, and the way to do that, of course I would say that, but it's true, is around an experience vision, commonly referred to over the years as north stars, concept cars as I refer to them, which I love and I'll talk about at the end of this presentation. It has been a staple and almost a calendar reminder in my career, actually to do those north stars and concept cars. But now it's matured much more, not about the sizzle and the concepts, but actually grounding it really in the voice of the customer and those highs and lows of the insights from the UX research team. And that is becoming an amazing unifier within Verizon Connect in recent years, and actually particularly in recent months, so a little bit more about that in the slides. We refer to really not just trying to straighten the spaghetti on the wall, but actually cleaning the wall and doing the process on the right properly, around the customer.

Five tips for CX alignment

[00:04:21] I can't help but always tell folks what I'm going to tell them, then tell them, and then at the end tell them what I told them. So here we go. CX alignment, customer experience strategic alignment: these are my tips for this talk.

[00:04:36] Embed the experience. Don't just think UX, think of everybody having customer touchpoints. Embed that throughout the organization. A huge amount of customer exposure with support groups, with sales groups, if there's hardware involved with the installers, and all of that. But embed it into the team, hardwired into the team. I know I talk about CFTs and product teams, but I really mean all the teams in the organization, and we'll cover this throughout the talk.

[00:05:06] Share that user research. Don't be protective of it, really share it out everywhere and at every level. Then build out customer journey maps. No groundbreaking ideas here yet, but that really is important, because if and when those customer journey maps are based on the user research, and then they iterate quarter after quarter, or even week after week in the more lean organization, they become very, very powerful. But they're localized, if that makes sense, rather than federal, and a very, very high-level map is also required, so we'll cover that.

[00:05:41] And then iterate with the customer or the user, and sometimes the same person. Obviously the iterative design, but also the map itself: how is it going, what red pain points are you turning to green?

[00:05:54] And this is, as always I'm very frank and honest, this is, even if you're a startup, but certainly if it's enterprise-level transformation, this is multi-year. Where service design really has matured, and I barely got to mention it four years ago, is really becoming a driving force certainly outside of the product teams, but in the wider organization. So that is multi-year. They are going to be really ambitious visions for multi-year, and it takes nerves of steel really to stick to that kind of transformation.

[00:06:26] And with those multi-year service design blueprints you develop also the multi-year experience visions. Basically north stars are prototypes at a grand scale, a massive scale, and really again a unifying force for the company, not just for the product team but for the wider company, to have skin in the game and be invested. Why do you do that? To transform the company around the customer.

[00:06:49] And I don't know how that got in there, that's the list, but we're doing a lot of this and obviously, I'm sure, it's a pretty hot topic right now: if you like what you're seeing here, I'm hiring, as are many of the leaders of Verizon Connect, in all those areas such as Ireland, Italy, US, New Zealand. So there you go, that's sneaky in there.

Four years to embedded UX

[00:07:08] As I said, and it's a shame I'm not on stage, I do like an audience, but this was four years ago, and it was a hell of a challenge obviously to embed and transform the company around UX. At the time it was a company called Fleetmatics that was acquired by Verizon. We'd just been acquired, I think, around the time of that talk, and I gave an ambitious four-year target to truly embed, and I'll show that maturity chart in a minute, but to try and do that in four years. And the great news is we actually hit it, which is amazing. I'm really, really proud of that, of our team.

[00:07:48] So that's a slightly younger looking and I guess a little bit more hair as well photograph. It's great to take stock and look back at that. But it's a UX maturity model. It's a little based on the Nielsen Norman model, which has got a lot of traction in recent years, but also a hybrid of a few other great thinkers in this area as well. To be frank, I just made it and translated it for the Verizon Connect instance.

[00:08:15] It can take, according to Nielsen Norman, anywhere between four to twenty years to actually embed UX within the organization, classic user experience, from unrecognized, not important, basically lipstick on a pig UI would be the classic, but way, way beyond that now. And we've gone through interested, UX is important but limited funding, invested, well beyond that as well obviously.

[00:08:45] And the team actually hit the dizzying heights in numbers, which I was obsessed with in the past, not so much anymore, but actually got up to 80. I remember the talk was about how to build up to, I think, 25 or 30 at the time, and the huge excitement of that. Got up to 80, and there were hundreds of designers in wider Verizon at this stage, and researchers, so certainly invested. But I'm confident now, and the whole team are in complete agreement, that we've actually got up to embedded, which is: user experience is central in every decision. But note that I keep referencing user experience. So we are here, we really celebrate that regularly, and we're very welcome and very celebrated as well by our colleagues in products and marketing and engineering. So I can confirm that did happen.

