UX-ifying the C-Suite: The Three Layers to Transform Leadership

Valentina Caruso at UXDX Community: From Data to Design: UX That Works. Video: https://youtu.be/c95rJUJnezE

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.

The three needs every leadership team has

[00:00:08] Thank you Rory for introducing me, and hello everyone, and thank you for having me today. What I'm going to discuss together with you is how we can UX-ify the C-suite, how we can bring a UX thinking that can transform the leadership. Before jumping into the discussion, just a few words about me and my background. I'm currently working at Vitec Fixit, that is a company working on digital solutions for the beauty sector, but I have a background in UX research for different industries like the media industry, travel, education.

[00:00:51] That's why for me UX is really important, and that was the mindset that I was using when I was approaching this new role in the leaders group. When I was starting to be invited into the leaders meetings as a researcher and as a UX person, I was starting observing the needs that leaders have. Any leadership, no matter if it's a big company or they're based in a small company, starts with needs. I identified at least three main needs that we have. First of all, before taking any important decision and jumping into a solution, we really need to understand what is the problem that we need to solve, and for who, and how we can make this better. Which means that the other need that we have is making decisions that serve both the business and the customer, and at the same time we need to connect people to that purpose. We need to align people.

Challenge one: turning execution into understanding

[00:02:02] But this is also a challenge that we have. The first challenge is really being able to transform execution into understanding. Small companies and big companies have several things that they share, but still, small companies usually are closer to the customer, are closer to the people, so that's what leaders at least do. But the vision is very blurred. Sometimes the vision corresponds to the founder's vision, and even though there's a willingness of understanding the user, there is no user validation, and decisions are usually gut driven.

[00:02:43] When it comes to big companies, we have metrics, very precise metrics, very precise KPIs, but they do not reflect the user value. And still executives tend to prioritize operations and strategy over the customer's feelings. So in that case the intent that we have with our vision doesn't really match the user value. There is validation, it can be fast or slow, but still there is a lack of user validation in the long term.

Challenge two: fragmented data

[00:03:20] The second challenge that I have noticed is the fragmented data. We don't really have a full picture of everything that we should consider when taking decisions when it comes to product and strategy. For small companies we usually have lower data volume, that probably it's easier to access because of the ownership of people, whom the data is with, it's everywhere. There is not this particular role, several people cover several roles. There is no clear ownership. Even the tools that we use, like the CRM and other tools, usually are fewer and they are not integrated.

[00:04:03] When it comes to the big company, on the opposite, we have massive data volume but it's split across silos, across departments, and each department used to own the data independently, so they are not connected. We also have many tools for actually collecting the data, but even there there is no full integration. So despite that we have more advanced analytical skills for big companies, we still take slow decisions because the data is fragmented. And this is something that we all share. There is a lack of collaboration between departments. We don't own the full picture when taking decisions. Rather, the decisions are often made without linking what we are considering to do to the user journey. We don't contextualize them.

Challenge three: culture

[00:05:00] And the third challenge, that might be not that significant, is culture. And culture is extremely important, because people often are tired. The pace is relentless, change is constant, but what happens is that the small company employee usually doesn't understand the leadership decision, and that could also happen, by the way, also in the big company. Culture is something that it's nice to say, but it's not really related to the way we behave, to the stated values and to the company in general.

[00:05:39] In the big company particularly, the executives prefer strategy over culture, despite everyone saying that culture really matters. What we both share, small and big company, is that culture isn't really embedded in the daily work. The execution is misaligned to the culture, that is not really connected to specific decisions. And in addition to that, we might also have employees that are fearing to share honest feedback when, for example, there is a project where everyone is not really aligned on the direction that we're taking. It doesn't happen very often that people are willing to share their concern. So we really know that culture is important because it's going to determine the way we're going to work on that specific project.

What if UX is not just for product?

