Itoday Apero - Jackie Colburn

Itoday Apéro #10 - Jackie Colburn

Jackie Colburn

Jackie is an expert workshop facilitator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
She launched her strategy and facilitation practice in 2017. As a passionate facilitator and leader, she believes that the way we design our workshops and meetings has the power to improve the work we do as well as the experience we have working together.

How to win at workshops whether you’re remote, in person, or hybrid

Meeting in person is excellent for building camaraderie and team culture. It creates space for authentic moments and sidebar conversations, and it builds rapport.

But Covid 19 forced us to upgrade our gears and run full online workshop. And to everyone’s surprise it actually worked!

Now it’s time to look back and discuss what’s best: in person, online, or even hybrid workshops? This talk will also be an opportunity to learn from your experiences.

Jackie Colburn

Jackie has been leading the creation of new products, services, and businesses for over 15 years; everything from emerging startups to critical strategic efforts for fortune 50 businesses. With a dedication to clarity, Jackie thrives when the problem is hard and the team is ready to make a change but doesn’t quite know what to do, or how. Jackie’s workshops create the conditions to co-create future solutions. She’s worked with teams at organizations such as Medtronic, Roche, Ameriprise Financial, Purdue University, and Best Buy.

Jackie has proven that openness and optimism accelerate our collective potential to make great things happen and unlocks team potential to make the impossible possible. She is also a speaker, coach and the co-author of the Remote Design Sprint Guide.

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Gaël Mercier - Itoday

Itoday Apéro #9 - Gaël Mercier

Gaël Mercier

Gaël is in charge of corporate Innovation at STIB, the Public Transport company of Brussels Region. In early 2021, he proudly launched STIB’s Innovation Lab (InnovAtelier) with a team of passionate colleagues from across the company. They use design sprints (up to 10 per year) to help colleagues and partners bring their ideas to life, and solve their biggest challenges in an innovative and customer-centric fashion.

Building a culture of innovation, in a large transportation company, with design sprints

Most organizations seek to innovate and integrate their employees, at all levels, in this process.
But building a culture of innovation takes time, perseverance, and requires effective tools.

Thanks to a structured, bottom-up approach at STIB in Brussels, Gaël Mercier and his team may have cracked the code of a pragmatic and efficient innovation process. They were able to create an emulation in a 10’000-people public service company, by organizing a design sprint per month on customer-centric topics.

Gaël Mercier

Gaël is passionate about mobility and innovation. He started as an engineer at Renault-Nissan, where he led several connected-car innovation projects, leveraging Innovation and UX methodologies. He then moved to the mobility sector, at Transdev, to help anticipate an autonomous & connected future for public transport. He moved to Brussels and joined STIB in 2020.

He studied engineering in France at Mines ParisTech. He has a passion for theater, which led him to take a one-year sabbatical to write a play, and perform it 50+ times with a small troupe of actors.