[00:09:31] And how it happened, if you remember, was that idea of embedding in lean squads, so that classic model of a product manager, engineering lead, experience designer. And of course the breakthrough, and the topic here, is that now they are absolutely hooked into the feedback, the visits, and the personas in our instance as well, of the customer, regularly. So that's again nothing revolutionary.

[00:09:57] But next, and this is where we are, where we have now moved into, is a lean enterprise and a customer-centered enterprise. You see here that really building these teams and models around the customer, their feedback and direct channels with them, is really where the company is now maturing into, including marketing and hardware design and that entire experience, customer support, so really broadening that out.

[00:10:22] A quick plug, but also just to pat myself on the back, because not only is it the launch of our Customer Love Hack, which is a hackathon, today, it's also my birthday, which is brilliant, and I'm doing this talk, so an incredibly exciting day today. But I want to congratulate our own teams in all of Verizon, because instead of it appearing to be an engineering hackathon, today it launched, and we're going to do it in early November but the PR starts now, internal PR, it's actually inviting and including all of those other functional groups, and that's really, really walking the talk at this stage. So wish me luck, that's like 3,000-plus people. God help me. But it's going to be fun.

From UX maturity to CX maturity

[00:11:06] Okay, so, same chart. I'm not going to really rate where we are because we're in progress, but it's high, but not high enough. And now it's not the UX, I should say, it's actually the CX maturity model. And I know, CX, UX, what's the difference, internal, external, but really the culture change here is to focus on customer outcomes.

[00:11:27] So, embedded, the way I've described, in the wider organization, but in every decision throughout the organization. I really believe that, where Josh Seiden went for example, for outcomes over output, which is a phenomenal reason and something that we're really adopting here as well. That's really needed at every level in the organization: not to be just OKR-driven or target-driven or business outcomes or business targets, but for it to be much more about what is the behavior change for our internal teams and our customer-facing teams, and obviously the customer and users themselves. The behavior change, the outcomes for them based on their day, their lives. So we're off again, we're probably a year into this at least.

[00:12:16] And the drum that has been banged constantly, which I found as a nugget at one of the first executive talks that were happening when the acquisition happened in Verizon, was in the States with a whole bunch of leaders, and someone was up there onstage from the Mayo Clinic. And it was an amazing question, which was: how did you become number one and so patient-centered, or user-centered or customer-centered? And it's terrible of me, but I can't remember the person's name in the Mayo Clinic, but they said it beautifully. They said: put the customer at the center of every discussion and decision throughout the company.

[00:12:55] That was a eureka moment for me, because let's face it, there's a lot of talk, and there's a lot of LinkedIn posts or Twitter posts about customer centricity, but it's talk. What really, really happens is around the decisions, and every decision, finance decisions, legal decisions, product decisions, support decisions, have to be around the customer. How will this decision, in this meeting, in this workshop, affect customer outcomes? That was a eureka moment for me that I'll never forget, because they said it's simple, and then put the same emphasis on the decision bit. And I love that. And the old saying that your parents hopefully, or your family or your friends, will tell you when you learn: actions speak louder than words.

Customer contact and the seat at the table

[00:13:48] So now it's more about embedding, but not necessarily as before around the cross-functional squads, but actually in the company. So the voice of the customer somehow in each team, and that is through obviously user research or the UX research, and the customer contact, which we've really doubled down on and is phenomenal for having a seat at the table. Frankly, it's hard for design in the old days to get a seat at the table, but when you turn up with a customer, or a recording, or with those clips sitting beside you in your back pocket in your presentation, at every presentation or at every meeting, then you have a seat at the table. That will be my tip for the day.

[00:14:28] How do you get that? Obviously we're a very, very large team and we build up these kinds of hours, but of course you should do it, and you must be doing it if it is a small organization, even more so, because you really depend, in those early days and the success, you're nearly MVPs, you don't have that much buffer or comfort for example on constant failure.

