Experts of Experience - #41 The Power of Storytelling and Design in Customer Experience

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

On this episode, Dane Howard, VP of Product Design at G2, discusses the impact of design on customer experience in software and he emphasizes the importance of trust and transparency in a software marketplace like G2, where reviews play a crucial role. Plus, Dane shares insights on creating alignment and collaboration among teams, the power of storytelling in design, and the value of customer journey mapping.Tune in to learn:The Impact of Design on Customer Experience in SoftwareWhy You Should Be Bridging the Gap: Designing for Buyers and Sellers in a MarketplaceThe Role of Empathy and Emotional Connection in DesignHow to Create Alignment and Collaboration Among TeamsThe Power of Storytelling in DesignHow to Break Down Silos with Customer Journey MappingThe Importance of Reducing Friction and Increasing DelightThe Power of Useful ArtifactsMentions:G2.comdanehoward.comstandbeautiful.meBlack Players for Change Juneteenth–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

You can't push the emotional side of design out. And at the end of the day, our audiences and our users and our customers are still emotional beings and they make decisions on that emotional level. So I try as much as I can to make sure that empathy, understanding, emotions are brought back into some of the decisions. A designer has to be very adaptable to understand where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. And you're constantly adjusting those, really, in every meeting, every part of the year, and every project you're working on. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today,

we are thrilled to have Dane Howard, VP of Product Design at G2 on the show. Dane is a visionary leader with a wealth of experience in strategic design, product development, and fostering innovation at companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft, previous to his role at G2. So Dane, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's wonderful to have you. Great pleasure. Thank you. So G2 is the largest software marketplace out there, and it's really at the forefront of helping millions of people make software decisions. And so I'd love to kick it off by just understanding how do you believe design when it comes to software really impacts the customer

experience? That's a great question. Well, when you pull buyers and sellers together, there's a natural opportunity to create a safe environment for trust. And so where G2 started was with reviews. And so that transparency in an industry of SaaS software became really valuable. One of the great stories that I inherited from the founders was, why was it, you know, easier to get a review for a $20 pizza than a $20,000 piece of software? I think from that strong foundation, you know, Oh my God, totally. is a really important role, I'd say, at the center of trust. But then also the audiences are very different in terms of how a buyer shows up and what they're looking for. And the average journey of software is greater than 60 days. So it's not like you're going to go and add it to your cart and then check out. And so that journey of education, understanding, coming back, research. And then on the seller side, we actually have really important data that is valuable to sellers to help them understand the sentiment in their reviews, their review growth strategy,

their ability to understand who their market is, who they're gaining market share from, who's maybe taking market share from them, and how they exist in this category. And so G2 has built a pretty healthy business in the information business and the intelligence business of selling information to sellers. And I personally am an avid user of G2 because just as you said, you tend to stick with these companies in the long run. And these are really, really big decisions that people are making. So it makes a lot of sense that trust is really at the forefront of doing what you do on both sides of the marketplace. And marketplaces are tough because you have two very different customers. And I'm curious to know how you approach designing for a marketplace with these two very different parties

who, well, they may be somewhat similar, but their needs are very different. How do you really bridge those gaps on both sides of the marketplace to create something that really feeds both sides? Yeah, that's a great question. So I lead a design team that is kind of split between a buyer guild and a seller guild. And within each guild, there are several squads within it. And each squad owns a certain part of the customer journey. And so think of it as a relay race of knowledge and insights. And so you have individual squads that develop deep subject matter expertise and are able to dive deeper to the customer. One thing I have enjoyed over the years is that, you know, I don't expect designers to be user researchers entirely, but I do expect them

to be very close to the research and to conduct their own research. And the team trains each other in terms of best practices on how to do concept testing, do user testing. And then we also provide quite a bit of analytics to understand did what we theorize actually turn out to be what the customer actually did. And so as we, you know, work on several, you know, sprints at a time to be able to line up like what we did, what we're doing and what we're going to do, it provides this ongoing narrative of learnings. And so we just try to have as many learnings or iterations per squad per year to be as close to the customer and what they're actually doing.