[00:06:40] That's why, when I stepped into my new role as chief product officer, I actually didn't arrive with a roadmap. I rather arrived with a question. I was asking, what if UX is not just for product? What if it's UX for leadership as well? What if it is a mindset that we need to adopt? Because UX is not just design. UX is the foundation that can help to reduce the risk of taking the wrong decision, of building the wrong product. UX brings empathy to really ground decisions. UX is storytelling. UX is what connects the dots when the full picture is not really clear with the data that we have. And the mindset of UX can also align the company culture, that will therefore be designed for a change in the process that will be more sustainable.

Layer one: empathy, and the Google Glass story

[00:07:47] If we go now deep into the detail, the first layer. I call it layer because actually those three are not really steps to follow. They are just layers, and each layer reinforces the next one. The first layer is empathy, meaning that we have to start with understanding people and the needs that they have. Because if we don't really understand people, and we don't really understand the problem that we are solving, eventually we're not really understanding the business. And that lack of understanding is not just a minor detail. It can cost companies millions to build the wrong product.

[00:08:28] An example of this is Google Glass. I don't know if any of you remember when Google launched the first edition of Google Glass in 2012. Actually, it looked very cool. They launched the glasses with advanced tech, they were having an AR display, voice control, camera. But they were really missing the deep understanding of what is the use case that we're going to address, what currently the users really needed. They assumed that people wanted to always be notified without even checking their phone, and the executives, the leaders, were actually thinking that the tech innovation alone would have driven the user adoption.

[00:09:22] That was a huge mistake, and the impact was huge, because they only sold a few units, approximately 150,000 units. And if we think that Apple sold 10 million iPhones just in the first year, you can imagine how the result was very poor. The public reputation was also something, because people were very skeptical about using the Google Glass everywhere. They were having privacy concerns in addition to all the other frustration, so they started calling Google Glass users glassholes. Google failed to really understand what kind of problem they were trying to address, and this was reflected in a loss of over 1 million for development over five years.

[00:10:16] What happened is that that product was shut down after a few years, and in addition to that they lost an opportunity. They really lost the momentum for addressing AR, that was something that Meta then was doing. Later they decided to adopt another approach that was empathy driven. They were focused on a specific target, on a specific workflow, they were focused on a specific problem to solve, and Google Glass started being adopted by DHL, General Electric, Boeing, with several positive results. For DHL they had plus 50% of picking speed, and then efficiency. But even for General Electric workers, using Google Glass was helpful to reduce by 50% the training timing. In that case they have a return on investment, because they addressed specific and precise workflows. Google Glass was not a tech failure. It was a human failure.

Understanding the right problem

[00:11:26] How can we therefore start understanding the right problem, and the point that to address the wrong problem can eventually be expensive? First of all we have to start trying to understand the customer story. Just bring a customer story, the user journey. Try to make the user real, and don't be afraid to ask what kind of problem we're going to solve, and exactly for whom, who are our personas, and try to align everyone around that problem. Ask if we all agree with that.

[00:12:03] For executives that means that we should see more often customer interviews, user interviews, so that we can really humanize our metrics. And that also means that if you address the user journey, if you have a customer story, you can even make the KPI connected to the user friction. That's why, when I was actually addressing this presentation, I was thinking that UX-ifying the leadership, the target for this presentation, it's not only people working in UX or in product teams. It's also leaders. Everyone has that shared responsibility. Everyone taking the vision, at least.

Layer two: storytelling, and the Nokia story

[00:12:54] The second layer is storytelling, for connecting the fragmented data. We know that when the data is captured, your strategy is not resilient, and eventually it's going to die. This is a problem that the majority of companies actually have, with several departments not really being aligned on the story that they're going to tell, or on the problem that they're going to address.

[00:13:22] An example of this is Nokia. Nokia was a failure at the end because the teams were not aligned. What happened around the mid 2000s was that developers, for example, were focused on the internal operating system that was complex out there. They were just focused on technology. Marketing was already starting to see some demand for touchscreen apps and simplicity. Product was comparing and seeing the user friction compared to the iPhone, there was already something at that point. Sales was of course prioritizing the legacy models because they wanted to meet the quarterly numbers. And executives made the mistake of believing that the brand loyalty could really have kept the users buying Nokia.