[00:14:50] So, experience team customer contact in the general year or so: 150 lab tests, back-to-customer field studies as well, which is amazing, which is get out of the office, go visit the customer, watch them, and shut up and watch and listen. Those field studies are really important, provided amazing insight and very humbling insight as well, and led to some great innovation as well. And customer interviews: 900 interviews, 1,500 prototypes, a huge amount of user testing, we had the discussions earlier about testing as well, and then obviously a huge amount of surveys. So that's how you get the contact and the finger on the pulse, and you get the seat at the table. You don't want to turn up and get that seat empty-handed.

[00:15:36] These are examples of site visits. We love our customers. They vary anywhere from micro businesses and mom and pop shops all the way up to huge enterprises. But it's incredible to go and watch those moments, to see how, I think Dan Olsen referred to, we're competing against pen and paper, with some of his insights obviously from the Intuit days. You really see that when you see the customers. I mean, look at it: there's our product in the center of that, but surrounded in the customer's ecosystem, and we have to flex and integrate in their worlds, not the other way around.

Personas and embedding the customer everywhere

[00:16:11] So, big fan of personas, and we're standing on the shoulders of giants here in this presentation, so shout out obviously to Cooper. And we also do jobs to be done, so we're not really caring what methodology we use, but personas have been hugely beneficial for that cultural change, with engineering, with leadership, with the ELT. It's based on thousands of elements and thousands of hours of research. They're super, super helpful for us and they're growing out really nicely.

[00:16:38] They're also growing out in a way that they're referencing internal personas: the customer-facing points of success, customer success, sales closers, that we have to start designing for as well. That's a great breakthrough for us and has been a real turning point for us as well, to get away from, as a UX and CX team, being so customer-centered that we actually miss some of the internal team members that are critical to the experience as well. Just to show some level of detail, it's that classic template, but it is really resonating in workshops, and certainly it's going to be hugely useful in the company-wide hackathon which is coming up as well.

[00:17:23] So I mentioned about embedding the customer now, but everywhere in the organization. And while it's okay to talk about these kinds of virtual teams, I also really mean that they're now beginning to be referenced and mentioned everywhere: from our ELT sessions, recurring exec staff meetings, pressing play on those highs and lows, those great moments of our promoters but also really the moments that we have to double down and improve on, and standups, Slack channels, those should always be bite-size and tempting you in and then drawing you in on those little nuggets of insight and customer feedback. Obviously posters, all hands, project kickoffs, project retros, research readouts. And then all that insight is leading to action, so insights for action.

[00:18:13] That is going to take time obviously, but it should be organic, it should be a pull rather than a push. In the first year of trying to do this transformation, back in the days when it was trying to get UX working with product and engineering, it was a bit of a push, like a push initiative. But really what I've learned is it's superb when the pull is there and people are like, we want more of this, we want to hear more of this. And then you're in your motorman[?].

Product strategy and the lean product playbook

[00:18:42] Okay, so, again throughout the organization, and let's keep focused on the theme here, which is strategic alignment by design. So the product strategy is influenced by the design team, the UX research team, and vice versa. We're heavily involved in some of the strategy now, and in some of the new working models we have.

[00:19:03] I mentioned earlier, we leverage tools and techniques such as the Lean Product Playbook with Mr Olsen. In this instance, rather than describing the process, but I really recommend looking at it, this is again covered in customer contact. So from that methodology, obviously determining who's the customer based on the personas, everything I outlined, actual customer interviews from what we're going after in the problem space, customer problem space or the user problem space, and obviously site visits. What's their need: observational studies, interviews, quantitative and qualitative surveys, and wires, so that's competitive analysis but particularly around the experience.

[00:19:44] And then you move into the solution space and you iterate between three and four obviously, so you're building prototypes and ensuring to include the differentiators[?]. And then the outcomes as well will come with that. Delight is an outcome, but we need to get more specific on that. And then validate with customers, testing the prototypes, iterating based on feedback.

Strategic transformation and the master map

[00:20:06] And then the last, but really big, massive section is strategic transformation. This is, I'll almost pause to catch my breath on this, but this is not for the faint-hearted, but it is really where the action's at. I would say that to everyone: once you see that things will take a multi-year plan, you're probably in the right space, and stick with it.

[00:20:31] But service design is key here, and then also the multi-year experience vision is key here. You've got to know the hill or the mountain or the Everest you're going to conquer, and not find that all your colleagues in the organization are standing on other mountaintops. And again, it should all be based on user research and UX research again, and many other things as well, but it has to be based foundationally on that.