That collaboration is so, so key in making sure that we're hearing both sides. I'm curious, kind of a broad question, but you've been in this space for quite some time. And I always love to ask folks like you, what do you believe about the customer experience that few people would agree with you on? I've grown up basically through several cycles of customer experience and design. And I think we're in a seasonality where there's no question that experience matters. The thing that is becoming increasingly a part of the dialogue is the importance of data and analytics. And I'd say that what I still hold on to is that when you're getting people behind

big ideas, when you're getting people behind emotional ideas, that it's oftentimes the role of the design leader or the role of the designer to represent the emotional position. On the other end of whether you're designing for a small audience or for millions is that you have to carry the flag of empathy and understanding. And the customer feels when you design a feature. And I like to make sure that when we step into really large initiatives, that we also feel. Because there is plenty of my collaborators that represent the analytical position or the data position.

And a lot of our designs are informed by that. But at the same time, I would say that you can't push the emotional side of design out. And at the end of the day, our audiences and our users you can't push the emotional side of design out. And at the end of the day, our audiences and our users and our customers are still emotional beings and they make decisions on that emotional level. So I try as much as I can to make sure that empathy, understanding, emotions are brought back into some of the decisions. And there is this sense of gut still. And so gut doesn't play very well in a boardroom. But one of my favorite actual comments from an executive somewhere in the organization is that you've presented a vision, you've presented a new design on where

we might head, you presented the data, and they say, why aren't we doing that? I love that comment because what's implied is that you just had a compelling argument and helped me defend why we should not do that. That's when I'd be quiet and I just let everyone else defend either the way it was or why we shouldn't do it. That's the fun part for me because that means we've done a good job to create the right blend of emotion plus data and integrity in that data to build a good argument to build software progress. I love that you bring this up because I think that that balance of data and empathy, of course, is so necessary. And like you said, I think often we can index on the data piece and

sometimes forget about the empathy part. And I think great designers really know the impact that empathy has on the user experience. And I'm curious to know how you approach really bridging that gap because sometimes the data doesn't show something that you intuitively know to be true. And what do you do in that type of situation to really follow your intuition around? We know that a user is probably feeling this way and we should experiment with that, even if it's not exactly what the data is telling us. Yeah. So I mentioned squads earlier. Think of a squad as a three-legged stool between design, PM, or business and engineering. I'd rather have a united squad that has a conviction,

an emotional connection to the experience they're shipping than a right one. And that might sound weird when I say that, but data is imperfect. And one of the phrases I often use with designers and as well as PMs is you can't outsource your insights. That means like you can't just go let user research do that customer visit or let them report back to you what they heard. Because when you have those three functions that all hear it, they take with them the intangibles, which is the conviction of I heard it from a customer. And it's not that you're making decisions on just small data points, but all of a sudden

you've got a human connection that's telling you about how they felt in some way or manner. And I'd rather have a squad and a team be united under that conviction and that feeling of they feel that this is the right decision. And that power of being united is far better than having quote unquote the right data and having people kind of move into the meh of implementation. Yeah. And so you're also a coach and a mentor and you support other design leaders outside of your work at G2, from my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong. I'm curious, just digging into this topic a little bit more, how do you support leaders in creating that agreement among those parties? How do you create that collaboration and that alignment when it can actually be really difficult when we're all swimming in our own separate lanes? Yeah. I got a great insight that listen and silent share the same letters. And there's a lot of power in those that listen. And

a lot of the work that we do is remote. And so it's often difficult in a remote setting to give power to those that are just listening. They're not disengaged. They might be really powerfully listening. And so if you're going to create a united front, I think creating an environment where everyone's voice matters, creating like a type of meeting where you may review a document. And so the comment in a document is just as important as what someone says. And so, you know, as we try to figure out and get increasingly better at hybrid and remote work, you know, you have to get really good at synchronous and asynchronous work. So when I coach individuals about impact and influence, it's about developing the soft skills, assuming that they're on some continuum of

mastering their hard skills. And I see so many designers that are extraordinary designers that really what they need is to have a better presence, a better voice, a better way of asking thoughtful questions in such a way so that people want to follow that question and follow them into that answer. And then their work is able to speak for themselves in that way. But oftentimes, it used to be that work can't always speak for itself. And that's difficult when you have highly collaborative teams working across the globe, working both synchronously and asynchronously. So I often coach the individual on impact and effectiveness. And a lot of that starts with listening.