Links

Hello everyone welcome to Itoday Apero number nine I guess nine thank you so much for
being here today this is really really great because it’s the middle of the summer and some people actually
showed up so i’m so so so happy that you guys are here you can tap for yourself
this is good so thank you so much for being here for it
to the apparel we are live from Lausanne Switzerland and today we’re going to talk about innovation about
transportation and about creating a culture of innovation in a very very big transportation
company our guest today his name is Gaël Mercier
and Gaël so there is a there is a little tradition that i to the apero
i have this bottle of wine and Gaël is gonna get one bottle of wine as a speaker and we gonna have a second
bottle of wine for the best question in the audience so it’s going to be interactive and if you have questions at
any point please ask it and you might win the battle so about our guest today
Gaël Mercier he’s a innovation manager at steeb mivb
which is the big transportation company in brussels city and Gaël is from
originally from france and living in brussels right now so i’m gonna read his bo bio and then we’re gonna welcome him
so Gaël he’s really passionate about mobility and innovation he studied as an
engineer at ronald nissan and he led several car innovation projects he
worked in the mobility sector at transdev where he tried to help
anticipate autonomous and connected future public transportation and then he
moved over to brazil to to to join STIB which is the public
transportation company in brussels he has a degree in engineering and engineering from baritek le min and i
didn’t know that but he has a passion for theater which i think is good because he’s also facilitating workshops
and he wrote even a play and he performed it more than 50 times
more than 50 times with a small group of actors so please from brussels belgium
make a huge round of applause for mr Gaël messier [Music]
hey Gaël hi steph and thanks for having me
today i’m really glad to join you guys so yeah thanks for the for the opportunity
it’s great thank you guys for for joining in july yes yeah so we are the beginning of
july people are actually going on holidays right now so they are from the car watching the watching
the show which is which is kind of cool so thank you so much guys for attending
so Gaël today we’re really really excited to to have you on the show because we’re gonna talk about about
transportation about creating a culture of innovation in that space and
it’s it’s quite some years we we know each other right we we we work together we run design sprints uh
together at your company we’re gonna talk about all of this together but maybe before we start can i can i ask
you you know to to kind of tell tell us who you are and what’s your journey and how you ended up in innovation
sure and thanks again steph for for that yeah so as you said i’m from france
originally and i was born in south of france in toulouse i studied in paris
engineering and i i started in in the automotive industry at reno nissan so
actually a first exciting first job not related to innovation but which taught me a lot for for that field which was in
romania in a in a plant in the car factories that was acquired by renault and it was really about being fast and
doing things with what you have and getting things done so i think as a first job experience when you just start
from school it was really really great and then i back in france i worked in
a more traditional design office in automotive so less exciting i would say that i started really to have side
projects in research and that’s really where i already started this innovation in autonomous parking systems and so on
but to be honest what really i would say kicked me off in terms of innovation was really this personal
project that you you mentioned that theater project so i took a one-year unpaid lead after that first job at
renault to do that to write that play and to perform it and that’s really how i i think i
i had the confidence and experience to to really explore new topics and and really at the same time stay very
focused on one goal so that’s really where i started this innovation i think that’s great when i came back to toronto
nissan i i started again as a innovation project manager and that’s really where the fun began professionally speaking so
working on great projects on on voice assistants for cars with microsoft with google so really great
and then i had the opportunity to work on partnerships as well or still in the automotive industry so in partnerships
between car makers and so that really gives you the big picture of
how you deal with legal how you deal with commercial aspects and with design and so on
and after a while i mean i was like okay i’ve been doing this for more than 12 years and i’m
putting diesel vehicles on the road so is that really the future is that what i want to do afterwards so i decided to
move to the mobility sector and to join transdev which is a big public transport company in france which is present also
in the us and germany and many more countries not in belgium or switzerland but
and i i was there in a a small division working on adapting self-driving technology to public
transports by preparing the company for that future and and then my wife moved to brussels so i uh yeah we
took for a new job so yeah i moved there as well i was really lucky to to be able to uh
to join steed so the big public transport company of brussels region to become their innovation manager and i
started their early march 2020. so this is great so STIB it’s
actually a giant company right i read somewhere it’s more than ten thousand employees right yeah so you have to yeah it’s a bit more
than ten thousand employees but you have to realize a big part of those ten thousand employees are like mostly bus
drivers trump drivers meteor drivers or technicians working on the on the work we have so it’s it’s not like 10 000
employees like google employees you know so it’s it’s mostly a people management company but yeah it’s
it’s pretty big of course and it manages basically all the public transport in the region but it’s also a local company
which is also a strengths and in some in some points and i think because because i’ve
worked a bit with you and what is really interesting when you are not when you’re not from
brazil is to realize that brazil really is you know you have different languages in the same city you know you
have people speak dutch or speak french different cultures too and also inside the company so i i think
it makes it a super interesting context for what we’re going to talk about for the rest of the of this talk so i
saw ninten like your title is simply innovation manager right so what does it mean at STIB and what’s
uh what do you do and like exactly and what’s your job there
yeah so i think there are several things to the job and this is what i do and what you
know the team does and other people and in the company do and i see today alexandra is connected so she’s also
part of that so so yeah i think the main thing is about
building an innovation culture for first tip and so we definitely will talk again about that today i think it’s
really the core of of the interview i guess but there are also other things another thing is to really manage i
would say the innovation portfolio to be able to okay over the years match this is the
corporate goals and strategies that we have another point is really about uh
being able to anticipate major challenges and opportunities to to like look ahead
in 5 10 15 years and see okay how things are changing what are the trends in
technology and in in in the society and so on and how do we adapt to that what are the opportunities
for us and and last but not least it’s about partnerships and partners so it’s building also
especially in innovation a culture of partnerships being able to partner with other big public companies with
industrial partners with startups with academics and so on so that’s in a nutshell but of my role is that uh
let’s do it it sounds pretty interesting i like how you know sovereignty is you know
innovation manager but you know people they will have added like three lines on 18 i guess but yeah
it’s great so let’s talk a bit about the enough italy because i think it’s uh
it’s really the the heart of what we want to talk about what’s super interesting is that you
have built what’s seemed to me at least a kind of mature innovation
you know culture at STIB using design sprints so several design
sprints over the year and i think it’s a very well structured approach
very well far through and it’s probably a model that could inspire a lot of people so could you tell us a bit more
about what is this innovatory and how did it start sure
yeah so so i think what what’s important is also yeah how did it start and why did it start
so yeah going back a bit more than two years so when i started that at sip so beginning of march 2020 so by the way
15 days before the first lockdown so it was a bit of a special time it’s also a good opportunity to maybe start new
things yeah i really started to discuss with many people in the company to see okay
how is how how things are going how are we doing regard with regard to
innovation and what works what doesn’t work what are the expectations and well one of the things i i noticed that there
are a lot of very creative people within the company i mean ten thousand people of course
you’re going to find people who are really willing to to have new ideas and do stuff but a lot of them were a bit frustrated that okay
they could not really execute on their ideas okay they can locally innovate but maybe they don’t have the resources you
know the connections as a to to do things at the broader scale so we could see there is a huge potential
but a little bit untapped potential and so one of the main things we we proposed
first to do to our our top management is to say okay we maybe should start a sort of innovation lab
and they say okay sure why not but what exactly do you mean so please come back with something more you know concrete
and so that’s when we started to work with a small team so alexandra here today is part of that team of
people from everywhere in the company so like sunrise from from marketing from digital marketing there are people
from operations from hr from finance and so on and so we were like yeah six person working together during the
summer of 2020 to to actually define what we wanted to do and okay we said we we need something quite
simple quite condensed in terms of time and so we we said okay we need something that will support uh
colleagues who want to yeah to to to bring their ideas to life to solve big challenges in an
innovative manner a customer-centric manner and so we we looked at several methodologies we
decided to choose design sprints five-day sprints for also for the reason that it’s really uh
in one week and that’s really going to bring dynamics to what we do and and yeah so we basically got
the budget end of 2020 and we really started operationally speaking beginning of 2021 our first print was in february
2021 and to date we’ve done 15 sprints so we basically do
9 10 sprints per year so we don’t do in july in august but otherwise it’s basically one sprint per month
and yeah so what we do is we we we source we select projects and then and and project
leaders or our ideas leader should i say and we we have a yeah we can talk
about this later but we have a low selection process but basically we we make sure those people can get the
resources the right team to to to give their idea or their a chance to to to be to be uh
prototyped tested and maybe then become a reality so that’s that’s what we do yeah i think i think
something that that you said but i would like to put an emphasis on that is the these ideas leader the people who
become basically who bring a sprint idea and become the deciders of the sprint right
they are not you know top managers or they are not from the sea level they are basically anyone in the company
if i understood well so could be a metro driver who has an idea it’s like oh i would like to do that or i think we
should do that or we have this problem could bring a sprint idea and become the decider right yeah that’s that’s that’s correct
so it’s very bottom up approach should i say so yeah we have several ways of sourcing
uh ideas i mean or the first one is is it
the team that basically runs innovative or in our innovation lab is really the core thing so we we have
one person in each big one or two person in every big division so like marketing
sales hr operations and so on and each of them has a network of course in the company and they hear about okay what
are the big problems what are the big ideas and so that’s the first way to to actually bring ideas to the table
and then of course now we a little bit more well-known inside so people come to us also saying hey i have this idea has
this problem can you help us and we also have when the third thing is a sort of small internal innovation
contest which was there a long time before that stupid it existed more than ten years
and that’s more for for the field level for the year for yeah for like bus drivers and so on for
them to be able to to to bring like small projects they’ve done or ideas they have to the table and
and be part of that and so for example we had a yeah a former bus driver who had a nice idea and who did a sprint
with us and that’s yeah so it can be really bottom-up and that’s i think that’s a good part a
great part of it it’s really great like what was it from the beginning like really like the
like the vision for innovatory that it would be that bottom up and really open to absolutely anyone or did you
have some first test with like you know smaller team at the management level like
how did you build that no no we we didn’t have a like test with management level but it’s the fact is
that at the beginning the first topics were really more brought by people like i would say a director or manager
level because they already had a vision of like what are their big problems so there’s there naturally were the people
to bring the first topics yeah but it was not like okay it’s a test only you can bring ideas it was just what
happened i would say and then over time we said okay now we can really go i would go get more people i would
say to to to participate but yeah no no there were no like trials
before it was really from the start we were very clear about the governance and everything we we had
i would say to buy in from for for from our executive committees a budget for it and then we just started
how did you get the buy-in you see like it’s already hard to finance you know a five-day workshop in general like to get
the buy-in but how did you get the buy-in for such a you know a strong uh
yeah like innovation track with several workshops like a once a month
was it a yearly budget was it a quarterly yeah how did how did you make it
um yeah i think it was really step by step so so first of all i think it was the right timing i mean i joined early
march 2020 it was a time when they had i mean uh
STIB was already thinking okay what should we do with innovation that’s a question in mind it was pretty hard to
find the right way to do it so it was an expectation about it so that’s first thing i mean i just
joined at this right time and and and yeah it was step by step so so first
defining what is innovation for us for first tips so of course innovation for us we are a people management company so
innovation for us it is all is not the same as innovation for google or or tesla of course and so that’s the first
thing was to say okay have an agreement on what we mean by innovation and
what what are our goals there why do we want to innovate so that’s what the first thing the first few weeks a month
was really about that and then saying okay to answer that maybe a first step one one big thing we could do is launch
an innovation lab okay let’s try to see what that means and then we come back okay with uh
exactly what we want to do okay we know we we could name them innovate here is a methodology here is a budget we need for
the first year and so on and so on and basically we we had the i would say the confidence of
our executive committee to to start and do and test this for a i would say
a few sprints and see how it goes and yeah that’s basically how it started
[Music] yeah so so it’s basically that you came with a plan right yeah
yeah yeah but that plan was built i think the one of the very important
thing is i didn’t just build that plan alone it was co-created with yeah
those you know five six people i mentioned before and now it’s evolving over time the team is but it was a
really transversal team not just a corporate team for working alone i would say it was people from throughout the
company yeah passionate people of course all really great very different from one another and i think it was really a
collective work of building that innovator so if it was just one person or two people
just trying to do that in their in their office makes sense could you maybe
you know like take i don’t know like one of this project as an example and basically you know give us some kind of
timeline about the steps because i think it’s so interesting your whole process of like how do you select the projects
how the the people who brought an idea become the deciders how you assemble the team and all these steps i think it’s
fascinating yeah what i could do even is is already give you a few examples of projects we
have because it’s very different from on another so maybe just to give you a sense of what we’re doing we we have
for example sprints about we had sprints really at the beginning about how to get back our customers because
that was during cove period of time so like in any other i think public transport company of the world we had
much less travelers at the time so it was about okay how do we get back customers when we’re after the pandemic so and so for
example we had a sprint about how can we build more flexible offers for example
for our customers and then we also had stuff about yeah i would say uh
more operational stuff so for example how do we best man best manage our our our real time our our disruption on the
network so for example when we have road works and so on how do we manage disruption better for our customers of
course things like to be a bit different physical objects we design like for
example we have an e-terminus which is a charger for our electric buses which is
going to be in the streets in the public space so it was about co-designing that uh
also with the lighting and the electrical company from brussels with the authorities and to make something
that will be a physical object then we have more digital traditional
for sprint but digital topics like designing an app for to to declare uh
problems on the network so anyone can take a picture and very simply declare problems and so we even add
internal ones like working on our our the way we’re going to work with with
hybrid so how are we going to redesign our office spaces and it tools to better work hybrids of course it’s going to
it’s a topic for every company i guess in those times so you can see it’s very very diverse one of them was and you
know this one stuff it was to to how do we reduce fraud so people not paying their tickets in our network
so and for this one it was funny because the testers at the end of the sprint were actual offroaders people
really hard one actually it was quite fun interviews so yeah just to give you a sense of the variety
of topics we we have and so but for all of them it’s a bit the same in terms of processes we
basically so it’s a sourcing time where okay you identify the idea
you identify maybe the person who becomes a decider and then okay when you and we with
the team we try to see okay is it a good idea for a sprint or is there another way to help them i mean it could be
something else but if it’s a good idea for a sprint then we we start to coach one of them is coaching the future decider and then we
have every three months we have a sort of jury reassemble to to select the topics we’re going to
to to run sprints for the next trimester so basically what we do is we have three
or four topics being presented at the time and every candidate has like 10
minutes to pitch and then 15 20 minutes q a with a jury so the jury is basically directors from
throughout the company but it’s not always the same so from one time to another it changes a little bit to be able to to have some
diversity and so basically that’s how we we select topics then we we give
ourselves a bit bit more time to assemble the full team and to prepare the sprints but that’s basically how it
works this committee kind of looks like like what like it’s like
it’s like a shark tanks like the like the candidates they come they pitch for for five ten minutes the spirit id
and then they leave and like and basically how many proposals like do you get per
session yes so so in one session we we usually have three typically three maybe four
candidates so not not too many we do a lot of pre-selection also before to make sure there are good topics that we ourselves
judge good ideas for for a sprint and then yeah they have 10 minutes to pitch but then they stay for for a bit
more time to to have a question and answers with the jury and it’s usually we ask a jury to be to
ask us the right questions so of course ask the yeah the questions which are hard
but of course be be be respectful of of the work of course and usually
uh it works pretty well so the jury is like 12 people 10 12 people basically from throughout the company and who have
a wide vision of what is going on in the company so they can really weigh out priorities and they have criteria of
course to to help them make a decision but basically at the end they vote and you decide what to be
yes you bring so it’s very close to a startup approach right instead of getting like the like
like investors for the startup they will get a sprint organized and they beget to become the
decider of the sprint yeah basically what they get is a screen being organized for them and they get a bit of
visibility and of course we they also usually have one or several sponsors higher up in the company who will not
take part to the sprint but who will will yeah support supports that and support the execution afterwards when
it’s when it’s done and then the preparation steps of the the objectives print it’s like
like do they get to choose who is going to be on the team or
yeah i mean you you i mean basically the decider and usually they’re their sponsor or sponsors and it’s their
project it’s their idea it’s their i mean we’re just here to support so it’s usually they have ideas about the team
and then here of course we help because we don’t want to have a team of like a seven person from the same uh
from the same division or something so we of course we help them build like the dream team and putting diversity there
putting really yeah people from every meaningful department their partner external partners as well when it’s
needed and yeah so we we tend to to play it by the book to speak so to speak to have a
max yeah six seven people and eight people really max in in the team and so
yeah it’s it’s a we we built a team with them and it’s it’s actually they have to be comfortable with
what the team is and there is never an issue to to get
to get the people they they want or they ask for or you see what i mean because and also maybe some people might be too
busy or yeah i mean it’s it’s a good point you you mentioned
because it’s a very good selection criteria as well i think for me is if someone is not willing to commit five
days for that it’s maybe for a very good reason which is it’s not really important enough for him or her
and that’s fine i mean if you’re saying okay this topic is yeah it’s interesting but it’s not really my my core
business i don’t want to spend five days on this okay fine yeah so but so it’s basically we get only
people who are who feel already committed enough to say okay i’m going i’m going to clear my schedule for five
days yeah and that’s that’s also part of yeah that’s a good criteria to to have a motivated team i think and then
yeah so and that’s perfectly fine if people are not available and saying yeah that’s maybe not for not so much for me uh
maybe another time okay no problem but usually we get really the team they want it’s very rare that they don’t get the
right people so so the team is assembled then they run the design sprint i know because i’ve
been the the facilitator of some of them so i kind of know how it goes which is a typical five-day design sprint
and then at the end of the sprint there are some more steps right yeah yeah basically what we do is
just the week after the sprints i mean we originally we started we tried to do it to fit it in the friday but it was
really not working so well so we did it after yeah i mean traditionally in the sprint
you do this this this synthesis at the end of the sprint but it’s really very quick
so like typically tuesdays or the week after or wednesday we assemble the team
again for one one hour usually remotely and then we we we deep dive a
little bit more okay what is really the take away from the sprint what what are the actions we want to to have next and
then we present that in another session just one second one hour session to the sponsor so basically the guys who are
going to to put like the money or people on the table to to do to do stuff and so here and then we present okay what was
the sprint what are the takeaways and and we discussed basically the actions and we we discuss okay what are we
really going to do now and it can be nothing because it’s a sprint test we should do
maybe stop that project and it happens and sometimes it’s of course yeah let’s go and let’s do it so it’s uh
how easy is it to get i don’t know some some more funding or you know like some people or
who who can be mobilized on the project to execute after the sprint you see what i mean like since you thought you thought it
through because it i i see sometimes we do run the design sprint in the company and then
they have a great idea a great product or a great whatever and then they want to build it and they have to wait for two years to get the
funding to actually do it does it happen at you or did you think this through and are
you able to execute faster it really depends on the kind of topics and the teams so
um in in some cases it’s so first of all the decider it’s usually the insider is
from the main team who who has the resources to build it usually or two teams together so it’s in the
sponsor is basically usually the director who has the the decision power to to get the guys to
do it or not so if that’s the case and and it’s really core to him or her uh
usually we’ll put resources to do it so in some of the cases it can be the execution can start quite fast then of
course it can take then the execution itself will take maybe six months one year a bit more it really depends on the
project but we can really start executing quite fast in other cases and it really happened as
well and the same the director will say okay idea is great but actually i i can see now with the scale of what
you want to do i i don’t have resources for that i i mean i have to to to to have my priorities and i’ll say okay
let’s let’s post this or let’s park this and it also happened and a third kind of things as well and
that’s something we’re really going to work more on this this fall and next year is digital projects
uh we were not very nimble and agile with digital projects that’s tube so we we have to be a bit more efficient with
that and yeah we’re going to try new approaches to to to execute faster on on
digital products we we we we design and test during sprints but so
to boil it down it’s really depending from one project to another and then sometimes it can go pretty fast to have
the resources and then some other time we will just stop the projects on yeah
how is it perceived now internally you you have run this innovate for
almost two years right yeah year and a half and 15 sprints now
uh yeah it’s i mean it’s getting a little bit more well-known within the company but still
of course you have to to explain all over again sometimes to to new people and so on so that’s a constant
work i think it’s two two things that’s perceived quite positively for for some
of the results we get i mean and some other projects of course though don’t stop there so it’s really uh
mixed but some of the projects we deliver so i think it’s also also giving a very positive feedback and it’s also
going to be giving positive feedback regarding what it’s what is being created within the team from the design spirit and i
think that’s common to all sprints and i think steph you know that really well it’s that during the sprint people will
really connect together they don’t really know each other maybe at the beginning of the sprint and of course at the end of the sprint especially if it’s
in person we’ve done a lot of things remotely during pandemics but now hopefully it’s it’s back to uh
to to in person then yeah they really create trust and so on and that’s really lasting for the project and beyond and
that’s really perceived very positively as well as yeah yeah this is great maybe can you compare because
yeah you studied i guess the program during kovid so it was all online and
now you have shifted to in person again right yeah correct i mean all the first prints
we did were we started really during pandemics so it was 100 online and we
were actually quite surprised how well it worked even if it’s not as cozy and
and convenient as doing it in person but it really worked well in terms of results and then we started to add in
the mix like one or two days in person i mean based on the pandemics rules and so on so for example we did the testing
and prototyping and testing on site for example and i mean we tried several things several days of the sprints we
could do on-site and and now since yeah four four or five sprints we we do it purely 100 in person
and so that’s i it feels pretty natural to to i mean we we follow the way uh
i mean we all manage the pandemic so it it’s a very natural evolution to it
yeah the the thing okay i find it fascinating that you know you can be a metro driver
for like you know 95 percent of your year and one year during uh like
sorry one week during this year you can actually be on the design sprint i think it’s super cool because usually we work
with you know managers or or really like like people working
in offices right and we don’t work too much with with people who are on the field and driving buses and metros and
yeah my question is like how willing are they to be part of these kind of
initiatives like do they see it like as a great opportunity are they excited about it or are they more like yeah
it’s not really my job i shouldn’t do that like yeah i mean
the guys who do it are really excited because it’s usually they are they are their ideas or their colleagues ideas so
they’re excited about it and but you of course there are challenges as well i mean it’s for for someone who
has not done so many studies and so on who’s not used to to to do this kind of work
it can be pretty challenging and it requires quite some coaching i would say to
to be in the mindset for a design sprint so accepting okay because it’s natural for everyone to have solutions in mind
so so people are saying okay i have an idea but the idea for them means solution and so when you explain okay
your sprint is about starting with the problem start starting backwards and so on so this requires a bit more coaching
with people coming from the field that done with like managers for for who it will be a bit more natural to work
like this so it requires a little bit more coaching before the sprint for them to to be at ease with how it’s going to work and
then i think during the week they they really deep dive i mean dive in and it
really works that’s cool like when you when you look back these
two years i guess you you studied something you probably change along the way you are
maybe thinking about the things you want to modify or improve in the whole process like if you
yeah if you could look back and give some advices to someone trying to replicate what you guys did what did
work what did not work yeah maybe it’s a bit a bit too early to give advice but two years
i think the first thing for me which is important is that innovation is really different from one company to another so
it’s really about what what is your company doing i mean that’s it’s really about people management so
we have a lot of topics which are related to that actually how we how we operate and how we
yeah how we plan our our operations and so we we’re going to really focus more on on people management topics and uh
more than digital for example a little bit more than digital and and design sprint is really well
suited for what we do for for our customers or internal customers but maybe at other companies of course you
you have to to to see what your innovation culture is what are your needs and maybe you’ll need other tools
i don’t know so it’s really about building the right lab and the right innovation tools for for your company so
it’s i don’t think you can just copy-paste stuff it’s it’s it’s really about looking what what is out
there and then just yeah assembling the blocks to to build your own your own things for your own company but
um for example just to give an example i was discussing with other labs of course
to to see how it works and even now we we give feedback to each other and just to give an example
uh the leo so in the automotive space so it’s a big [Music]
automotive supplier they have those car labs network so they have several labs actually it’s a big company throughout
the world and it’s much more centered on product design and they have fab labs
huge fat globs and so on other methodologies are not only sprints but it’s because they are centered on
product design so yeah yeah and
it’s interesting because the the sprint was created for digital products right but i think it’s one of the example of a
non-digital product that can be worked on with this methodology because
basically what’s kind of great is that you if you have everything around right if we need
to access some users we just go to the metro station and we can ask them directly because they are there if we
need to look at a specific location we just go and so it’s kind of experiential and
uh it’s also great that it’s at at the city level so you users they are very close to you they are in the same
city which is not the case that’s one thing that’s making very making it very easy actually to deploy
things faster in terms of processes that we are very local company i mean we’re at a scale of a region and it’s of
course much faster than when you’re in a much bigger company multi multi-continents and so on and
where you have to synchronize cultures from and people from singapore from the u.s from from uk and so on at the
same time so here it’s much faster and we’re all in the same time zone and so on so it’s easier and
as you say our users are nearby great so we have a question from sabrina
sabrina do you want to ask yeah thank you so thanks kyle for for
all your information that’s so fantastic to hear how you how you just
in how you unfolded let’s say the power of the design sprint
and actually i also have a client who wants to let’s say
have more innovation and it’s just let’s say the support from a sea level
so my question would be how is the feedback from your sea level and and
so regarding their expectation what did they expected and how is their feedback now
so after one and a half years yeah i think it really varies from one one person to another of course and some
of them are really more familiar to the to the innovation field some less one of the things they see is the result i mean
they can see that when we when we every like three four months we go to the sea level of the company to the
executive committee to say where we stand and usually we do that with uh
with sponsors from from projects and they themselves present the results of the sprint and so that i think the
strength is that okay there’s the results and the people will speak for themselves about it so
yeah what i wish we could do now is have also sprints with some of the sea level
and but it’s of course for them a bit harder to to three five days from their agenda but i think it would be a nice
experience but at least the way they see it i think it’s yeah they they see it’s working and of
course they always have the question for some of them okay can you do it shorter can you do that in three days can you do that in half a day
so we say yeah sure we can do a three hours workshop and then do many things of course we won’t do yeah
prototyping and testing at that time but yeah so we we try to adapt also methodologies and
and the panels of tools we have but i think overall the feedback is really is really great
do you feel that they have a personal interest i mean i mean the sea level people for
for these kind of things to be part of the design sprint or do they like that position of
you know basically giving the funding and then seeing what happens and and being more
like in the review mode yeah once again i think it will really depend from one person to another some
of them are really i think ready if there is an occasion and a good topic for them i think to to jump in probably
so we we definitely have to to try it i would say we were a bit reluctant to do it at the
beginning because though i mean in the company culture if you put sea levels in the sprint
too too early in the process it can be very frightening for other people but now i think we are at
the stage where we could definitely do it without any issues so definitely something to try
oh yeah also i have a personal question because i’ve been a facilitator for some of your sprints but not all of
them which is a shame but some of them but at the same time i’m very interested about
like the reason why you you decided to work with several facilitators who
might have a bit of a different flavor or things like that and i i think it’s intellectually very
interesting so i would like to understand your train of thought and basically what did you choose to do to
go this way yeah goodness great great question
yeah i think it’s if you take it the other way around it’s the same like for a consultant for example if you had only
one client and you were working always with the same company doing your your stuff after a while i think you’d be uh
maybe running in circles i would say so here it’s about the same it’s saying okay we want to have not too many
partners but to to have also some diversity to to yeah to to be able to to have various flavors
of how we do sprints i as you mentioned I do facilitate
some sprints myself but not not too many because it’s i try to join all the sprints we do
for for at least one reason which is to to make connections between sprints to be to be able to see okay we’ve had this
in the sprint before we will have this in the sprint in the future and we will make connections between ideas and
solutions so that’s really important and it’s not so easy to do at the same time facilitation and and also being part of
the decision making and be really really involved in the topic so i think it’s really great to to keep the
external consultants to to to run our sprints and to have of course a variety
of people doing that so i think it’s yeah it’s a good approach we actually
laughing because we just looked at the chat and alexandra has a question for a question for girl because she wants to
win the battle do you want to ask alexandra yeah that’s your question
am i as good as steph in facilitation yeah i i know that
i’ve learned a lot from you steph so i think he’s as good as you for the moment but STIB hasn’t offered all the material
the the sauna and so on and the right makers and so on so no no definitely no and there is no
modesty here it’s just a few sprints compared to to steph and you you can really see the
experience and passion so no definitely not that’s good [Music]
so Gaël you you’re welcome any time to say good things like like like to come back on the show to say good things
about me anyway there is a great question from fomo wait says right there johann are
you here yes yes hey Gaël yeah hi you are nice to talk to you
after all those years yes yes yes yeah first of all i also want to say
thanks for all the information it’s it’s great to see and very creative thinking
what you are doing in a company in a public transport company i was wondering how
what’s the difference if you present this to your executive committee in
in the public transport versus to if you present like the assistant projects in renault
right i mean what is there from a high level management
thinking or goals versus a commercial company like renault with sops with budget restrictions
how what is their strategic goals right is that is that
what’s aligned or what’s different versus let’s say commercial company versus a public public transport company
yeah this is a great question i thank you on and i think there are many differences i
mean first of all is the size of the company i think a big car company like like renault nissan for example is much
bigger so usually you’re not pitching your innovation ideas directly to the ceo to be honest first of all
uh but and yeah as a company uh it’s very different because like a car
company to take this example is really about product design and and and then how to build this product that’s going
to differentiate and make money and be marketed into a very very competitive
market on our side what we do is we are not in a very competitive market because we are
a public company operating without direct competition in in the brussels region and so our
challenge is really to have the best service with i would say at the lower cost
and then and it’s really about people management what we do guys it’s not about product design so yeah the mindset of course is very
different in both companies and of course here still it’s much more direct because it’s smaller and you can pitch it directly to
the sea level and yeah so it’s really very very different of course and it’s
easier of course in a smaller company like that even if it’s ten thousand people it’s really smaller to to actually
yeah get get the buy-in for for that okay but can you can you get let’s say larger
projects easily more easily approved than in in a commercial
enterprise like a renault if it’s going to be very big projects no
i think it’s it they still take time it takes a lot of time right yeah to take one example and this did not come
out of a sprint it was something that started before we have a big project for example for hydrogen buses and
we’re starting small with just just one two bus and buses and then we’re going to build a bigger fleet so that’s
a very big project i mean you have to work with partners and how to supply hydrogen and you know big build pipes i
mean it’s huge project so this of course you cannot just decide it on in one day it’s a
[Music] big enough budget it’s going to take time to to to convince but
really depends on the size of course of the projects usually after sprint what we do it depends on but if it’s a
digital project you can directly go in into execution but otherwise we usually do a proof of concept we do pilots
[Music] pilots on just one metro station or one line or whatever and it’s of course a
first step towards something bigger so it but that is a bit like like in the commercial
companies right we also do that yeah yeah in that regard is the same same approach yeah
and another unrelated question is how how do you find talent right i mean
everybody is there’s a war for talent i was not aware that
public transport company that you do this kind of thing so how can you expose what you are doing this innovation
natalie to the external worlds to find talent to come and work for for the for
the company good question now it’s a great question because as i mean a lot of other companies we we
are in the talent world actually i said we’re not competing in our space but we are competing for
talent that’s for sure and so yeah it’s definitely a challenge as for everyone else to attract talents so
yeah i mean doing interviews like this can can of course contribute i hope to to find talents as well but what we do for for
design sprints we do we we assemble our teams internally first of all with the talents we have and that’s and of
course with partners i mean we partner a lot with many other operators with other companies but yeah
i mean it’s we’re all part of a talent war and and yeah
we had one one sprint about our work philosophy i mean it was more i would say higher level thinking not not so
maybe not as concrete results as other sprints but it was more how we are going
how are we going to reinvent our work philosophy in the hybrid world and that’s i think that can really help also
showing that we do that bring bring bring new talents to the company
um there is one last question from matthew manning matthew had to leave
because he’s driving he’s on the road but he sent the question it’s very interesting because he has a very very
similar role than yours for public transportation in switzerland so his question is this one
how how do you ensure with this approach that you do actually innovation reinventing the company and not only
incremental improvement that’s a hard one yeah it’s a great question and to be
honest i think that we with the approach we have right now and it’s going to evolve over time we’re not yet at the stage where we
reinvent the company to be really honest we are we are doing more daily innovation which which matters i think
we do project and we are building a culture of innovation but we are not doing disruptive innovation with with
what we do right now with innovator to be honest i think it will come over time but
it’s definitely it’s more trying to find us the small projects or i mean the
projects that will improve over time what we’re doing so it’s it’s really innovation in the
sense that it’s it’s like new for us to do that and then it’s really reinventing the company but it’s not like
fully disruptive and i think for that we we need to to first do what we do for
a long enough period of time build this innovation culture and then i think we can be ready to be a bit more disruptive
but we’re not there we’re not there yet fully i think to be to be honest we’ve done that less than two years
but so i think we i need to wait a bit to to really answer matcha’s question no but actually i think well
it’s interesting because because matthew i guess is in the same position than yours
but i think personally what you have is already comparing to a lot of companies i’ve seen it looks to me already very
mature but in your wildest dream like whether you want to push that and you
know if you could yeah if you could you know be in the in two or two years or five years
what what do you want to be with innovatory yeah great question
um yeah i think we we definitely could
i think we’re going to try i mean i mean other methodologies are pushing the methodology to
um to to to other areas i think for example one thing we’re going to try for example
is to mix and we’ll see if it works on to to mix design sprint five day sprint with hackathon approach for example so
basically we’ll take four day sprints approach like mixing monday and tuesday to make more room for prototyping so it
will still be five days but we’ll you’ll have two days of prototyping so that that’s an example of experiment we’ll do
so what i mean is over time we’ll try to to to to have more tools in the toolbox to to to be more responsive to to the
needs of of the company but at this more strategic level i think what we what we need to do and what we’re doing
right now is try to define what yeah they find more strategic priorities on which to to focus our
sprints and be able to have a series of strengths that really will respond to and one another to really
be more disruptive i would say and that’s really a goal of our time that we should have
to to really focus several sprints in the same very targeted
priority to to see rate leads and i think that’s something we are going to try so what you’re meaning is that
someone who already got one sprint right could have a new sprint to push it forward
yeah it could be the same decider or or it could be several deciders but you have to see as a difference between
a project and a program so if you’re at the project level it’s just one single project if you’re at the program level
then it’s of course a program is like a collection of projects with the same overall goal so here it could be the
same it’s basically sprints which which are the same i would say overall challenge and you could really
start with like a sort of sprint to explore that and then define your topics and then
okay have various maybe deciders and and to explore various approaches that will all
converge on the same yeah strategic goal so that’s something we we should try
Gaël it’s time it’s time to choose this was my last question
who asked the best question and who should get the bottle of wine
well i yeah i’m going to say johanna had a very good question johann smulders uh
and so i would i would say okay let’s let’s send him the bottle you have a winner
he seems to be very happy happy that’s great great
it’s great guys so again thank you so much for all of this it was it was gold super
super valuable i hope you guys had had fun thank you so much for being here on summertime really really appreciate
this and yeah that was i to the upper row number nine see you see you very soon cheers
thank you Steph thank you everyone and thank you guys today you can dance
thank you guys