[00:20:56] I'm reusing my material, I kind of put this in the last time, to say change happens one person at a time. That really resonated with me, because it was a very small team at the time, of about 10 or 11 people, and we had to scale and it was overwhelming. But now we're at a point where the ambassadors, the champions, the people who are really helping this change, are really starting to accumulate throughout the organization, and by that I'm feeling we're getting up into the hundreds. Because you have to scale this beyond the design, the UX or the CX team, and they are the people who will make those decisions around the customer every day. So that means so much more to me now, that quote that I used years ago. And the sharp intake of breath is that to do that in large organizations will take a couple of years, but like the last time, but now much wider, we're well on our way.

[00:21:55] I did mention customer journeys before. This has been a breakthrough for us again, which is called a mega map or a service design master map, and a huge shout out to Emilia on the team, and really the whole company, because all the functional areas have fed into our master map, which luckily you can't read. But if you zoom into this, it is individual customer journeys throughout the phases. There are all kinds of functional areas going in and swarming on this. We are flushing out any inconsistencies or frictions or disconnects, all in this map, and it is a living, breathing monster that's used nearly at every single strategic session that we're having now, in the wider and executive level, and all of the breakouts and all the sessions that we do now. It's been phenomenal.

[00:22:43] And a lot of the vision, and what I've got to show now, a lot of the vision, this is a future vision layer as well, around the product, around the experience, around that future vision, is also layered in. Really, obviously a huge amount of research, but these are real milestone foundational research and things to reference as well. There's so much in this, it looks complex, but it's hugely useful.

[00:23:08] We didn't invent it, but we're certainly championing it, which is: how you will end up with large design teams with 40, 50, 60 journey maps for all the widgets and products, but you have to align them, and it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be way beyond the service design or UX team. It's going to require a village to raise this map. And as you can see, this is not lorem ipsum, this is a real living map. So I really recommend that. As we say, it's one map to rule them all.

Unifying experience vision

[00:23:36] And then, starting to close now in the end of my content, unifying experience vision. So this now is a shout out to Jared Spool. The team have been getting involved in a lot of the incredible work that he's been doing, and he is really, really focusing on something that's so close to my heart, which is experience vision. Any of the talks he's done on it are basing it, of course, and again, on research, and so it's not just gut, but there's a lot of good to that as well, and I'm proud to say that I am head, heart and gut.

[00:24:12] But the experience vision is also great fun, and a reference to that: it's a companion piece to your service design master map, which should be a to-be state as well as an as-is. If you have a companion piece like this, it's incredibly powerful. I really recommend you go three to five years out on where you're going, it should be a real stretch.

[00:24:33] And then the one that he references, which is phenomenal, is the Knowledge Navigator, which in '87 was a bit of a curse for them actually, because they went public with it and then all the investors were asking, when can we have it? But it had a touchscreen tablet, it had cloud collaboration, it had some guy with a dickie bow, or for our international listeners, a bow tie, and that was Siri, and it had email, internet search, wiki, machine learning, AI, FaceTime. It was phenomenal. A bit cheesy obviously, it looks a little bit like a soap opera cast was used for it, but it was known as the Knowledge Navigator.

[00:25:09] I really, really recommend that to help transform, because once you have the prototypes and the visualization and the pictures painting a thousand presentations or spreadsheets, plus then the master map to swarm on how do we go after the current experience and improve it year by year, or week by week if it's more of a lean model, that's a really powerful alliance for strategic alignment.

Recap

[00:25:35] And just to reiterate, that is why, it's over on the right: why do we need to unify around the customer journey and a master map in this case? Strategic alignment. Everyone's doing their best, but if we're not doing our best together around the customer, it's going to stay spaghetti. So that's really my focus, and not just my team's focus, but the entire company is now really starting to pivot and turn and look very seriously at this.

[00:26:02] And that's it. So, reminder, I warned you this was going to happen, but I need it, and that's how I learned in college, in school, is repetition. So: embed the experience, and by this now it's not, oh please can we have a UX team, way beyond that. Embed the experience everywhere, and that's wider service design and UX of course, and all the champions and the other groups that also own the CX.

[00:26:25] And share the user research, to provide them with the insight and frankly the ammunition sometimes. Use the journey maps, and try not to have competing journey maps, my map's better than yours and all that malarkey, not good, so align them. Iterate with the customer, the user, so that's the lean model that we're really trying to abide by. And use multi-year service design, because this will take time, and develop a multi-year experience vision, to transform the company around the customer. And that's me. And oh, there we go, look at that: if you want to join us, you know where to call me.