We could do a whole podcast on this specific topic. I too am a leadership coach and influence is one of the paramount skills, in my opinion, for any leader, not only to be able to drive a direction in where they're going with the business, but also to support their team in really communicating what it is they're seeing, especially from a CX perspective, to communicate to other teams what we're seeing, what customers are feeling, what is a direction worth heading in. And that influence piece is just so, so, so important. I think it's something every leader should spend some time thinking about. How can we be more influential? And there's tons of resources

out there, but just as we're on this topic, I'd love to know from you, what are some tips or tactics that you sometimes recommend to leaders in terms of how to really build their influence within the organization? Yeah, it's a great question. And I've had many trials at this over the years, and I'll share something that's turned out to be really effective. So it turns out that most product and service companies go through an annual planning cycle. And in this, there's usually the authoring of a quite large document. This might be a 30 or 40 page annual planning document that has a lot of business requirements in it. And what I've discovered is that design and visualization and experience,

when yielded at the right time of a planning cycle, and pointed in the direction of a future. And I'll distinguish it by saying a responsible future. So I think we've all seen visions that are cast that are really inspirational, but they might be two or three year visions. And I think as a design leader and experience leader, I ended up drafting alongside a lot of the words that were in our business planning document, but it allowed us to visualize scenarios that were implied based on the goals set for that year. And what it did is it brought to life a lot of the experiences that we could do. It also left open a lot of the, what ended up happening is a lot of the squads ended up using that inspiration and then using it as a foundational inspiration to build off of and do their planning. And so, I made sure that it was something that was grounded in the year's plan, inspired by data and research, but also had an emotional connection. And the organization then rallied. So, I would end up calling this in previous lives, previs, which is short for previsualization. And the insight is actually

borrowed from movies in Hollywood where they've got these big, you know, high production value movies to do. But, you know, oftentimes they have to figure out how they're going to do the movie. And I think, you know, this insight is also really valuable and found in Airbnb when they would storyboard, you know, their business. And so a lot of this is about aligning the story and how a company can rehearse their future. And design just happens to have a superpower, which is to, you know, visualize stories of opportunity. So I try to capitalize on that whenever possible. And I think it really touches on what you had initially shared around listening,

really listening to the leaders, the decision makers. What are the things that they care about? What are the directions that they see the company going? What are the decisions that they might be making behind the scenes that we can really tap into and then deliver to that vision, that story. And I also love that you brought up storytelling because you've mentioned, I've read a little bit on your LinkedIn, you've mentioned that stories build strength with retelling and that product and brand stories are pivotal. I'd love to understand a little bit of how you incorporate storytelling into your design process at G2. As much of a superpower, storytelling and visualization can be to a designer. It also requires a lot to constantly reinforce context. So if you think about the importance of storytelling, a designer has to be very adaptable to understand where we've been, where we are and where we're going. And you're constantly adjusting those really in every meeting, every

part of the year and every project you're working on. And so if you do have the luxury of working in a certain part of the business for a while, you develop subject matter expertise in that way. But most of the time, people miss the benefit of telling a story inside the organization first. And think of maybe an organization much like a symphony. There is all these different instruments and they all have different song sheets of music. And a story can actually amplify the sound and allow everyone to be heading the same direction. And so when I say stories build in strength with retelling, it's that rehearsal of that story.

It's the playback of that story. It's also in a way the prototype of the story, because if it takes, it's no longer yours. It starts to have a life of its own. And so when I get the most enjoyment of a story that we've put out there in the organization and it comes back to us in a way that is really owned by that group or by that individual or by that function. And that's wonderful because then the idea of documenting it or telling it or it has a feeling and a momentum and an excitement. And that's so critical in today's world where you're just trying to ship software.