[00:14:17] The impact was absolutely huge, because developers were starting to lose interest, or starting to develop fewer apps, and the users have been more frustrated. UX complaints were increasing, the users were complaining about the difficulty using Nokia. It looked also very outdated. They had a market share decline from 49% to 3% in less than five years. They lost billions in revenue, and eventually they were bought by Microsoft.

[00:14:59] How can we therefore align through UX driven storytelling? Because storytelling is not just telling a story or explaining the problem that we have, it helps to align everyone around the problem that we need to solve. How can we do that? We need to start visualizing the end to end user journey, visualize the real friction and pain points that the user is experiencing, and understand this for each persona. Instead of discussing each department's data, marketing or the customer support coming with several tickets, we had to link each data to the user journey with specific personas.

[00:15:48] Which also means that the leaders should be invited to put themselves in the user's shoes. For example, we can have workshops together where you can have a kind of role play, where you ask the leaders to play a specific persona and then they have to understand, if they were that specific customer, what would they do? That brings them into the right perspective, that is not just metrics and KPIs and strategy to execute, but that brings us into a perspective where the user is still at the center of our decisions.

Layer three: culture, and the Google+ story

[00:16:26] The third layer is culture. Culture is what is going to determine the result and the outcome of our strategy, and culture can also explain 40% of the performance variance that we have in our company. So it's both the foundation for execution, but it's also a powerful predictor for the performance. If the culture is weak, then most likely the strategy execution will fail. If the culture is toxic, even the performance will suffer. It's the leaders' responsibility to understand how we can actually support culture, because it's the invisible system that can really shape the way we work.

[00:17:25] Another example of how important it is to really have a culture that is aligned to what we are doing is Google+. I don't know how many of us remember when Google launched Plus as a social network to compete with Facebook. It was a major investment. Google was also trying to have a forced integration with other Google products, but they really failed, for three main reasons. They had a lack of psychological safety, criticism was not really welcome. Teams that really wanted to question the strategy were ignored. There was a lot of rumor that people were leaving because of that.

[00:18:21] Even the user feedback was dismissed. The users didn't really understand the reason why they should have used it instead of using Facebook, and in addition to that they were frustrated because they were forced to link it with other Google services. So what happened was also that the leaders didn't really listen to the feedback, and this was seen as an executive priority. The prestige of the product was something that mattered more than the customers and more than the outcome.

[00:18:56] The result of this was again huge, because Google+ saw low engagement. 90% of user sessions lasted less than 5 seconds. Low retention: approximately 30% of users never made a second public post. And eventually it was shut down, and that caused almost 600 million spent on development and acquisition, because they were not brave enough to challenge themselves. There was also a financial impact, because investors started reacting in a bad way. They had a six billion[?] drop in the market value for the parent company because of the platform failure.

[00:19:55] As we can see, culture is a crucial factor to support our strategy and to support and align everyone around the strategic decision. That's why it's the leader's responsibility to design meetings for clarity, for understanding exactly what we're going to solve, but even design meetings where everyone can feel emotionally safe to share their concerns, and leaders should encourage that critical feedback. At the same point, companies in general should normalize learning. Either there is a failure, an example of failure that should be shared, but at the same time we should share a project where we started from the wrong problem and then we were able to understand the customer to arrive to the final solution, that was a compromise but still was better for the customer. We have to support that kind of culture.

[00:21:00] That's why UX can be seen like taking care of a plant. We have a seed that represents the empathy, but any seed cannot really grow if we don't have sunlight and water, and there is the storytelling. And even more important is the quality of the soil, and there is the culture. So having UX empower leadership is not just a role. It's not just something nice or something trending that we should have in our company. It's a choice that will determine whether a company will be successful or not. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:21:43] Rory: Excellent, thank you very much Valentina. I definitely recognize some of those things in there, the different challenges, the lack of safety, and some interesting products that you chose as well. If anybody has any questions, please do post them in, but I'm actually going to start with one question for you, Valentina. You gave some examples of failed products. Do you have an example of one that was successful?