Michael Margolis - GV

Itoday Apéro #8 - Michael Margolis

Michael Margolis

Michael Margolis is a UX Research Partner at GV. He has been spearheading UX research practices at Google Ventures for the last 12 years. His testing approach "the five act interview" is highlighted in the book "Sprint".

The Research Sprint -

A pragmatic path to efficient UX research

If his name looks familiar, it’s because the UX research partner Michael Margolis appears in the world-famous book “Sprint”. He is none other than the creator of the testing process known as “the five-act interview”, used nowadays by thousands of startups worldwide.  

These 1:1 customer interviews are at the heart of his Research Sprint, a 4-day process that combines with the design sprint, and helps startups and big companies test their assumptions and de-risk product ideas, and innovation strategies.  

Michael Margolis

Michael joined GV in 2010 as the first UX research partner at a venture fund. He has conducted hundreds of research studies for GV startups, including Slack, Flatiron Health, Foundation Medicine, Gusto, Bluebottle Coffee, Nest, Lime, and Uber. As part of the design team, Michael has boosted conversion, tested new concepts, streamlined experts’ workflows, and validated product-market fit for hundreds of startups.

In 2006, Michael started at Google as a staff user experience researcher, where he conducted research for Gmail and Google Talk, led the UX research team for Google Apps, and managed Google’s UX team in Seattle. Prior to Google, Michael spearheaded user research at Walmart.com, helping build new online and cross-channel businesses. In a previous life, he produced educational software at Electronic Arts after starting out as an editor at The Learning Company.

Michael earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from Stanford University. After many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michael is living happily ever after near Seattle.

Links

Welcome to itoday Apéro #8. I’m so excited to have everyone here. We have an amazing crowd today. So, the guess we have today with us is Michael Margolis. He joined Google Ventures in 2010. So 12 years ago as the very first UX researcher, he has been leading the team there. And working on countless of projects of UX  research.

He worked with startups including Slack, Flatiron Health, Bloomberg Coffee, Nest and many others. Yeah, he’s absolutely a star. He’s a UX researcher. Please everyone live from Seattle, USA -Michael Margolis. Welcome Michael.

Hi, thank you so much. I really appreciate your guys inviting me, I’m happy to see all of you. So I want to say before we even start, that I’m just terrified to interview you. You know, you are such an inspiration. And basically it’s hard to interview the godfather of user research.

So I hope I’m going to do my best. Thank you so much for taking time. Really it’s an honor to have you here at Itoday Apéro. There are a lot of people here who know who you are. Of course, because your name is featured in the book Sprint, about the Design Sprint, and you, you play a very important role in creating basically the whole interview methodology that is used in the book.

So your name is quite famous to these people and of course to the UX research community, but for all the people who are a bit less nerdy so maybe could you introduce yourself in a few words?

Michael Margolis

Sure. So I’m the UX research partner at GV in alphabets venture capital team. And so what I do there is I use UX research and design to help startups learn more, faster, find product market fit, de-risk big decisions. A lot of the work that I do is kind of coaching, advising, training, showing people how to use research to. I mean faster progress and to build better products.

I heard that you were the very first UX researcher in a venture capital fund? How did you get there? Yeah, as far as I know, I’m the first one. Couple other people out there doing it, but it’s pretty unusual job, so. I can give you kind of 30 years in 30 seconds of how I got here.

So my first real full-time job, you know, I studied anthropology. My first real full-time job was as an editor in educational software company back in 1991. So we’re making little floppy disk software. And so that was kind of my introduction to product design.

The group was doing a lot of testing products with kids at the time. So it was my first time of really seeing that. And also, I was the editor and building the documentation for teachers and parents. You have to explain how to use products. And so when you’re explaining things, you are kind of at the back end and you’re learning about design.

And then I went from there to work at Electronic Arts, where I learned how to ship box software. What does it take to build these things and get them out the door? And then I worked at a design strategy consulting firm. Where I got to essentially apprentice with really great researchers and designers there. So that’s where I learned how to do kind of deep customer research.

I got to work with people like Steve Portigal on Tom Williams and Sue Squires to be very client focused. And so we did these very big, very expensive projects.

And then I went to walmart.com where I had to learn kind of how to take that and adapt that and do it much faster, much cheaper. I can’t do much scrappier right? Walmart is all about everyday while costs. Yeah, and it was a place where I had to do a lot of it. So I just got a lot of reps and I was doing a ton a ton of things. So it was a ton of practice.

It’s also where I met Vanessa show who’s my partner in crime, that GV. And she is design partner. And so then I went from there to Google where I learned just a ton. So I worked with this amazing UX team. So that was in 2006. It was smallish team compared to us now, which has learned a ton ’cause at Walmart I was essentially a solo researcher.

Joining Google Ventures back in 2010

And then when I got to GV, it was really about startups, about speed. Like how do I continue to make this faster? How do I hone this for startups to be higher impact in dealing with a really huge variety of different kinds of companies across domains.

And so it’s a lot of teaching, coaching, advising. And as I said, showing people how to do this- It started, ’cause Braden Kowitz was the first designer at a venture capital firm I had worked closely with him at Gmail team. And he’d gone over in six months later, he’s like:” no, I need to research. Can you help me with some of this stuff? “Yeah, and so we just started doing that.

You told me it’s 12 years you worked at GV. Right? Now you are leading the UX research team. So how did your role evolve over the years?

It’s evolved along with our portfolio, which has changed and it’s evolved because we’ve just gotten better at kind of optimizing how we do this work. As an example, I used to spend a lot of time developing programs to teach people how to do research. How do I do interviews? How do you plan all of this? We had these giant workshops and things and what I found was that that wasn’t didn’t seem very effective.

And what I learned was the best way to teach people how to do this was to show them. So when you have a project, let’s do it together or I’ll do it with you, or I’ll do it for you, and you’ll see how I do it.

Because when I was doing these big workshops, I would train people how to do it and go through as a one day, two-day workshop. And then among six months later, they would say: “I have a project like how do I do this thing? Like I haven’t done any of the research and I don’t know how to do it”, and so just didn’t seem that effective.

And so we just got more in the habit of doing it with them. I spend a lot of time optimizing the work I do in a way that it’s transparent. So they can see me going through the recruiting process and we’re doing that together.

We’re defining who is your bullseye customer and we go through that together. It’s why a lot of the things that some of you probably seen that I’ve written, a lot of it was for that. I’m like, OK, here are the recipes. This is how. We can do it so when you need it. I’m there and we can kind of do it together and expose the team to it. They see it and they go through it. and they kind of have that wonderful ha moment when we do those studies. And then, oh, I see if we now I see what you’re talking about, now I see the power of this when we have these conversations and we do the research this way with our customers.

It’s a lot that’s really changed quite a bit. We’ve done hundreds and hundreds of studies with you know, hands on with our companies.

By the way, Michael shared a lot about the recipes of UX research.We can find them on medium, going to add the link in the chat. I really have to say that everything I know about user research, all the practice I got is from just watching your videos.

So I think it was really generous of you just script all the documentation. Yeah, you can check the links. Basically the whole GV guide to User Research on medium. That’s absolutely amazing. Everything is there.

Helping Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky creating the design sprint

A few days ago I announced that you were coming to Itoday Apéro on the design sprint Slack channel. And so John Zeratsky answered me. John is the Co-author of the book Sprint. Right. He wrote me this. He wrote, I quote him:” Michael keeps a pretty low profile, but he was instrumental to the design sprint process and had a huge impact on how we do research. Before we started working with him, it was unheard of how to plan and run the user research. So, yeah, what’s the story?

Well, it’s kind of a low profile. I was kind of hoping this was going to lead to a Netflix special. Pretty cool. So I think the way that it evolved to me, it seemed like a somewhat of a natural. Starting from what we had been doing. I haven’t been working with Brayden. I’ve been working, bring Kowitz and Jake now at Google on Gmail on some of their very early things that eventually turned into Google Hangouts.