You know, it's an act of will. And so stories can be a great catalyst to make that happen. Could you share an example of a story that you may have catalyzed within G2 or other organizations? Sure. I mean, one of the things that we identified at G2 was the importance of our returning visitors on the buyer side. So much of our journey, and you said you've used G2, so much of the G2 user experience starts off G2 actually with a search or a query about a

certain particular piece of software or a category. And we've done such a good job at allowing G2 to be notified and be present on that search result page that someone usually is dropped into the middle of G2. And so we told a story of what would it look like to entice that, are they a buyer? Are they a reviewer? What's their intent? And have them just log in. And when they log in to preserve that state or to view that information, we now have the ability to save or preserve that state and then do some work behind the scenes to start to personalize whatever information or what category they were inquiring about. And when they return in a logged in state, we can actually surprise them and delight them with some personalization, with some additional research that we've done for them behind the

scenes and really help and assist them along the way. And so just by telling that simple story to say, here's what a simple active login would unlock, it then created a whole bunch of initiatives for our roadmap this year to say, that's actually a really wonderful opportunity to create other metrics like engagement, other metrics like personalization, and how might that help our buyer users later in the journey when they're starting to be later in their journey when they're starting to be later in their journey when they're searching for additional software. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it.

They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. And I assume you're probably also creating different characters in that story, different types of people that are coming for different reasons and how they're navigating that. It's one of my most favorite things to do with an organization is to really map out what is the journey of this user? Who is this user? And then what is their journey as they go through the flows? Because it may be very different depending on who it is that's playing that main character role. That's right. It's very true.

One of my experiences is joining an organization and meeting a lot of smart people. And a lot of their identities are identified based on the organization or the process that they're tied to. And there's a great saying, which is the customer never cares how you're organized. And so one of the first things that I did is after I collected a bunch of knowledge about the organization, I said, well, in order to do my job really well, I need a mental model of the customer journey. And I kept asking, is there a customer journey map? And there hadn't been one that had been created yet. And so what inspired us was really the Disneyland map.

We worked with a really talented designer and we ended up doing about 20 internal workshops and gathering information. And we just recently launched the customer journey map, the first of its kind inside of G2. And if I were to use an analogy, let's say like a car, imagine wanting to join the car team and you're building a car, but you get invited into the engine bay and you say, hey, what do you do? And you're like, well, I work on this wire that connects with this wire and this is connected to this system. And you get all the inside information and language around what it's like from the inside of the engine bay. And then you might ask a simple question like, well, how does the user or customer interact with what you do? And they say, oh, I'm part of the braking system. Like, aha, I know what that is. And so, to the dashboard of the user

who's driving the car, they know to step on the brake pedal and they expect it to do something. But there's a lot of complexity behind the scenes in order to make that braking system work. And I think the same is true with companies is that they can become very efficient at knowing their function behind the scenes. And yet, I would say it's so valuable to align people through experience. And what Airbnb taught me and what them inherently storyboarding their business would tell me is that experience unites us, regardless of the function. So that's one way to create a common terminology, a common vocabulary. And so that was just a small but important act that we needed to do at G2 as we're getting bigger, as we're getting more complex, to actually map out the touch points of both the users on the buyer side and the customers that we have on the seller side and align

our initiatives around the experiences that we have on the seller side and align our initiatives around the experiences that they feel. It really helps to break down those silos that naturally form within an organization. It is much easier for us to stay in our lane and just focus on the engine, for example, instead of how the engine plays in the context of the entire car. But you really miss some critical information about how the user is experiencing that car if we don't think about it holistically. And that's what I absolutely love about customer journey mapping is not only does it allow you to see the entire context of what a customer is experiencing end to end. But it really helps

to connect teams in how their role is actually contributing to other elements of the business that may not be as directly clear to them. So it's super exciting to hear that you've recently gone through this exercise. And I'm curious to know, what have you seen in terms of benefits or insights after rolling out a customer journey map? Yeah, it's a great question. So we decided very intentionally to, once we had a version of the customer journey map that we liked, was to take it on tour internally. And we're right in the middle of that tour. And I would measure effectiveness based on the conversations we're right in the middle of that tour. And I would measure effectiveness based on the conversations we're having around it. And so, some groups see themselves and can point to where their work is in the journey map immediately, right? Others take a little bit of pause. So think about IT or legal or security and how we actually

talk to those groups and how they locate themselves in their work helps bridge a language barrier with groups that are there. And I've been fascinated to sit, like I've seen whole meetings like where they put a little marker on one part of the map and they have a whole meeting about that particular touch point. And they talk about what came before it, what needs to come after it, who else needs to be in the room. And it reframes the playing field to say, well, this is not a security meeting.