[00:22:19] Valentina: Actually Google Glass was successful. It was successful later, when they really understood that they were lacking the user understanding, that they were addressing the wrong problem. Which is also something that I think every company is trying to do. In my company we are trying to implement empathy, storytelling for fragmented data, and culture, through UX, because we are in the process of rebuilding our core functionality. This will be a huge project, so we have started implementing that UX thinking. We are still, I would say, in the initial phase, but we have already seen positive results in the empathy. We are in the empathy but also in the culture. There is still some work to do on the storytelling, to connect the data, but we have been able to implement the process so far that has been able to align the employees around the right problem to solve while keeping the customer in the loop.

[00:23:31] Valentina: We also have reduced the delivery time, at least for the first part of it. We are monitoring some metrics, but it seems to be promising, at least according to what we have also seen with different other products. Every product that addresses the users cannot fail. Then of course we have to address the business perspective, the business goal, but those are related. You have to start from the user first and then you can understand how to run your business. But if you're not going to be helpful for your customer, there is no business.

[00:24:09] Rory: Just on the storytelling bit, because it's all so familiar, all the scattered data and there's just different pieces of information all over the place. Who is responsible for collating that, or how do you get started with your story with a limited subset of that data?

[00:24:29] Valentina: I think that's a tricky question, because it's where today we're also struggling the most. What we are trying to do is really trying to have workshops among the leaders group first, where we try to visualize the user personas first. Let's try to visualize this user persona, what is the workflow for them, what is the user journey. And then we're trying to connect each department's information around that. But it's not an easy task. I wouldn't say that we're good at it. It still takes some time, because especially for a small company we do not work in a very structured way.

[00:25:20] Valentina: And the structured way also starts from the tools that you're using. Even the tools, as I also said in the evidence before, are disconnected, they are not interconnected. So we have to start first from the basics, like having workshops where you can really visualize each department's data in the user story, and then start building on top of it with key metrics. That's not an easy answer. I don't really have a strong answer. Not yet.

[00:25:56] Rory: And that workshop kind of approach, that makes a lot of sense. But how do you get that buy-in at the C level? Because all of this takes a bit of time and effort, and they have to be bought in if they're going to be reiterating the problem and making sure that everything works through stories. Because from my experience, unless the C-suite adopts it, the culture doesn't change. So how do you get that C-suite buy-in?

[00:26:25] Valentina: I think that this happened to me, and was actually one of the reasons why I stepped into my role. Of course there are differences between big company or small company, but in both cases, if you work as a UX researcher or as a UX designer, or if you work as a product manager, your responsibility is collecting the user data, collecting every data you can see, just try to visualize it, make it human really, and don't be afraid of sharing with the company. At Vitec we have the company presentation where each department is presenting what they are doing. That is also one of the ways how we're trying to connect the data.

[00:27:13] Valentina: But at that time, when I was starting working as a UX product manager for this company, I was really trying to align everyone around the problem, around the user. I was sharing several video clips, and that got noticed. The leaders, since it's a smaller company, were really close. They really understood that the users were struggling with this. So it was a way to make them closer and closer, and that can also happen in a big company. You still have the possibility to present to the leaders, right?

[00:27:51] Valentina: So you have to be able to sell the user. You have to be able to let them visualize. And when I say visualize, it's not metrics, but video clips, user interviews, when you let your users or your customers speak instead of you reporting the results. You make it more human and you get people closer.

[00:28:16] Rory: Makes sense. Well, that's a brilliant way to finish up, because we're just at time now. But make it more human, bring your customer front and center. It's a brilliant way to finish. And thank you once again, Valentina.

[00:28:29] Valentina: Thank you. Bye.