We had ways of working already where, like we were conducting studies, figuring out new designs, iterating kind of planning and doing that. And we saw some of the side effects of planning a research study right. You schedule that and all of a sudden remarkable amount of work gets done by a team when they know, oh crap, we have a study coming up and people are gonna come in. Like we need to generate these designs.

And so there was a lot of that work that we had been doing for years. I saw the effects of that and then as I said, a lot of my tendency is to try to make things faster. And I think that the one of the big things that happened was getting to GV. I had a lot more freedom to recruit.

So when I worked within Google, there’s a really remarkable internal infrastructure team that provides a lot of the recruiting. And, for good reasons, there’s a lot of policies and a lot of rules and a lot of ways that happens and it’s for good reason as I said, but it’s slower, right? ’cause. You can’t just do it on your own.

And so when I was at GV, I had a little more freedom to just go do it. And so when I was able to take control of that, I could accelerate it pretty dramatically. Originally, starting out just recruiting with like Craigslist and finding my own people very careful. Screeners and those kinds of things. That helped me see like, oh, I can. I can really shorten it.

That was always the thing, that was kind of the limiting factor of how quickly we can get this organized. How fast can I recruit. And now as you guys know, there’s what’s changed, their economy services, right. So I can use things like user interviews. And they can help me find groups of people really, really quickly. And so that that shortens that lag time dramatically to be able to do all the interviews.

What’s the max number of interviews that I can actually survive? What do I have the stamina to get through in a day and what seems to work right? As you guys have seen you do three or four interviews and we were kind of sort of seeing some of the patterns. And after you do five that basically the whole team is like:” Oh my God, don’t make me sit through any of this for doing the same thing over and over. Let’s just like, let’s go fix it and build it and do the next thing.”

And so being able to compress those things allowed us to fit it into that that fifth day. And as the Research Center to me, like everything, everything requires research. Of course, if you’re designing it, you don’t know if it’s working until you kind of ground it in that feedback.

And so that’s kind of for the first day, but a lot of times we’re doing the research before the sprint also. So there’s a lot of work that’s happening to kind of inform that first day and leading up to it. So it kind of often bookends. I’m going to work. This is great and all of these.

Basically, it’s what we call the research sprint, right? So we got to talk about that. Was it existing before the design sprint. It’s the process that you were already using and basically they just took it and it became part of the methodology. Or is it something that you created pretty much at the same time?

I think it’s kind of like an adaptation of things, that are optimization of things that we were kind of doing before. And then we learned overtime. So there are ways that we started doing it and then it kind of got better and smarter as we did it.

So an example of things that evolved overtime where the technique that we use for the watch party. So this very organized structured way to have a team taking notes. Debriefing and then by the end of the day, knowing kind of what are the big takeaways.

We experiment to put that in place. A lot of these things were just, we tried stuff and something was really good, didn’t work great or you know, why didn’t that work so well. And we were doing enough reps of it. That we kind of tweaked and adjusted.

And so that combination of having enough reps that we were doing, where we could experiment and just having that that pressure from the teams also. They were like well five days is a lot, right. So we need to kind of get it done. Like how can we get it done, because coming back and doing more analysis or thinking about it, we just frankly, didn’t have time.

Also I’m lazy. And I don’t want to go off and do a bunch of analysis and generate slides or any of that stuff. Like let’s just do it and move on. And so it was.

I think it was really an evolution of things that we were doing. You know, I had been doing research before we did design sprints, but it just fit into that. You know, Jake and Brayden and Jay-Z, and Daniel like we fitted into that structure. It worked really well.

I would like you to tell us about the research Sprint. What’s super interesting is that when you run for example, design sprint, in the background there is a research sprint that’s going on. And something that you can use as a stand alone.

Research Sprint

You can totally run research sprint at different times of the project. Could you lead us through the whole research sprint and tell us exactly what it is?

Yeah. Kind of looks like. Yeah, we do a lot of it independently of design sprint. So I have one I’m doing tomorrow. I’m doing a bunch of interviews tomorrow, so. Kind of the basic steps of it are it starts out with defining the goals and the key research questions very clearly with the team. This is kind of a critical part. It is basically thinking about like, well, what do you, what do you need to learn actually and pressing here.

And so a lot of the underlying approach that I have to these things, it’s about the importance of being very specific. You know, speed is one part, but being very specific helps me be very efficient. So from the start, if I can help a team figure out what do we actually need to learn here?

And then. From there, if we know that, then we can kind of we go through a process where we’re defining who are the bullseye customers that you need to talk to. Maybe what I’ll do is describe this as there’s kind of this idea of kind of start at the end. I’ll talk about it in that context.

So if the first step is I figure out: OK, so. So what do we want to learn? What are the goals? What’s the outcome that we want to have as a result of this? And we all agree on that will be the insights that we want to have.

For example, let’s say we talk through an example. I was working on a project. That was helping a company develop a health plan, essentially for people with serious mental illness. And so the idea there is if we can help those people engage and take care of their basic healthcare needs along the way, we can keep them out of the ER. So things that we are talking going to be chronic issues. Somebody has diabetes.

If you can keep them engaged in healthcare won’t flare up and they don’t end up in the ER and have a lot of problems in the world. So there the fundamental question is, well, how do we find it?

Engage people with serious mental illness in their health care. That’s a hard problem. And we got to like the crux. And like, that’s really what it is. Find and engage. OK. So now I know. What we want to do that’s very specific.

Then the next question I think about is like, OK, well, how am I going to answer that? Like what’s the technique for gathering the data I’m going to need? Is that like a survey or interviews or what’s going to happen here?

And so for that case where I want are very actionable insights and lessons. That people have learned about engaging that population. How do people engage patients with serious mental illness and then also, how do we get some reactions to the startups offering right, if we have some concepts and things? So I know what I wanna learn. Who could give us that kind of information and and in terms of how right that’s getting packed to be through one on one interviews, right?

I have to do some discovery interviews and some concept evaluation with these prototypes of what the plan looks like. But who am I gonna talk to there? So there was like, OK well, who has experience in this case to engage with that population?

People have serious mental illness in the community. Like I don’t want to probably talk to the patient themselves, ’cause in this case, that’s not what I wanna. I wanna touch somebody who has experience with this and has the tips and lessons. So I wanna talk to experience case managers at Community health, mental health clinics.

OK, so now I’m kind of like working backwards and figuring this out. So then I have to go recruit those people, which I’m able to do, create Screener, do that work. And so all of this work is happening, but the first batch of things that I’ve just described, all these figuring out like what do I need to learn? Who do I, how am I gonna do it? Who do I need to talk to? That’s happening very early like.

Let’s say it’s a four day thing. It’s happening, let’s say Monday, and we’re hashing through that and then that gives me this time to actually do the recruiting. Now I know what I need to find, so I have to draft a Screener that’s very specific, that allows me to identify those people very precisely. And then you know, it takes me a few days to recruit.

Then on that, you know, 4th, 5th day or whatever and then conduct those interviews. Yeah. And again, because I was very specific. I can design the interviews to make sure I’m getting the information that I know I wanna get out of folks. So that’s kind of at a high level.

What that design this. With the research, Sprint looks like in those pieces just kind of how I think through it. It’s kind of from what do I want the outcome to be and then I can plan more efficiently.

A Research team at GV

So in our agency basically like I will be running the design sprint and I will be probably interviewing people on the day five, but it’s Eglé who is in the background basically looking for the customers. Running the ads, creating the screeners and all of this so it’s a lot of work. In our case it’s 2 peoples job. Is it something that you are doing like all by yourself or do you have a team? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I still just do it all pretty hands on myself. I have like you guys. I’m sure I have all my templates and my examples or I have quite a library of different kinds of things that I can draw from to help accelerate it. But it’s just me.

Finding the right testers

This is great, by the way. What do you think of all these services? Earlier you mentioned user testing for example. Do you think you can reach the right quality of customers or do you still need to, you know to run some ads or go to social networks to find them?

So it depends on whom I’m looking for. I have a huge range of companies I’m supporting. So there are times when if it’s something that’s fairly high incidence kind of group of people. I need software engineers. I need busy dads. I need you know, something like this then user interviews is actually relying pretty heavily, very have been very good at helping me find things that I thought would be very difficult to find.

I had to find people with very particular sets of medical conditions, OK, and they were able to help me find that. And what I’m doing is, again, I’m writing very careful screener questionnaires that help me identify those people. And these services are able to do that pretty fast.

For things that are much more specialized and harder to recruit you’re not going to find that way. I have to rely on some other techniques in other networks. So for example, when we need to talk to ophthalmologists. Not too long ago, like they’re not, they’re not responding to Facebook ads, right? They’re not responding to that and they don’t care about my Amazon gift card or whatever incentive because it’s not gonna work.

In those cases, we have to work through other networks that we have or the companies relationships to try to get those people. Those can be a little harder to pack into one day. You know the way I like to do this clump of interviews on that Friday. For example, it can be a little harder, so we do it as much as we can, but some of those people are just harder to reach. But I do rely quite heavily on those services.

Did you constitute a repository of very good, very good testers that you can call again, you know, or it’s always different. I don’t do that. So I don’t do that because I don’t wanna talk to the same people again. Actually, there are enough other people out there and what’s really important to me is that I want the companies that I’m working with to get in the habit of talking to new people all the time as much as possible.

So I don’t want to take the easy way out and just like go back to those same people. I think it can lead to a little bit of an echo chamber and I want them to be. I want more exposure to more of their users, so I don’t do that.

And then the other reason it doesn’t work for me is ’cause the variety the people I need to talk to is so large. So tomorrow I’m talking to people about their experience going through and getting genetic testing ’cause, they had predisposition for cancer, and next week I’m talking to people who are software engineers. It’s just not the same.

I mean there could be some overlap there, but it’s just not the same people and because I’m screening very, very specifically and carefully to make sure that I’m getting the bullseye people that we need for a study, there’s just not very much overlap.

Convincing gatekeepers about hands-on UX Research

I have a very personal question because I work a lot with corporates and the people we have, you know, they are mostly managers and some of them they don’t do too much research themselves. They don’t really know about the whole principle of iteration and all of this. And at first they’re always very surprised. They’re like. Just five tests?

It looks like a very small number and they react strongly to that and they’re like, no, the risk come back with these ideas of, like, giant surveys and all of this to do real research. So do you still have to face this kind of opposition? And how do you deal with?

Yeah, occasionally I get some of this. So in my experience people who object to that is ’cause, they just haven’t seen it yet. Quite frankly, that’s why as I was describing a lot of the way that I work is to try to be as transparent as possible so people can see it and watch the interviews. There’s nothing more convincing than getting people to actually participate and observe and hear the stories, and it becomes a little more personal.

And so when I get that kind of opposition. You know, I have some benefit, I guess I can explain the way we do it, why we do it, that we’ve done it hundreds of times. I can drop a lot of names of well-known startups that they look up to what we’ve done. And quite frankly in the end, it’s their company. But if they don’t want our help, that’s totally fine. So they’ll go do the research and figure it out in a different way.

So we’re available resource to the companies that are in our portfolio, but they don’t have to do it. But if we can get them to see it. It just opens it up, it opens up their eyes in a very different way. Because very often people feel like, oh, we’re already listening to our customers. We have feedback from customer support and our sales people are already talking to them. And you know we have a lot of input.

And then they see how we do it and then Oh yeah, that’s different. That’s not the way we’re having conversations. We’re not listening in that way. We’re pitching or we’re, you know, getting feedback from certain kinds of people who are out there, who are very vocal. This is so important.

Pitching vs listening

Can talk a bit about the difference between pitching and idea, and really like listening to the customer? That’s so important. Yeah, this comes up a lot. I said I’m training and coaching people to do this so often. They will do some interviews or I’ll do some, and then they’ll do some and I’ll give feedback and watch them.

And so people at startups, are very used to pitching, right? That’s what how you get your funding. It’s like how you got to where you are. It can be very successful or you can be very successful if you’re good at pitching your ideas. Pitching is usually about presenting like the the Rosiest picture and about convincing you fundamentally. Like I wanna convince you, this is a great idea.

But if you’re doing research where I want to see how are you seeing it? How do you react to? What do you think? Is it a good idea? What do you like or not like about this idea? And so the approach, mindset must be much more neutral. Like here’s this thing. What do you think of this thing? Here are two or three things. And like, let’s compare these different things. I don’t want it to just be one. And so. I don’t want to have express any kind of vested interest in one approach or another or whatever.

The thing is they were trying to learn about. Usually for me that’s easier ’cause it’s not. I haven’t spent the past, you know, year or two or more these companies building that thing. And so I’m kinda like, I don’t know, it’s there’s a thing they gave me and like, I can just kind of get feedback on it. But that pitch mindset is difficult for people to undo. Often fit to, because it’s such a strong habit. That’s what’s happening. As I said, having multiple prototypes. You guys know this, right? If you have two, three, four different things that you’re comparing, it takes a lot of the pressure off of that and then you’re just teasing out.

Building prototypes for Research

What are the pros and cons of these things? Are you involved in the prototypes? Like, are you behind the designers, telling them exactly what you need to do to integrate in the prototypes so that you can, test this hypothesis? What’s the link?

Yeah. So I work very closely with them to do as I said. So we’ve defined what we are trying to learn and then we think carefully about like, how are we gonna represent that so that we can kind of tease out those questions.

What we found is there’s this a lot of to answer your question, there’s a lot of back and forth. They’ll come up with the munition prototypes and we go through them and then we’re revising and I’m getting tons of feedback. And we’re kind of going back and forth. So I’m not looking over their shoulder exactly, but what we find is there’s this interesting exercise where, you know, it’s very common.

I’m sure familiar with this idea for a certain concepts where we’re testing the landing page, right. Just create like, what’s how would you pitch this idea to a customer, multiple ideas and how do you present it? And what we find is there’s this really valuable exercise which is just pushing them to actually write it down.

It is really valuable because we all know what it is. We know what we’re building like, OK, that’s fine. I’m the newbie here, so explain it to me. Write it down and then we can see. Sometimes it’s very difficult for them to just write it down and agree and have some alignment there. And so just that exercise, often documented, is very powerful to the team.

You told me when you were preparing this interview, that you have been in UX for like, what, 30 years, right? Yeah. Do you know, with all your experience, can you predict the result of a test before even running it? Just looking at the other questions, looking at the prototype like, yeah. How good are you?

Yeah, sometimes. So after doing so many of these, we do see certain patterns, and it’s things that you know it’s like basic design stuff that you guys would all know. People will write their messaging in a way that’s like all marketing speak and then you just need to be blunt and straightforward. Nobody is going to know what you’re talking about. Like there are things like that.

But what we see is that because again, I’m working with so many different companies and so many different kinds of users and topics that a lot of times, I don’t know anything about it. So it’s hard for me to predict. So it’s something that to me doesn’t make sense and then we go interview a farmer or a software developer. A trucker and the way they respond is just completely different because the context, the conventions they’re used to, the other tools they’re using it makes sense to them for some reason.

You know that I look at that, I think this is terrible this is never gonna make any sense. And somebody else who’s in that industry for, oh yeah, I totally get. I’m used to doing this that looks exactly like the thing we’ve been using for five years, right? And that’s why we do it, right? ’cause if they were relying, I mean, I’m not the target user. I’m rarely the target user for these companies. And so that’s why we do that work.