This is about this customer experience, right? You know, this is not a security meeting. This is about this customer experience, right? You know, this is not a legal meeting. This is about a customer experience and they just are feeling this because they just went through this. So, how do we make this? How do we incorporate? What functions do we need in order to, you know, reduce friction or increase delight. And so that has been fascinating to watch. And in a similar way, you don't need to be an expert in your business to be able to have the right wayfinding. And I'll go back to the Disneyland map as an example.

So if you've ever been to Disneyland and use the map, let's say I've never been and you've been a hundred times, we could meet at 10 a.m. at the base of the Matterhorn and we could both get there. And I think for organizations and companies, they just need one useful artifact to help locate where is this problem that we're solving? And that has a sense of terminology, wayfinding, and just enough information to be able to have a better conversation than you would have had otherwise. And I think to double click on that, especially using this example that you're sharing around

security, for example, when we look at the customer experience and we can see the barriers to the optimal customer experience, it gives us insight into what each team is being blocked by in them actually fulfilling on that experience. What information might be lacking for that team or touch points, cross-collaboration, processes, systems. There's so many different things that that can really kind of open us up to where we can then start to unpack the employee's experience in delivering on that individual customer experience, which is something that I just think is so critically important for us to be able to deliver the optimal customer experiences that we dream of.

And I don't know if that's something that you've come into contact with as you've been going through this process, but if so, I'd love to hear about it. Yeah, 100%. Technology is complex and sometimes hard to describe. And even between functions, they have some of their own terminology that they spend quite a bit of effort just communicating to other functions what they do. One of the benefits of this journey map is that we leaned into a metaphor of a city. It was one of the things that worked. And once you commit to an analogy or metaphor of a city, there's kind of rules of a city. What are utilities? What are streets or buildings? What does it mean to have access to the penthouse?

What is the main lobby? And there was a huge insight when we were taking this on tour, is that we realized that some teams could lean into this analogy. Like there was one that comes to mind is that one group that does a lot of our integrations. We had a lot of discussion around the ground floor. We visualized a lot of our service offerings and our packaging as a large building that had a ground floor and then there was different towers or spires. And they said, well, we really identify with this concierge moment

because think of what a concierge does in a hotel and how it helps guide you to a better experience and how it introduces you. And so they really identified and leaned into that analogy because it allows them to describe what they do as a function better to internally. And they were just, in a way, it was so fun to see them feel liberated to say like, oh, it's been so difficult to describe what we do. And now we can actually use this analogy and speak about it in a way that's more useful to bridge between what a concierge would be. And it also forced them to say, well, how could we be better? How could we be the best concierge

ever? And so that was really fun. And so it's just, you know, oftentimes in getting people all pointing the right direction, sometimes we need a little help to say, well, what is it like or what does it behave like? And sometimes you need to reach into other worlds, other languages and other industries to say, well, what might it behave like? So not only is this giving people a maybe more meaning or purpose in their role because it can be seen through a different lens and through a different context, but also what I'm hearing you say is that it's also a place for inspiration to look to other industries and say, how is, for example, I love using hospitality as a proxy for tech service because at the end of the

day, hospitality has nailed how we experience a space and we can take so many lessons and apply it to our roles. And so just as I'm hearing you speak, I'm just loving it so much because we need to be looking to other industries to take inspiration and then apply it to our work. And on that note, I wanted to talk a little bit about inspiration and innovation and how, as you lead a globally distributed team, you can really cultivate and foster a culture of innovation amongst those teams that you lead? I feel real fortunate that, you know, innovation has been like a, not just a talking point at G2, but it's been part of the core founding. You know, there's a G2 Labs that sole purpose is to run hackathons and innovation sprints.

And we create time for the, you know, the population to come up with new ideas. And so that's a regular part of it. Monthly, we do what's called Innovation Pulse, which is basically an hour-long storytelling of what's about to ship or what has just shipped. And so it's kind of at the tip of the tongue. I've seen a lot of organizations talk about innovation pipeline and talk about innovation process. And I would say that's kind of like a uppercase innovation. And there's a lot of formality around the talk around innovation. But I also subscribe to the fact that,

you need a good working mechanism to be testing and iterating ideas. But I subscribe to a definition of innovation that you don't define or put a label on innovation internally. You allow who you serve to actually get to claim that that's novel or innovating, right? And so I don't think that for the most part, like if you really are customer focused and user focused, you might put things out there and hope that they are step change. But the ultimate judge of that will be in the rear view mirror of after executing. So you don't walk in saying, hey, I've got an innovative idea. You know, that doesn't fit my definition of innovation. But inspiration, I think, is on the heels of allowing a culture where you can try things. And I think that's something that I really applaud G2 and the founders that they've set