These are the best tests, right? It’s when you do that interview and you discover something, you know, that’s really you have no clue about. And you’re like, ah, I was wrong. This is so good. It’s much more fun than if I could just predict it all the time. Yeah.

When tests go wrong (anecdotes)

So do you have a story that you could share with us? Like a user test that went horribly wrong, you know, like, yeah, crazy tester or.

I guess the one that I think about that went horribly wrong. I mean horribly wrong. I won’t mention who the company was, but I was doing my research for a company. Just say it was in the mobility space and I had organized a bunch of interviews with users in Los Angeles. So I’m in Seattle. We traveled there with a gig team from the company, had set it up.

This whole thing at a Google office down there, that was a lot of work and for these folks, come in and in the course of the interviews, one interview and somebody you know. They explained to me how they’ve used this product and they’re telling me all these stories. And so there’s a thing that I do, which is ask them to show me their account.

So we have recruited very specifically people who were have been using the product. And what I found is it’s very helpful to walk through somebody’s account with them. Whether it’s their inbox or their dashboard like, look at it with me, partly because that flash of seeing it tells you a lot about a user and partly ’cause then in this case we could walk through the history. What I wanted to do was, kind of ’cause people don’t remember so well, but if they walk through the history like, Oh yeah, I did that time last week, we did this thing and then I could tell me the stories about.

So as we started doing this. People would ask them to show me their history and what became clear was that people had completely lied to me, so I don’t have the app. It’s not on this phone. It’s like it was obvious they had just downloaded it, you know, 5 minutes before. And it happened like four or five times in a row.

And I still to this day I have no idea what I did wrong. I mean other than just like, warning people ahead of time. I’m gonna ask you to look at this, right, so they wouldn’t lie. It was so horrible. ’cause you have the whole team watching. It sounds weird, but like it’s somewhat of a performance element. I’ve set this whole thing up and I’m doing it, the team is there and we spent all his time and it’s just a complete 100% plush.

We had to completely redo the study. That was that was bad. It was like no way to recover from that one ’cause. It was just. Yeah, well, wasted effort.

I had a horrible one, too. We organize these user tests. And one of the testers, she comes and she had a crazy cold. And I mean, she was blowing her nose every minute, literally. And it was really, really getting out of control. And the worst thing is that this was in person. So she was using my phone.

Basically she had my phone in her hand, in her dirty hands for like 45 minutes and all the time, she was, like, blowing her nose, pressing like that. It was just so painful. The worst time.

A Research highlight: Flatiron Health

I see a lot of questions are coming from, so this is gonna be my last question. Is there any research project that you have run that you are especially proud of, like something that really changed totally a product?

Yeah, I mean, it’s actually ’cause the way I think about these sometimes is that what? I’m looking to have impact on a product or a project, but because of my relationship with the companies that we work with. What I’m trying to do is actually have a bigger impact on the way they develop products. Because we’re investors and so we want the companies to be successful long term.

For me, each project is kind of a way to demonstrate, like, oh, look at the power of user research. If you were there, adopt this and hire people and do more of this, you will be successful. That’s when I think about things being successful is when I see people are hiring researchers later.

Um, that said, I think a personal favorite research project, especially these days, thinking about doing in person research is very appealing. I think currently about some of those projects, but work that I did with Alex Ingram at Flatiron Health was really fun ’cause we were studying how oncologists identify eligible patients and match them to clinical trials.

Which is super complicated process for them to do and they have research teams and so we did this couple times where we would do these kind of insane road trips. We ended up doing 35 hours of interviews with I think it was like 25 people at five different cancer centers and three States and four days. So it was really intense, but super fun project and leading to, you know, working on what was it really important project. So what stands out to me is something that was kind of this, this very crazy fun road trip.

How to summarize findings

When you have like any research projects, especially this one. It’s so big. How do you capture all these results and what technique you use to basically transmit the results to the stakeholders who make the decisions right to make sure that they have an impact.

Yeah. So that one is unusual. So the typical way that I do for most studies is kind of it’s UX watch party where we, we bang it out in a day and we capture the takeaways and everybody walks away. And because they have experienced it together, I don’t need to put together some giant deck and I don’t do that kind of work. And I’m lazy, so I don’t have to do that kind of work.

So for something that’s big like this, this was proceeding a design sprint that we did. And so what I needed to do was document the process. So what we were fundamentally trying to detail out was what is the process that people are doing and who’s involved with it. The question is what are their challenges? Green points along the way. Identifying these kinds of patients and so. I had to put together a very detailed description on those processes, so that then when we walked in and had a slide deck.

We walked in on Monday with a team to do the design sprint for this. I could present to the rest of the team who had not participated and joined me on this kind of workshop. They wanted to know what did this look like? And so with them when we started the design Sprint, everybody was kind of loaded up and understood what this process was. So in that case it was a slide deck, presenting all of that to everybody about what does this look like?

And Daniel Burke would make help me make these giant posters out of my documentation about the whole process. So it was kind of a set of steps and who’s the actor and what we’re trying to do. What were their goals, what were their questions, and what were their pain points. And so we had giant posters on the walls. It’s unusual for me to do it that way.

I just want to remind the people who will ask the question. We have a nice bottle of wine to win for them. So at the end, you can I like the best question from from our audience. So the first question. It’s gonna be Olivier. You ready? Yep, I know. So I’m designer from Belgium and my question was to rebound about the research field that you prepared actually.

The best way to teach people about UX

You mentioned that you do it alone at the moment. How would you do to help people who had never worked with UX would discover, use profile in their teams, how would you do to help them to create a surface? How do you help them help me during all the recruiting and all of that process y. How would you build maybe the protocol. These people might think that most of the time they are not aligned and so how would you make them understand?

The people in my case in Belgium have never heard about UX and discovered the profiling some companies still there.

What I’ve learned for myself and have been reminded by other people over and over, is the best way to teach people how to do this is to show them. And so I haven’t found a better way to do it. I’ve tried all these different kinds of classes and workshops and fundamentally I need to just have them play along with me. Like we’re gonna do it together. And I’m gonna go through this whole process with you and ask you a bazillion questions.

Turn my researcher skills onto the team to figure out. Help them figure out. What do you actually really need? What do you really trying to learn? And so that’s a lot of what I do. With their early step is essentially interviewing the team and figuring out like, no, no, no. What do you really wanna know? ’cause, they’ll often show up and so here’s what we want to learn, and we’ll kind of here’s what we need.

And we’ll kind of talk through it and we get to a point where I will ask this question, which is not like – what’s actually keeping you up at night. Like oh, that’s this other thing, like, oh, that’s interesting. Let’s talk about that like, OK, what is that issue? How can we help you?

But then we go through it and I do the research with them, just in this very open way. So they see me do it ’cause I haven’t and maybe I’m just not a good teacher but I haven’t found another way to get.

Would you maybe ask other stakeholder interview to better understand the concept the role of project. Yeah. Usually we start with a group in a room and so usually we promote ’cause. workers are set up. If we sense that there is not alignment like that, there’s something not quite In Sync on this team we will then sometimes revert to doing stakeholder interviews to figure out like, wait, what’s going on here.

Because sometimes there are other things that are not about the research, right? It’s about team dynamics and we realize there are a lot of other things that we are assessing when we’re working with the team. To figure out is this actually a good time to do this research.

A lot of things that we’ve also learned is there are times that I could do like the most awesome research study and it’s going to have no impact whatsoever. So we try to avoid that. So for example, if we realize the team is not aligned at all, what are the things that are keeping them up at night are completely different. They’re all going different directions.

Not a good sign if they don’t actually have resources to work on and build whatever. The thing is that we’re working on like that designer we’re trying to hire. A designer and engineer to work on this project. We wanna do the research now. Yeah, we’re not gonna do it now, ’cause, let’s wait till those people are here, and then we’ll go through this and have everybody aligned.

Otherwise, this is gonna sit on the shelf. New people show up. It’s not gonna work. So if the right ingredients aren’t in place and we can sense that now and figure that out pretty quickly. We won’t even kind of move forward. You will come in later, will kindly tell them that we’re not going to do it yet.

Blending Anthropology and UX

Hi Michael, I am joining all of you from Dubai and I’m an avid fan of the book Sprint since the time I got my hands laid on that book, my PhD journey has taken a next level. I am just a humble university lecturer and I have a lot of passion for sprints as well as ethnography. I would like to ask you about your take on blending etnographic techniques with design sprints.

When I’m taking workshops or when I’m teaching, I’m giving away a lecture. Most of my MBA students who are working, they are managing directors, CEOs and startup owners and investors. They’re much interested with a lot of pictorial research. And I’ve seen a lot of them coming in with pictures and you know we attended that, we saw the consumer touching the products like that. Or interacting with a particular product like that and we want to work on that part.

The way they’re holding the bottle or the way they’re sitting in the car. So I was much intrigued by ethnographic techniques and just until recently in one of my projects with IKEA, I was able to well blend both techniques, but I haven’t really gotten a breakthrough for that.

So I thought maybe you could let me know what are your takes on really blending techniques and design sprints. I’m much interested about phase four prototyping.

To me, it gets back to this idea of what is the fundamental question you’re trying to answer. What’s the outcome you’re aiming for and what’s the best way to deliver that? What’s the best, most efficient way to deliver that? At least the burst bite size pieces, right? A lot of this is about iterating and kind of doing it in chunks.

And so sometimes you just have to be there to see it. And when you do then I do that. So like this example I described of our traveling to these multiple States and studying oncologists, we just needed to go talk to them.

And part of that was because the oncologists are not coming to me like they’re not making time for me. And part of it is I needed to see. I want to see all the spreadsheets they were using and like all the posts. What is this messy process really look like and that’s harder to do online. Now there are a lot more tools where I can do that remotely. So sometimes I’m again because the way I’m doing this I’m balancing. My desire to be on site with doing it in a way that everybody can see me doing it.

So they’re kind of competing goals there, right? So I guess the short answer, is those techniques can be very powerful. They can be very good to help you tell the stories and to help bring other people in and have them see the context. But it’s, Ethnographic techniques are not just about pictures, right? It’s about stories and about the story stories and having those artifacts. And so you need both of those.

Just the pictures, like that’s OK and there’s a lot of waiting. I use disk out and some of these other things. But I lean very heavily on getting people to tell the stories and hearing the explanations. Because like how they’re holding it fine and depends on if you’re just doing some basic industrial design work, the work that I’m usually doing is much more.

What’s the value proposition for this business, and so that’s usually requires much more than like, oh, I can see how they’re sitting in the chair. There’s anything wrong with that? It’s just not the kind of projects I’m typically working on now.

That’s what I mentioned was quite amateur, but that did strike me that, you know, maybe. So I’m still getting there. I’m still trying decode. What’s that maybe in how and what to do. But yeah, at least it gives me a way ahead.

The thing that I would listen for, there are a lot of techniques now that make it very easy for people to avoid going and actually talking to the people that they need to talk to. And some of these are great tools, but they need to be used with other things. But if people say, well, we’re, you know, like I said before, you know, we’re using analytics, we’ve these other things. We have a lot of input from our users.

Sometimes you need to just like, leave your office or get out from behind your desk and actually go talk to these people. Be very specific, who are the people, but you actually have to go listen and watch.

And sometimes people are looking for like ways to, you know, shortcuts around that. And so what I tried to do is make it a streamlined as possible to do that work. But you kinda gotta do it. Sorry not able to do short answers.

Having empathy but avoiding bias

I think we have one last question from Andrea. Hi, Michael. Hi, Steph. I work in museums and galleries and staff knows I’ve been running design sprints for a couple of years now. But a lot of the work I do is about emotional engagement, but also economic engagement, with heritage, and I wondered about where you’ve been working, particularly with medicine.

How when you’re building empathy during an interview, do you make sure you don’t kind of melt too much and end up ALS, feeling that you’re leading for tested down a particular root of response? How do you manage to have empathy but also get clean information that you need?

It’s an issue, but it’s a good question. What I try to do is. It’s about remaining neutral. Right. And that’s what you’re kind of mentally trying to do is remain neutral and so? I think it’s important to make the noises and things where you’re acknowledging what somebody is saying. Acknowledging it and encouraging, but not necessarily reinforcing. That’s the line that I’m usually trying to ride.

You know making a simple sound like I’m trying to reflect back to them like that. Sounds like that was hard for you is different than. When that happens, right? Like so. I’m not trying to to. I’m trying to be understanding and encouraging, but not necessarily on their team to reinforce that.  Like, yeah, we hate when that happens. That’s really hard. That happened to me too, like I’m not. It’s just. I’m an observer. Trying to be kind. Uhm, in that way.

So that’s kind of what’s in my head is like, what’s a neutral acknowledgement so that the person knows that I’ve heard them. They wanna usually feel heard and like I’m understanding. So recapping and feed it back to them like oh, it sounds like you’re feeling this way about that.

In the in, the leaders say yeah, that’s how I felt like. No, no. Like you’ve misunderstood. Know correct me, which is perfect, right. But I’m not trying to add any kind of judgment or reinforcement to it.

And if they ask you for more detail around the question, again not adding detail, which then seems to be persuasive. I mean I will rephrase a question because sometimes I’m, I just would have asked it poorly, right? And so I’ll just take a step back and just try to ask it again.

We’re kind of stepping back to what we were talking about and maybe try to like rebuild ’cause some of it is managing and maintaining the rapport you have. And so sometimes if somebody starts backing at a question that I’ve asked either, maybe they just didn’t understand me, which is fine, or I’ve said something that clearly has touched a nerve in some way. And so I need to kind of backtrack a little bit and rebuild.

Add back, you know, put some more deposits into the Rapport building. And so I’ve kind of do that by like. I’m so sorry. I’m you know. I’m a little flustered, you know? Take some of the the responsibility to why it’s difficult, you know. Thank you so much for doing this. It is really helpful. This is kind of hard for me. I’m, you know, new with this, whatever.

But try to rebuild that trust ’cause that’s a lot of what you’re trying to establish in that context that, that relationship when it’s a sensitive thing.

The other, the other thing that I’ll say about this one, it’s about building empathy. So I have found in the past two years, I do it less now. There’s been this very effective thing that I found that I can do at the very start of an interview that will jump the report very quickly pretty far, which is that I’ll, you know, do my intro in which I chat about where you calling from or whatever and just like kind of the friendly hi chat.

I’m not a crazy person like establishment at the very beginning and then I’ll explain what I’m doing. And I’ll say, you know, before we jump in I just wanna check in with you, ’cause I know the past year or two years of COVID is has been really hard for people. Like, how are you doing?

And what I found is that i has been. And I’m trying to do it in a genuine way, or if it’s not, yeah, but it helped me jump pretty fast with people actually ahead. Because people will tell you. You know, hard things sometimes. Often they’re like, Oh well, I mean, this thing happened, you know, it ends like, OK, we’re deep into it pretty fast. And so just expressing that genuine but pretty neutral concern about that as a person has helped a lot

What’s the future of User Research?

Thank you so much, Michael. This is going to be me for real my last question, how do you see the future of the future future research? Wow. That’s your last question.

The future of user research my I guess in Michael’s fantasy world, the future is that it’s just gets done more and it gets done with a better quality. What I’ve seen in the time that I’ve been doing it and certainly achieving let’s say in the last 12 years. It has gotten much more common among consumer companies.

You all can buy the book, and you can do this stuff. And like, it’s just more common, more familiar how to do it. Enterprise companies were behind, and it wasn’t so common as much, people who were building those kinds of tools. But those things have become more consumerized.

Slack is a great example, right? Were design becomes very important in these big enterprise kind of products. And so they are doing more of this kind of work. They’re incorporating more of these techniques.

And the place where we still see that we as a team have disproportionate impact is on health care projects. Where we work with brilliant people solving very, very hard problems in US health care system. And they’re not used to these techniques as much.

And so we can just have huge impact there in a way that we used to on some of these other kinds of companies where people like, Oh yeah, we kind of know how to do some of that stuff.

So what I’m hoping is that continues and it just becomes more and more common and the quality of it is more and more prevalent. For some of these other, much harder kinds of problems that we all have to deal.

It was absolutely amazing having you on the show and giving your answers to all these questions.


John Zeratsky Itoday

Itoday Apéro #7 - John Zeratsky

John Zeratsky

John Zeratsky is a co-founder and general partner at Character, bestselling author of Sprint and Make Time, and former design partner at GV.

Character.vc the new $30M seed fund supporting startup founders with design sprints

For this new year, we wanted to start in style, with an exceptional guest: John Zeratsky, the legendary co-creator of the design sprint process. 

He is the bestselling author of Sprint and Make Time, with Jake Knapp, and former design partner at GV, (Google Ventures). Previously, John was a design leader for YouTube, Google Ads, and FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007. 

In December, John has officially announced his new venture: Character, a $30M seed fund, that supports technology startups with capital and design sprints.  

We’ll discuss with John about his personal journey, from designing websites to venture capital, how he chooses in which startups to invest, what makes a good tech team, the role that the design sprint will play in Character, and much more!

Participants who attend LIVE, will also be able to ask questions.

John Zeratsky

John is a former Design Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he developed the Sprint method and supported many of GV’s most successful investments, including Slack, One Medical Group, Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, Gusto, and Digit.

John studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the UW School of Human Ecology, where he’s now an advisor to the Dean and faculty. Originally from small-town Wisconsin, John has lived in Chicago and San Francisco with his wife Michelle. They spent 18 months traveling in Central America aboard their sailboat Pineapple before moving to Milwaukee in 2019.

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It’s so great to have all of you live today. So today is a very special day because we welcome an innovation superstar. You’re going to discover in a few minutes who he is. But before that, maybe you were wondering about the name Itoday Apéro

What is that weird names? So just so you know, in Switzerland or France in our region it is like a tradition. It’s kind of like a happy hour, right? So, if you want to have good time with friends, kind of 5:00 PM you meet with your friends and you take a good bottle of wine. Looks like this or a beer or coke or whatever you have in your fridge, right? And you just have a good time, and you chat with friends. So, I’m from a family of winemakers. So, you know, the tradition of Itoday Apéro? This bottle is going to go straight to Milwaukee USA, because our guests star of today is going to receive it. And I have a second bottle. I will send it to one of you guys. If you have a good question, if you interact well, we are super happy to send it to you.

Our guest of today is going to choose who’s going to be the lucky winner and we ship worldwide. So, get ready to win your wine. That’s it for the wine.

Let’s talk about our guests today. He’s let’s get ready. He’s the author of the couple of the books, Sprint and Make time. You can see them right here. Super famous, of course, he is a designer. He worked for companies like FeedBurner. Like, like Google. Of course, he works for companies like Google Venture GV is going to tell us a lot about this. And now he’s a venture capitalist which sounds like a crazy job. So, it’s going to tell us everything about venture capital. Welcome from Milwaukee USA. Mr. John Zeratsky.

Hey John, hey how’s it going? Thank you so much for coming to itoday Apéro. It is great to have you here with us. This is a pleasure, and I was saying to you and Eglé. Before everyone joined, I feel like this is more like talking to family than talking to, you know, some big public event. So, it’s a super fun. And I only wish it was a little bit later in the day, so I could enjoy some of that wine.

You know, like in here when we have an apéro, we drink it like at 11:11 AM. So, it’s the same right? You could. Yeah, so thank you so much John for doing, uh, for joining us. Maybe before we start can I ask you to, you know, give us a bit of background about who you are and about your journey in design.

John Zeratsky’s journey in tech

Yeah, I’m one of those people who’s never been able to settle on one job or one title. But I think the theme that has connected all my work has been designed so started out early 2000s when they used to call it web design. So, making websites and then worked at a tech startup in Chicago called FeedBurner. That was acquired by Google, went inside of Google, worked on a bunch of boring advertising products at Google. They made a lot of money for Google, but they were boring.

And then add, uh,  not boring opportunity to go to YouTube. I was the product design lead for YouTube channels. So, when YouTube decided it didn’t, it just wanted to be a quirky website for cat videos, but they wanted to be a true platform where people could build brands and audiences and businesses.

And then from there headed in even less boring opportunity to go to Google Ventures when it was just starting out, they were building out this team too. Go work with the portfolio companies. So, after GV made an investment, they’d send us in and we’d help them out. Me and other designers, researchers, engineers, marketers and that was of course that led to the design Sprint.

Because, you know, we were trying to help all these companies, but we were just a couple of people. So, we heard about what Jake had been doing at Google with his design sprints. Brought him to GV. He started working together and then we decided to write the book, so we decided hey, this has been useful for, you know our companies. Maybe this will be useful for other people to write the book. And we’re almost up to the current the current date.

The creation of Character (VC)

I took some time off, did some travel but I was getting sucked back into the world of startups and venture capital and decided last year to start a new venture capital firm. So basically, trying to do design work in a way that is really, really connected to the core challenges and things that people care about. And do it in a way that is really aligned with the people that I’m working with. So those events are the driving forces throughout my career. Artstone yeah, this is great. So, character was kind of a secret project, right? Yeah, until December.

Not entirely. Because we wanted it that way, but because the laws sure, you know, every country has laws like this, but the ones I know about other ones in the United States, the laws here, if you’re raising a new investment fund, are very strict. And you can’t really talk about the fact that you’re raising money, because then you might get into trouble with somebody who isn’t supposed to investor. Something you know finds out about it. So anyway.

So yeah, we had to kind of keep it a secret which was. Which is we not how operating as you know, like you know, Jake and I have done a lot of you know we like to write about things and speak about things and you know, kind of pull people in. So, we had to keep it a secret. But we finally we finally announced it on December 1st of 2021. So, it’s been. It’s been exciting to. Tiny deal to talk about it in the public.

Can you tell us like how many startups do you have already a part of the of the Character VC?

Yeah, we’ve invested in. 7 Startups already and might sound like a lot. Or maybe I don’t know, maybe, doesn’t it? It would be a lot if we had just started in December, but December was only when we announced it.

We started officially back in April. So, we started. Our first investment was in April of last year, and then we made. The most recent one was just last week, so up to date. But yeah, we will probably invest in like 6 to 8 companies per year, so we’re trying to stay on that on that pace. It’s hard because everybody that we invest in is so interesting in there all.

For every size, I should say everybody that we meet with is so interesting and all working on such exciting projects that we want to invest in all of them. But we only have $30 million. We don’t have unlimited amounts of money to invest, so we must. We’re learning, you know what is kind of the perfect company for character. What is our sweet spot for investing?

How to raise $30M

I like the way you said, well, we only have 30 millions of dollars. It sounds like a lot of money, right? And maybe the question that everyone here wonders is like, what did you find all that money like is it yours? Like are you rich or is it all these people money like yeah how does it work? It is other people’s money.

So, I can give you just a bit of a primer on venture capital. Venture capital fund you have the people who run it who are called the general partners. These names are kind of weird, but the general partner and they go out and they raise money from what are called limited partners. And these are people some of them are individuals. Some of them are big institutions or organizations and they want to invest in startups.

But either they don’t know how to invest in startups or them maybe they don’t know any startup founders. Or maybe they would like to invest in startups, but they want to diversify their investments. They want to have a little bit of money and a lot of startups. So, these limited partners. They give their money to us, so we kind of gather it together. We pull it into a fund and then we go, and we make it our full-time job to go out and find great companies. We invest in them. We support that. Help them be successful. And so, the way we found $30 million was by having a lot of meetings.

We have a partner another works with he had worked at a different VC firm but he you know it wasn’t. It wasn’t his fund, it was, you know he was an employee of the of the fund. So, this is the first time that that we’re all doing it together. There’s a lot of trial and error. It was honestly it a little bit like you know sprints like. Research we made a lot of different prototypes of our deck and writing up documents about our strategy and how we plan to invest.

And then we did a lot of a lot of tests, interviews you know, talked to a lot of our customers. Who are these limited partners? And you know, eventually we started to. Conan on yeah, this is the. This is the type of person this is, the type of organization who’s looking to invest in a fund like ours and it took us about. It took us like. Almost a year to raise all the money it took us like maybe 10-10 months or so from the first.

The very beginning to when we had our final closing for the fund. What was it like? A goal to reach like a milestone to reach 30 million. Or basically it’s what you could get like, you know. Which how much should you start a fund? Basically yeah, it’s it was our goal. And. Basically, when we were deciding how much we wanted to raise, we had to consider a bunch of different factors we needed to consider.

You know how many companies do we want to invest in? And since we’re running design sprints with every company, we couldn’t invest in 100 or 200, you know that would be impossible. But on the other hand, we didn’t want to invest only five because you know the risk, we wanted to have some diversification, so our partner, Eli he’s much more quantitative than me and Jake. He’s he has a finance background. He studied math in college, so he was very good at figuring out.

OK, what’s the ideal number? And then we had to combine that with how much money do we want to invest into each company. And that was, you know, we had to learn about the market. What types of companies that we want to work with. How much money are they raising? How much money do they need?

What percentage ownership would we have those companies after we make the investment, then we needed to think about how much we could raise as a new fund. You know we couldn’t go we even if we decided we wanted to raise 10 times as much. It just wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t possible, so we needed to be realistic. So we had 30 million.

As our target from the beginning, what we said was, I think 25 to 30 million and then and then we also came up with another number which was the minimum number that we could raise and still do it, and so that was around $10 million. So basically, the way we did it is we. We didn’t make anything official until we got that end. So, once we get to 10. Then we made everything official. We got the lawyers; we got all the documents. We signed. Everything you know got people committed. Got them to, you know, send us the first little bit of money and then we could start making investments.

And that was when we made our first investment that was back in April. But then once we you know kept going, we had some momentum. People could see what we were doing. It wasn’t just a slide deck, it was real. So, then people you know were committing to give us more and more money until we got up to close to 30. And then we said, OK, we’re good. Let’s cut it off. Let’s focus on now doing the real work which is making investments and running sprints with our companies. And then let’s put a pause on fund raising, at least for a little while.

John’s role at Google Ventures GV

If you look back at what you were doing at GV, I guess you were more designing and facilitating and writing the book, right? So, like, why are you picking the startup so choosing them where you on that side of the company on the truly? And this is something that you had to learn. Jake and I both were we.

 

We got to help with choosing the companies and deciding who to invest in, but it wasn’t our primary job so there was there was a team at Google Ventures who was all they did was find companies and then decide whether to invest and negotiate the investment. And but when they got to a point where they were seriously considering new company, that founder would come in and this was back in the, you know, the glorious old days of in person in person everything.

 

So that person would come into the office, and you know they would give a presentation. You know it’s sort of like would you imagine happening when a? founders pitching a VC and when those meetings happen then then everybody was everybody from GV was welcomed and encouraged attend Jake and the other the other design partners. Engineering partners, marketing partners, etc.

 

We were all encouraged to attend and then we were all able to give our input on that company and what we thought. And one of the cool things that we came up with that GV that we do at character as well as the idea of an individual scorecard so. Instead of, you know everybody just sits back and says no, that’s interesting, you know.

 

And then after the founder leaves, you have a conversation instead. In this you will not surprise anybody who knows about design sprints when the founder would leave instead of, you know, talking, we would all put our heads down and we would start making notes and writing down scoring. You know, here’s what we think of this company. So, we got to contribute with that, but no, the short answer to your question after all right that you know story is that.

 

I had not been responsible for making investment decisions. Eli had been. That was all he did, so he so he we continued to improve the process that we use to make decisions and hopefully will improve the quality of those decisions. But it’ll take a little while to learn if we’re making good ones or not.

 

The advantage of being a designer in VC

 

Like do you think that being a designer gives you an unfair advantage? You know, I’m choosing the startup and I’m trying to buy some stocks and I make horrible decisions and I’m also a designer, so yeah. Are you just better than others? With all the knowledge that you have acquired or on the GV?

 

Well, for what it’s worth, I’m horrible at picking stocks too, so every time I buy an individual stock in the stock market, it always goes down even when the rest of the market is going up and mine always goes down. So, I’m not good at that either, but that’s because investing in a stock is totally different than investing in a startup. When you invest in a startup, you get to sit down with the founder. You get to understand what they’re doing. We get to, you know, in our case, we get to work with them.

 

We get to kind of help them out and get behind the scenes. So, I think that us being designers gives us a big advantage because, you know, a lot of founders like to think about the market and the strategy, and fund raising. And all these big picture stuff. But none of that stuff matters if you don’t build a product that people want, and you don’t have a way of reaching those people. Finding those customers and getting them on board and so. Yeah, I think that you know Jake and I, we’ve worked with so many companies and we’ve seen so many cases of products that work well.

 

Products that don’t work well that when we look at what somebody is building, we just have a very intuitive understanding of is this going to work or maybe even if we don’t know if it’s going to work. We can talk to the founder, and we can understand. Are they going about building this business in a way that that means they’re going to? They’re going to figure it out, right? Even if they don’t know today, and even if we don’t know, do we think they’re on the wrath? Are they pay? Are they just sitting there with the doors closed and building something perfect for six months or are they out constantly testing and talking to customers and trying things and building prototypes?

 

I think that that we that sort of the core idea that we raised our fund on is that you know we had this unique way of looking at the world. We have this unique way of supporting our companies. It comes down to, you know, product and go to market or, you know product, market fit and so yeah, we 100%. 1000% believe that having that perspective and that approaches is going to make us better investors.

 

What Character will do differently than GV

 

So, you did work at GV, right? And now you’re creating a new VC. What are the recipes or the weights functioning like? What do you take from GV? What do you copy and what are the things that you want to do differently? That’s a good question.

 

The most important thing that we brought from GV is the design Sprint, obviously, and I think. More broadly than that, it’s the idea that a VC an investor can do more than just. Provide advice and provide feedback and make introductions that it’s possible for an investor to work. Hand in hand with a founder and a lot of investors.

 

Can’t do that and they either they can’t do it because they don’t have the right kind of background or the skills or experiences to do it or. They don’t have a model for doing it at scale because in the early days when we joined GV at first, we also didn’t have a model. This was before the design Sprint and so we would invest in a company and then I would just still work with them and help them out. You know I would just do the design work with them, but it doesn’t scale and so.

 

You know, if you if we hadn’t created something like the design Sprint, we wouldn’t have been able to do that work to help lots and lots of companies and so. Most investors they either don’t have the skills or experience because they haven’t been. You know, working inside of startups for a long time or they don’t have a model to scale it, so they kind of fall back on these things that aren’t naturally scalable, which are again giving advice, giving feedback, making introductions, etc.

 

So that’s the most important thing. There’re some elements of decision making that we also have taken and built upon, and I already mentioned this idea scorecard when we meet with the company, we individually rate our score, the company before we have a conversation about it because we want to try to eliminate narrative bias.