up from day one. If I were to speak to inspiration, I'd go back to storytelling. And I think how something came to be, how people came together. I think you often want to point a camera, not necessarily just to create is an era, an era of experimentation old days. And to me, you know, so much of just shipping software today and building products is a labor of love. It takes, it's hard work. And so as a leader, if you can document what it was like to be a part of that organization during that time period, it's somewhat akin to, you know, watching a movie and then watching the behind the scenes of what it was like to make that movie. And I think, again, I've been inspired by just making sure that as leaders and those that are auteurs of the experience that, yes, it's so important what

you're actually shipping, but it's also important that you care and feed those that are going through it. And you mentioned experimentation in this as well. I'm kind of seeing it's like you take inspiration, you experiment, maybe innovation comes from that. But experimentation, in my experience, some people, some companies are really for investing in experimentation and others are much more focused on just getting the job done or we want a more direct line to success. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on the importance of experimentation, because in the design world, it's really, really hard for us to get to a innovative idea if we're not

playing and trying things and failing along the way. And so I'd love to understand a little bit of how you inspire experimentation or create structure for experimentation so that people can really find what's working best. What I'm about to say might feel a little bit vague, but I look at it on two dimensions. So I mentioned that I've got the buyer side of the experience and the seller side of the experience. That is, let's say, a horizontal portfolio or a spectrum of opportunity. Then let's say on the y-axis, I've got a measure of ambition. I like to place a lot of different kinds of bets, both across the horizontal as well as the vertical. And I like to just have a very calculated

and methodical approach on where I place ambitious bets or incremental bets because you can apply experimentation. Let's say I was a mutual fund of experiences. I would wanna be pretty diversified. And so you want some of the bets to be like, knock your socks off. Oh my gosh, we should try this. And you want a certain part of your organization that is like wanting to,

they just, you can't stop them. They're going to do it. And others are going to be really important, calculated, methodical bets. And if we were going on a hike and you only looked at your feet, you wouldn't be able to fully enjoy the hike. So, you have to go on this journey and be able to change your vantage point as you're also watching your feet, if that makes sense. You don't want to fall over yourself and like fall down the hill. There is a responsibility to stay upright, but you also need to enjoy the view. And I think some of these larger bets, these ability to dream, I enjoy that part of my job as well, but it can't be at the expense of just, you know, having sure footing. And how do you find that balance? Like, is there a ratio that you go after?

How do you find the balance between the big bets and the calculated bets? I'd like to say there's a formula. I think it's intuition. But again, back to listening, I have to listen to the organization. So I've been real fortunate to work inside a very diverse set of organizations. Turns out that my time at BMW, they were very comfortable looking five, six, seven years out. That's not going to fly for a public company that's really like looking at quarterly earnings. And so usually what I listen to is just as much diversified, but it's calibrated within the appetite for risk and ambition within the organization.

Mm-hmm. So it's really organizational. It depends on the appetite or the, let's say, appetite for risk that an organization has and finding that balance and kind of the flavor of how they want to play. True. And I've also learned valuable lessons. So I've done some very successful quote unquote visions that three reorgs later were completely forgotten. And so the thing is, is I try to not just index on inspiration or ambition, but also look at effectiveness.

Did this level of ambition translate to roadmap? Did this level of incremental plan translate to roadmap and impact? And so at the end of the day, outcomes, you have to be really outcome focused. But you should also not be discouraged by the things that don't happen. And there's a lot of naysayers that sometimes someone who's been around the organization, they might say, oh, we tried that. And there's a lot of naysayers that sometimes someone who's been around the organization, they might say, oh, we tried that. And my usual response to that is, well, you didn't try it now under these conditions with these people. And that oftentimes is, you know, there's a certain degree of learning on certain things, but, you know, history would show that so much of success is tied to timing

and execution. Completely. Do you do a lot of postmortems? Formally and informally, I think it's super valuable. Like we have a retro process, where we actually have some good anonymous feedback and we group them and it can usually be done in about an hour. And so there's a great retro board where it brings groups of 15 to 30 together. But I also like really smaller processes that basically look at what went well, what could have been improved. And I think what you're after is those insights at the shortest distance between when you feel finished, right? The longer time goes on, the value of those learnings, you know, depreciate heavily.