 

You know, we don’t want someone to say, oh that was so interesting. You know that that color is what everybody else is thinking in the room. Just like on you know I’m Wednesday of the design Sprint when we’re making decisions, right we want to keep everybody sort of opinions separate until we’re ready to share them all at the same time on level playing field.

 

Those are the those are the main things I think the one thing that’s different. I mean first of all character is way smaller than GV. You know we are. Let’s see 10103 orders of magnitude smaller, so yeah. 303 and there were two hundred of magnitude smaller, so we’re like way, way smaller. But I think the thing that’s that I hadn’t really thought about a lot.

But Jake pointed out is that there’s a different relationship that we have with founders because we are both investors. And were the designers or the Sprint leaders? And at GV, even though you know GV believed in US GV, you know we were partners. We truly we had ownership and equity in the company. You know, we you know it’s not like we were off to the side but still there was this.

 

There was this handover. You know there was like somebody made the investment and then they handed them over to us and then we tried to help them out. Jake pointed out in some of our very first meetings with founders that when we are running a Sprint, it’s totally different because we’re also the investors. We’re the people, you know, we represent the money from the limited partners. You know we have our own money, you know, a small percentage of the fund is our own money, our personal money.

 

We have skin in the game. We’re, you know we’re making that decision and then we’re there and we want what’s best for the company because everybody’s incentives are aligned. So that’s not like a tactical thing. It’s not like a, you know, a process or anything, but it’s more of a structural. Saying, that’s quite different from GV, but I think is unique and really special about what we’re doing.

 

Facilitating design sprints for his own startups

 

When you’re facilitating a Sprint for one of your startups?  You’re obviously the Sprint facilitator, but are you actively participating? Like are you sketching or do you prefer to stay neutral?

 

We try to participate as much as possible because I think that Sprint facilitation is important. As you know the difference between a bad facilitator and a good facilitator is huge. But Jake and I and the other people that we work with are also experienced designers.

 

We’ve designed a lot of stuff, we’ve seen a lot of stuff. And so we think that if we cannot just facilitate, you know, so we’re going to facilitate. But we can. We can help even more if we also participate. As you know, provide sketches you know actively participated in making decisions, and then I think it’s it. It’s also connected back to the fact that we have skin in the game in terms of the investment.

 

You know we’re going to everybody in the room is going to make money. If the company does well so. It, I think that we could provide a value to this. The startups by just facilitating, but we think that we can provide even more value. We can be an even more helpful investor if we’re also really participating in the in the Sprint. If we’re really contributing our ideas.

 

If we’re taking an active role. In sort of shaping the direction of that company, but it’s you know it’s kind of hard to do it as you know, like facilitating a Sprint leading a Sprint takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of attention, and so that’s part of why we always try to have multiple people from our team in a Sprint. That’s why you know me and Jake are me and Jake and. Eli or me and Eli, you know, because it means that we can kind of share the responsibility of facilitation while also having some mental bandwidth leftover to contribute. Our best ideas.

 

Have you been in the situation when you weren’t facilitating but you were the decider? But it’s always I see you. Well, if we’re working with a startup that we invested in, then it’s always the CEO, but we have run some sprints on our own internal stuff for character. So, we used a brand Sprint and a name Sprint to come up with the name character. We are running an opportunity Sprint and a couple of weeks about this this new.

 

Program that we’re considering developing, and in those cases, Jake has been the facilitator and I’ve been the decider. But normally our philosophy, when it comes to working with our startups that we invested in is that you know, we sort of. We exist, our job is to support them and serve them and help them be as successful as possible. So, I don’t think it would ever be appropriate for us to be the decider.

 

Picking the right startups: John’s OATS decision making framework

 

I guess there are a lot of questions about how do you choose the startups and what the key things you are looking at the startup? Is it the people? Is it the tech? Is it the field? What is your magic recipe?

 

Yeah, we. We created a decision-making framework. That we call OATS.  It has nothing to do with food, but it’s just easy to remember and it stands for opportunity, approach, team and success. And then within each of those categories we have like 4 maybe three to five or three to six. Criteria that we look at. So, I’ll pull it up right now and I’ll just give you an example. In real time while we’re. So, for example, within opportunity, the first section, the three criteria that we look at our R1, is it a real problem and meaning that you know like is it a nice to have thing where it’s like?

 

Oh, that’d be cool if you could do that? Or is it like? Oh my God, this is something that you know causes me to lose money every day. It drives me nuts it’s you know whatever it is it is it a? You know sometimes people talk about vitamins versus painkillers like is it a pain killer? Is it really helping somebody fix this big problem that they have the second criteria within opportunity is?

 

Market size, so how big is the industry and not just today’s industry? Not just you know how much money people are spending on this sort of thing today? But how much could they be in the future? Our first investment is a company called Phaedra, which is doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that we would invest in as designers, but it’s. It’s this software to optimize the heating and cooling systems in factories and they talk about why we think it’s interesting as designers, but it’s a good example of where the initial market size. You know if you only look at well how many people today want software to optimize their energy usage in their factory.

 

Well, maybe not that many, but if you think about it in five years or 10 years, you could have this software installed in every factory in the world. You know, helping to control the systems, helping to optimize, helping to keep them running smoothly. So, we think about that, and then the third criteria under the opportunity are. His competition, so it’s not just it’s not simple as is there already a lot of competition, but we try to look at that unique situation and say OK, who are the competitors? Not only direct competitors, but what are the substitutes? Is this competing with some other thing that already exists or that they’re already doing and? If so, what are the benefits or the downsides of that? So that’s just the old category, but so just that just gives you an example of like fruit for show, which is the opportunity A, which is the approach, which is basically about OK, that’s the opportunity now what are they doing about it? What is what’s the product that they’re building?

 

Like, what’s their strategy? How are they going to market? Team, you know something. We have some criteria around; you know the technical skills and the design skills and the ability for the team to raise money and the ability for the team to build and validate their product. And then the success category is all about what they’ve achieved so far. So how many customers do they have? How much revenue do they have? How quickly are they growing?

 

And you know, that’s kind of the framework that we used. And of course, the assessment, the rating or scoring for each of those components is subjective, right? And that’s where our experience as designers and investors for the last ten years comes into play because.

 

We believe that we can. We can make the right assessment on each of those categories, so there is no secret formula. It’s not like we can just plug in all you know data on the company and spit out like should we invest or not?

 

But we do think that just as we do in a design Sprint, we think that by having a structured approach to decision making, we can make decisions that are high quality decisions. That are free of bias, that are inclusive of everybody in the conversation and that that in this might even be the most important things that give us a record of our decisions. Overtime a structured, consistent record.

 

So, we can look back in six months and we can say, WOW, that company we rated them like this, but turns out they went out to be successful. What was going on? What did we miss? What did we get wrong, and how can we improve the quality of our decisions overtime?

 

Relationships with startups

 

Can you? I don’t exactly know how it works with VC, but like, do you sign a long-term contract with them? Or can you break up with a startup that is not doing a good job?

 

When we invest the like simplest way to think about it is that we are buying a piece of the company. So, in that way it’s like buying a stock. Let mechanics of it are a little bit different, but we give them cash. They put the cash in their bank account and then we get stock we get. Percent ownership of the company, so it’s there’s no contract in that sense. It’s a. It’s a transaction that happens. The only way for us to break up with them is to sell our stock that our ownership in the company. But because these are early startups, there isn’t. There isn’t really a stock market. There isn’t really a market for those types of shares, so it’s very it’s virtually impossible. And it’s very uncommon for an investor at our stage to sell or to break up with a company. You know, maybe in five years, maybe they’ve grown, but you know. We think we would have potentially opportunities to sell down the road, but if you know in six months, we say oh it’s not working out, we can’t really get out of it.

 

I think the only thing that we can do is maybe to spend less time with them, and that’s not what we want. From a financial perspective, there’s no obvious way for us to sort of end that that engagement with them.

 

How often do you sprint with your teams?

 

Alright, so we are getting some, some questions from the participants. Really good ones. Jameel was asking, how often do you Sprint with your teams?

 

I don’t exactly know. I can tell you how it’s been going so far, but we just, relatively speaking, we just started. So, we don’t quite have the feel for it yet. What we have been seeing is that within the first couple months of making a new investment the team is ready to run some type of Sprint. Either a Brand Sprint, an Opportunity Sprint or a full Design Sprint.

 

And we’ve only had one company that has run multiple design sprints. That was that first investment I mentioned. That company called Fedra. We invested in them in April and they had a lot of sorts of back-end technology work to do. We ran a Design Sprint with them in September, and then they ran their own Design Sprint in November.

 

But we sort of coached them, so we weren’t there for the full five days of the Sprint, but we coached them and they ran the Sprint on their own. So, we had to kind of like do some math based on like how often we thought companies would run a Sprint. And compare that to what we were doing at GV to make sure that we wouldn’t find ourselves in a situation where everybody wanted to run a Sprint every week and there was no way we could possibly do it.

 

So, we assumed that we would be running sprints one week per month, which we’re not quite. We’re not quite at that level yet. But that’s because we’ve only invested in seven companies so far, and we’ve assumed that most of the startups that we invest in will run maybe two to four full design sprints per year where they need our help. But that overtime they will run their own sprints and we’ll be able to just help them out a little bit here and there.

 

So those are some of the assumptions that we made and it’s working out so far, but there’s a lot of a lot of things still to figure out as we continue to go.

 

Training the teams to run design sprints

 

This is super interesting. Are you giving the facilitation power to someone else? Are you training someone inside the startup who will become the facilitator?

 

Yeah, totally and for real we didn’t do it on purpose, really, like we ran a Sprint with them, and then a little bit later they emailed us telling they were like “hey we decided to run another Sprint”, like “I don’t know if you guys are free to join us but it would be cool to have you and somebody who had been in that first Sprint”.

 

She decided she wanted to be the facilitator by herself. This is awesome. The CTL one of the cofounders, he was like you know, an engineer. He was like: “this Sprint thing is so much better than how we had been designing products”. So, he was really excited about it.

 

So maybe when we get bigger, we’ll have like more of a training program or something, but for now it’s just kind of organic where people pick it up and decide to run with it.

 

I don’t know what you think, but usually at least in my sprints there is also. There’s always one person, you know, who is the perfect person for facilitation. You can spot that person right away, and that’s what comes to ask questions and looks exciting.

 

Yeah, so that’s totally right. Yeah, that person is always there. When sprints really stick in. A company is usually. There’s like some stealth components, and I think in this case that I was just mentioning it was the engineer the CTO, who was like you know, he’s not running the Sprint but he like behind the scenes was like telling the team- you got to do a Sprint like this is this is the way that to you know, figure out our product. So yeah, I don’t know if you’ve seen that but like the sort of the person who’s going to take over the facilitation. Kind of behind the scenes champion who’s sort of like pushing it when those two elements exist. Then then they’re going to take it and run it on their own.

 

Something we get a lot is people asking. Can I just come to observe the Sprint? You know, like being a fly on the wall. Because they want to see and to learn. Yeah, it makes it a bit awkward. But the companies that we invest in are too small to have the observers. They’re only like 6 people, so, you know, everybody is in the sprints anyway.

 

As an investor, do you facilitate differently?

 

Stephen has a good question. Do you want to open your mic? Well, first, thanks for being here John. I’m honored to listen to you and congratulations on your new venture. All the best! I just want to know as an investor, since you’re, do you think it changed anything to your way of facilitating your sprints? Just because you might be a bit pickier on like the business model, on the potential? To be more challenging on the decision process, the concepts and on the winning the decision, on the winning concept. Does it change anything or it’s all old way you did it at GV?

 

That is a really good question and. I think the honest truth is that I probably care more now than I ever have before. Like even at GV where like we had, we had skin in the game. We had an incentive, but TV was so much bigger that I think I’m just like being totally honest here like I think I had this. Thinking back that you know is like OK, well this one doesn’t work out great like there’s this other one. There’s like hundreds and hundreds of companies. Plus we were like, yeah we were still figuring out the design strand like we hadn’t fully developed the process itself.

 

And then I also experienced that a lot when I was working like as a consultant. Working with companies, especially bigger companies and I it sounds bad. If I’m running a Sprint with a bank, I just like I don’t know I’m there. I’m present I’m doing the best I can, but like I’m not going to put my finger on the scale and try to change the outcome if I believe they’re making the wrong decision but.

 

As an investor, I totally feel that way. I mean I feel much more engaged and I feel great sense of responsibility for them to make what I believe to be the best possible decisions. So, tactically, I don’t know how that changes things, but certainly my mindset going into it is quite different.

 

I have a question about, you know like you have created the sprint too to like to avoid a lot of meetings, right? But then the Sprint is always like synchronous. Do you see it like the same? The way you work with startups? Are you getting way more asynchronous right now?

 

So far we have continued to run sprints synchronously. Everybody here knows it’s already but I think that is. It’s just such an important part of the core philosophy of a Sprint that the team is together that they’re focused that they’re engaged, that they’re putting their energy 100% into the most important problem that they face, so I don’t. I don’t see us moving away from that, with one exception.

That is that there’s this interesting situation that we’ve. We’ve observed that before somebody runs or before somebody starts a company. And before they’re raising venture capital money. There’s often a period of three to six months where they are basically just exploring ideas, and they’re just going out and talking to customers and they’re thinking, yeah, there might be something here.

 

There’s kind of a cool opportunity. And sometimes we get to talk to people when they’re in that phase. You know, it might be well if you’ve read this Sprint book you know about Flatiron Health. And there’s a couple people who left Flatiron health. They’re both engineers, and they’re in this situation right now where they don’t really have like a clear business idea, but they’re exploring some things, and they have run several design sprints. Essentially sprints but kind of asynchronous.

 

They go through all the steps, but because it’s just the two of them, and because they’re in this broad exploration mode, they haven’t, been sitting together in the same room from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day doing it. So I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s something that we’ve observed that will meet with them, and you know, we’re not there with them because we haven’t invested and there’s still too early for us to invest.

 

But we kind of coach them and give them pointers and say, hey, I think you know you’ve been talking to these customers. That’s great, make a prototype you know and use that in your tests. You’ll learn a lot more. Here’s the process you can use. They’re kind of doing these sorts of asynchronous-ish types of sprints.

 

So I’m interested to see where that goes and what happens with that. But for the most part, yeah, we’ve been 100% synchronous altogether. Same time you know, totally focused virtual, obviously, but hopefully that will change before too long.

 

“Making time” for a design sprint (focus)

When you run sprints full week, synchronously. We get pushed by companies because it’s sometimes because it’s a huge time commitment and it’s a forecast that they need to have. And in a podcast you said with quote committing time for focus and design sprint is always hard, but it’s on purpose and I really love that. So can you elaborate on that?

 

Yeah, well I think. In the context, especially of a larger company or an established business, part of the magic of a design Sprint is just the decision to do it. It’s just the decision to say this thing is so important that we are going to focus on it. We are going to clear our calendars and get in the room, and even if you. Like even if you did that and then you put the book away and you just you just worked, you’d probably still get a lot done like it would still probably be way better than whatever you were doing normally.

 

It’s like having meetings and like sending emails and stuff so that that I think is the core idea that I believe in strongly and I, but I think it’s even more interesting. With startups, because the things that you do in a Sprint. Figuring out you know what you are. What are you building? Who are you building it for? Do those customers care? Do they understand it? That is all a startup exists to do.