But I do think it's so important just in going off of what you were saying that sometimes you might try the right thing at the wrong time. And it's important for us to really understand what were those components that worked and what were the components that didn't work so that we can learn and apply that in the future. And in my opinion, just doing the exercise, whether we go back to the notes or not, still brings a ton of value, at least for the people involved. And then, of course, there's how do we set other people up for success going into the future? But just the action of taking a moment, taking a beat. I really suggest this to anyone in any circumstance when we've gone through a project or a process. Just take a second to think about what worked, what didn't work, what do we want to do differently in the future? So I'd love to take a little bit of a personal turn because I know that you have a number of initiatives that you work on outside of work, one of which being an anti-bullying movement, Stand Beautiful. And I'd love to understand a

little bit about how your advocacy work influences your work as a designer. Well, thanks for asking the question. I'd say at some point of anyone's career, they realize that they can ship a lot of widgets, they can drive a lot of eyeballs, they can actually be really proficient at moving the metrics that are tied to business. And I think it's kind of a part of me that I was searching for something that would connect to purpose. And I first connected with this when I was at eBay. They have great programs like GivingWorks, which connects transactional volume to nonprofits. They also have PayPal Giving Fund, which does something similar. So I got involved

very early and saw some of the rewards of just helping out the best way I could to create some remarkable programs now that help donate hundreds of millions of dollars towards nonprofits and goods. So I got kind of teased by that success and that effectiveness that you can work for one of these organizations, but also do good. And so, Stand Beautiful represents some advisory work that I helped out. And it's a very close story to my heart. And I've also invited, I've been an advisor to Black Players for Change. And I just invite these opportunities into my life to advise and help in any way I can. But it helps me learn about the humanity in experiences. There's people that basically take on very large initiatives.

There's great recovery stories. There's great stories of resilience. And when that's in my portfolio of experience, it just adds to my other work and it rounds me out. And so oftentimes, if you have that desire to do that type of work, it may or may not be present in your job or your company. I'm fortunate that at G2, they have a certain percentage of their revenue that they put towards good. They also have giving programs. So that was like, you know, foregone conclusion for me in terms of what they've built up with their cultural values.

But, you know, most recently with Black Players for Change, I helped the executive director redo their brand, you know, before I started at G2 and, you know, planted some seeds with Major League Soccer and Adidas to say, well, what would it look like to have professional players before they would start the game on Juneteenth? What would it look like to have people stand in solidarity for equality for all? And it happened. I got to be involved in a jersey design that allowed, and it was just, it almost brought tears to my eyes to see how an idea could take root and build in momentum. And it's some of these things that, you know, might be really small in execution, but big in terms of impact. And so just to be a part of those things, you know, I think enriches one's perspective, enriches, and then I might take

some of that encouragement to tell and retell that story inside of another part of an organization to say, I was really close to this. What if we did something like that? What if we were able to take a little tiny piece of it and align it with our value system? And I think what you find is that generally a business or founders or leaders have an ambition to do that. They may want to do it. If it's part of their original culture and values, it's a lot easier to do than to bolt it onto an experience. But for me, it's just very fulfilling to be able to look at a body of work and have this sit next to some of the other things I've been able to accomplish in my life. I so agree with this approach. I myself have throughout building and leading teams and

working in startups have always had a little environmental side project that I was working on mostly initially because it just gave me more purpose and value in my life, which ended up making me a better leader. I felt like a more full, well-rounded human. And I looking back on it can see how I was just happier as a person and that happiness spread. But then at the same time, as you're saying, you can also learn from those types of experiences and bring them back into your work. And the example that I had, I started a trash pickup dance party nonprofit where we would have a DJ and a band and we'd go around the streets of New York City and pick up trash. And what ended up happening is we created this

extremely strong community of people. And without that being an intention, I became a community builder and was connecting dots and connecting brands. And it ended up really was something I could bring back to my customer experience work where I was building a team and we had a community of customers that we were interacting with. And so I love to hear that you're working on these types of projects. And I can only imagine, I mean, I have goosebumps with you telling me about what you're up to. So I can only imagine how it feels for you to be able to give back in that way and also share your expertise in an area

that is really aligned with your values in a place that you want to create impact in the world. So thank you for doing that. It's wonderful. Of course. Thanks for the question. Of course. So a couple last questions for you to close it out. We always like to ask our guests about an experience

that you've recently had with a brand or a business. It can be anything. And I'd love to hear about an experience that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience and why it was amazing. You know, one of the benefits, but also detriments of being a designer is you see everything through the lens of what could be improved. Or I have this inside joke with my wife that if we're sitting in traffic together and we see an absolute terrible billboard, she knows that within moments I'm going to be pitching her that billboard.

And she just thinks it's hilarious because I know how to pitch ideas. But to pitch, to imagine like that was the idea that happened, like that's the one that they approved is quite comical. But on a serious note, you mentioned hospitality earlier. I think what resonates with me and what jumps out with me, so I spend most of my time designing for software and services, and that might touch majority of what we spend time designing is on software or a mobile product. But there's so much of the analog experience that I appreciate in hospitality and what they think about of being just overtly customer focused. And I had a chance to go on a cruise. I've never really gone on a cruise before,

but it happened to be through Virgin and it was on a brand new boat. And I got to tie together so many thoughtful things that was part of their space and boat design, through their cabin design, through the architecting of their experience, things that thoughtful and were executed really brilliantly from the boarding experience and how they arrange people to actually how they design the doors. The pattern on the designs when the two doors interacted with each other created an animation. And it was just like, wait a second, that's just intentional. And so when you have an experience like that, eyes wide open, and you're keeping close attention to where you are in the journey and what was delightful, I learned a lot. So I have high accolades for that experience. Of course, I have a long list of things that they can improve, but that comes with the territory, right? Yeah. But those are the highs and lows. But I think they stand out as just a whole architectural journey of what they did really well. And I appreciate and understand all the different

disciplines that were behind the scenes to help orchestrate that. So, to me, high marks for that. And I think the hospitality, you know, for your listeners and just thinking about like the best check-in experience at a hotel, think of the best boarding experience of an airline. Think about the subtle things that one Uber or Lyft driver did differently that made it just that much more delightful. And I think we learn a lot from the analog experiences that we can then apply to our digital experiences. Because the more that we zoom out, everyone, I hope, I don't design products that I assume that everyone's in front of a digital screen all the time. There are spaces in between. And what this forces me to do is to think about the spaces between those digital touch points to see if there's something that could be designed better, if that makes sense.

Thank you for sharing that example. I love it. And I've also been on that cruise actually with the Summit at Sea community. And I remember the check in so vividly because it was exciting and it was fun. And I knew everything I needed to know to have a great time. And exactly as you said, we can take those analog experiences and apply them to the digital experiences that we're creating. 100%. So my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Well, I feel very fortunate that I am a part of several different communities where design

leaders and experience leaders get to get together. And they talk about the state of the state, and they talk about what's going on. And I would say, you know, what's unique about 2023 entering 2024 is there is, I don't know, this reshuffling and reanalyzing of the role and the craft of design within business. And I lived through the era where there was a lot of focus on design-led organizations, design-led initiatives. The discussion that we had was actually grounded in an analogy of a band. And it's actually more aligned as a customer experience leader to think of your group, your function as the bass player of a band rather than the lead singer. And if you can kind of reframe the function as a connector, reframe the function as bringing others together, there is a silent humility and humbleness in just

knowing that the band can't really do what they do without you. At the same time, designers aren't really that comfortable being the lead singer. I'll admit, they like to wear black, they like to kind of be behind the scenes. And to me, that really resonated. And I think a lot of designers as a population are trying to rationalize what's happened over the last couple of years in terms of their role inside of organizations. And I would just say, if you were to think more like a bass player than a lead singer, you'd have a lot more comfort in thinking about your function and your role inside of the organization and how you participate in the collaborative process, which is, you know, building and designing products. You've brought so many great analogies to the table in this

conversation, Dan. So I think that's a great way to send us off. Thank you so much for sharing all of your insights and expertise with us. I've learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners have as well. So thank you so much. And I hope you have a wonderful day. We'll be in touch. Great pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force,

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