 

A startup doesn’t have anything else going on. They don’t have committees. They don’t have you know ongoing project. Check in meetings for projects that have been going for the last. You know 18 months. All they’re doing is trying to figure out that we are building the right thing for the right customers.

 

And so for them it’s a very natural fit to run a Sprint. And it’s not hard to clear the calendar because they’re not clearing it from anything. They’re clearing it from doing what they were. You know, working individually, working in an unstructured way on product market fit. Now working in this very focused, structured way and product market fit. So it’s much more of a natural transition and natural fit for what they’re doing.

 

But yeah, that decision to focus. Is very purposeful. It’s very important. If you want to really make progress on our things, it’s really part of the experience of the Sprint, right? It’s what makes it in a way disruptive. But for good like it’s really bringing a change in the way people work, and that’s the that’s the point.

 

I was, you know, curious about bias from founders right? Because founders, their ideas or their products, are like their children. They’re very passionate about it. So when you step into a Sprint it does. Does the founder at times you don’t have that bias as part of the process? And how do you as an outside adviser or your team of advisors or others in the company work to resolve that? Yeah, that’s a good question.

 

And I have a question for you, which is are you really in Milwaukee? That is so cool. Well, hello from the Upper East Side. That is happens and you know one of the things that we look for when we invest in a company is. And this is one of the criteria under approach. It’s called weakly held vision, which might sound like kind of weird.

 

But, but we believe that the most successful founders they don’t hold on to their vision too tightly because we’ve worked with Jake and I could tell you some horror stories from Google Ventures. We have been working with companies where the founder had two, two clear of a vision and their whole mindset was I just need the team to bring this vision into the world and I know it’s going to be successful.

 

It’s never successful, right? It never works. Founders who are successful, they see an opportunity and they have ideas. They have beliefs. They have a hypothesis, but they’re willing to change when they learn they’re willing to. You know, test things to. To validate their assumptions and change direction when they learn something new. And so we try to get ahead of that of the situation that you’re describing by investing in the first place in founders who aren’t holding on too tight to their vision so that they so it doesn’t create that conflict in a Sprint.

 

But of course there’s always going to be a certain degree of people believing in what they believe, and you know, particularly founders, who raised money for an idea, they’ve had some success so far with what they’re doing. So I think that you know we don’t. We don’t do anything.

 

It’s special to try to counteract that or address it outside of what we would do in a normal Sprint, which is, you know, make sure that their idea is captured and represented a level playing field with all the other ideas. Make sure that everybody has a chance to weigh in, but then ultimately deferred to the decision maker, and so it’s basically. You know who is the founder? Who is the CEO? So it’s basically OK.

 

You know there’s, you know we see this opportunity this problem, this thing we’re trying to figure out. There’s ten different ways to do it. Let’s hear. Let’s think about why each of those ten is a good idea. Let’s sort of hear the pitch or see the pitch for that. But then you know if at the end of all that the founder says, you know what I’ve seen it. I’ve seen you. I’ve heard you. I still believe my way is the way to go. So be it. You know at least we went through that process, at least we gave that founder an opportunity to evaluate different options. The opportunity to learn so you know.

 

I think a lot of that stuff is already baked into the Sprint process but we do try to get ahead of it by, you know, evaluating founders on that. That measure of weakly held vision. From very beginning we had that on the Sprint Day one the founder is like I know exactly like he was:  I really don’t know why we are doing this because I know exactly what we should do.

 

Turn then on  the two he was he was catching on day three there was a sketch that was exactly what he was saying since the beginning so we knew it was his. And then, you know at lunch day three was like OK, OK. My thing wasn’t the best so I’m going to pick the other one that was good. Took time that is good.

 

The Brand Sprint and Opportunity Sprint

 

We have a great question from Timothy. Uh, it’s the same than Jameel. Both have the same question. Timothy, you want to ask? Yes thanks Stéph. Hi John, yeah some time ago you talked about brand or name sprints and opportunities prints and full design sprints. So can you tell us what the. What’s the structure of these? Well, we know very well what’s the design Sprint full design Sprint, but what’s the difference with the brand names brand and the opportunity Sprint?

 

Yeah, so I’ll start with the Brand Sprint because it’s easy because we wrote an article about it several years ago when we were still at GV. So maybe staffer. Glad maybe somebody can find that and paste it into the chat, but it’s really the goal is to. It’s only half a day. It’s only three hours.

 

And so when you take a five-day design Sprint and you shrink it down to only when you shrink it down at all, you must cut stops, right? You can’t just accelerate all the steps you have to cut things out. When you shrink it down that much, the brand Sprint is all. It’s essentially just parts of Monday. Getting the team aligned on why they’re doing what they’re doing and what you know what they care about what. What isn’t important in essential to that team in that brand. And then sometimes, and we have a PDF about this that I could send.

 

It’s like several if you’re familiar with the note in vote from the design Sprint. It’s essentially like a couple rounds of nolanville. Where we first identify themes for a name so categories you know like nature or exploration, or you know space and then and then another couple of rounds of note and vote where we identify. Actual names for the company or for the product or for the future related to those themes, and it builds off the brand spend, so that’s that stuff. It’s all well documented.

 

The big difference between the opportunity Sprint and the design Sprint is when you do a design Sprint you already know the opportunity. So you understand the problem you’re trying to solve. You understand the opportunity that exists for your product. And you’re focused on solutions. So in the context of a known opportunity, you’re generating and evaluating and testing solutions. You’re trying to figure out what should we do in order to achieve this goal in opportunity sprints.

 

Essentially the step before that there are a lot of different opportunities. There are different parts of the market there are different new product categories that we could consider. Which one do we think is the most promising? Which one should we? Should we prioritize and spend our time on? And then the next step after that would be to run a full design Sprint and I can.

 

Similarly we just have a doc that just that has the outline. For the opportunity spread and it’s not like it’s not ready to share and it’s you know someday we’ll get around to writing about it publicly. But it’s essentially like parts of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so it doesn’t include the prototyping or testing because it’s mostly about deciding. And prioritizing internally, which opportunity does the team want to focus on so you know, hopefully, hopefully staffer exit can send that out to you. But that’s it. You know, in a nutshell, that’s kind of what it is.  Yeah, it’s in this in the chat for the for the brand, Sprint and opportunity, you just must write the

 

Running a sprint before or after getting funded

 

Hi John, nice to meet you again. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. I have a question so when you run the designs then do you do that before you invest? Or after you invested. That is an excellent question. And. We run sprints after we invest. We would like to run sprints before we invest. But we haven’t figured out how to do it yet, and what I mean by that is. Startup fund raising is really weird because.

 

If you imagine that there were 100 startups in the world, 99 of them, they basically just need to raise money from, you know, from anybody that that sounds bad. But like they need money to keep the business going right. And so investors are sort of in the position of power. yeah, they can say. Well, maybe we’ll invest in you, maybe not. But for one of those hundred startups, it completely flips where all the investors are trying to invest in that one company. So there’s an inverted competition where the investors are all competing for the ability to invest and. In those situations.

 

What we think, and we may be wrong about this. But we feel that to say to a founder. Hey, we were interested in investing in your company. But first you must spend a week with us. We think that’s a hard pitch to make. So we had some ideas for how to get around it. That we’re working on, but so far we haven’t quite figured it out, but we do think it could be interesting because we could learn a lot about the company about the opportunity about the team if we were to run a Sprint together and the team could.

 

Also, they could learn a lot about us. You know they could learn what it’s going to be like to work with us. So it’s something we would like to figure out, but so far we are still in the GV model of us. We invest and then we run this Sprint.

 

The companies that we have invested in and I believe the ones that we will continue to invest in, they want to run sprints with us. That’s part of the value proposition. I’m going to raise money in then I’m going to have the opportunity to work with the character team to work with. With you know Jake and me and Eli and run sprints together.

 

Yeah, there is a comment in the chat a week in Milwaukee. This is the appeal I guess. I guess that you run remote sprints right? Or is it difficult? Yeah, yeah we do it remote but yeah, I mean once people are a bit you know traveling more freely and gathering more freely. Yeah, be funded to. Maybe not in the maybe not in the winter, but in general it’d be fun to have, you know, Sprint week in Milwaukee for lots of startups who were considering investing in could be cool. Yeah, that would be a seller. Definitely yeah.

 

A roadmap for following up after a design sprint

 

You had a great question where you are it? I’m here, hi. Hi, so these early-stage startups. I guess the early stage right when you run a Sprint with them? Uhm, I’m assuming maybe it’s bad, but like I’m assuming that it’s more of a vision Sprint. And like where they’re going to be like that. The prototype is something that’s like more visionary. I guess that’s from my experience with early stage.

 

It’s not only early stage, but when left to really rethink something in our and then the problem is, is that I’ve run into problems with these kinds of companies where they. Think that this prototype after it’s been semi validated. It’s a road map now and I don’t know how to like what do you do with them so they don’t think this is now a road map and now you’re done with discovery? You’re done with talking to users or you know what do you do with them for? With their startups for that.

 

Yeah, um. That’s interesting. We do that, we do see that sometimes it does. It does happen for sure. One of the things that we talk about a lot with startups is the idea of. It’s not a road map for like the features you need to build, but a road map for the questions you need to answer, and we often will use the Sprint questions on Monday or the risks as the start of that road map. So and we’ll talk about it a lot. We’ll talk about it before the Sprint during this Sprint. After this print and we’ll say, OK, you know, for this new product.

 

Yeah, it’s for adding on this this new functionality to your product or going and trying to reach this new set of customers with your product. There’s a bunch of things that you don’t know that you need to figure out, and if you don’t figure them out you might fail the problem. You know probably won’t work. Maybe there’s five. Maybe there’s 10, maybe there’s 15 of those things and we try to capture as many of them as possible on Monday of the Sprint, but sometimes we capture them.

 

Outside of this brand or after the Sprint, and So what we what we talked about during the Sprint and at the end of it is OK. You’ve answered these questions like you put the check marks next to this question and you believe the answer is yes. But now it’s time to move on to the next one. And what is what is the you know that’s the next.

 

Question on the road map. You know what is the best way to answer that question? Do you want to do another design Sprint or is there another type of test or experiment or prototype that that would be more appropriate for answering that question? So that’s how we talk about it. And that’s sort of how we coach companies. And I’m making this transition from the initial design Sprint into what they do next is.

 

Think of it as a road map of questions or road map of hypothesis or assumptions and then and then. Eventually it just sorts of just sort of morphs. You know, I, I think there’s often this idea that like you do discovery and design and then you do. Implementation you do execution, but it’s not really like that. It’s a. It’s like a gradient. It’s like you know you. You figure things out, you test things and then like you start to make them real and then if you’re like OK that parts good.

 

Now this part we need test with and so it just sorts of morphs over time, then eventually you’ve done everything on your road map, but you didn’t really. You know, I think about it. In that way you thought of it in terms of the questions that you need to answer. Instead. It doesn’t always work, but that’s what we try to do.

 

Do you see like? I mean you’ve changed the way product were built with a design sprint. Do you see the same thing coming for the VC journey like? Do you think running a Sprint will be a monetary step?

 

If you want to ask for more money to other VCs on your journey as a startup 118 B&C and uh like OK well you won’t have any money on romby if you haven’t done at least two or three Sprint before coming in front of me, do you see that? Coming as a trend or not. But exactly like that, but I, but we do see, and we’ve been seeing for years.

 

More investors use design. More investors have designers on their staff, more investors running design sprints as part of their process, and even if it’s not directly what you’re saying, I think one of the things that happens that is like what you’re saying. Is that at each stage of funding there are certain there are certain questions you must be able to answer.

 

So you know you must be able to say OK. You know how are you acquiring customers? You know? What is the process of selling a new customer and getting them? You know, set up and on board with the product and design.

 

Sprints are a really good way to answer those questions you know to for us. Start to be able to say, you know, here’s what we’ve seen when we’ve when we’ve. Tested these ideas with our customers, you know, here’s what we’re hearing here

 

Here’s the method that we’ve used to validate. You know how we; you know how we put this product into the market? And so, it’s not like a checkbox hard requirement to you need to run a design Sprint to raise money. But the design Sprint is such a natural way. To prepare you to raise money that that I hope we will see it more and more. And that would be you know honestly that would be an amazing long-term outcome.

 

Long term goal for the work that we’re doing with character. Awesome, thanks. Alright so uhm, I think that’s it’s a thank you so much John for answering all our all our questions. It was great to have you so I would like to show these two books.

 

First book of course is Sprint by Jake, NAB and John Deere add ski. So read it. If you haven’t read it yet, in the second book, great. Book two is make time. It’s the perfect companion for Sprint. So, Sprint is about work and this is about life, right? Do you have anything to add about character about yourself? Where can we find you online?

Yeah, I’m easy to find online if you’re interested in learning more about character or website as character dot VC. If you know somebody who is starting a company who wants to work with us, send them our way. Otherwise, Twitter and LinkedIn are pretty good places but we’re not. Yeah, we’re not hard to find so thanks everybody. This was this was fun to these questions were super glad. I’m so glad that I had a chance to come and bring you all. Thank you so much, John.


Itoday Apéro #6 - EPFL+ECAL LAB & Apptitude SA

EPFL+ECAL Lab and Apptitude

Nicolas Henchoz, Valentin Calame, Apptitude SA

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Augmented Relations, from tech to impact driven innovation.

We have extensively digitized our world. Huge efforts have been made to capture, describe, and store archives. It increases accessibility, but for which impact? The fantastic richness of digitized heritages must bring value. It means to understand how to engage with the audience, find disruptive ways to revive and express the content. The project Jean Starobinski. Relations critiques. launched by the Swiss National Library and the EPFL+ECAL Lab, the Design Research Center of EPFL, explores this challenge through the implementation of an experimental online exhibition, about one of the most famous Swiss authors, Jean Starobinski. They invited Apptitude to join the project as a partner: together, they defined a new model of innovation, performing research and production in parallel. After only 14 months, the project was not only online, but already an award winning digital experience.

Discover the website: www.expo-starobinski.ch

Nicolas Henchoz

Director of EPFL+ECAL Lab

Nicolas Henchoz is the founding director of the EPFL+ECAL Lab, the design research centre of the EPFL (the Swiss federal institute of technology, Lausanne) in cooperation with ECAL (University of Art and Design, Lausanne). Its mission is to turn technical performance into impactful user experience, and understand adoption factors for disruptive innovation. Nicolas is the author of several academic contributions as well as the book Design for Innovative Technologies: From Disruption to Acceptance. He is the curator of projects and exhibitions in places such as the American Institute of Architecture in New York, The Lab @ Harvard or the Museum Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. EPFL+ECAL Lab projects earned several awards, including International Design Festival Berlin, Design Prize Switzerland, Best of the web, Best application of the year, etc.

Valentin Calame

Research assistant at EPFL+ECAL Lab

Valentin is an architect and researcher in the field of digital design. After studying architecture in Switzerland and Sweden, he turned to virtual spaces for a MAS thesis in
Design Research for Digital Innovation at the EPFL+ECAL Lab. Through his research project, he had the opportunity to explore different ways of augmenting spaces (physical and virtual) through technology and to question some of its limits.

Apptitude SA

EPFL Innovation Park

Apptitude is where software engineering and design meet. Their team provides strategic, technical and ergonomic skills to transform ideas into elegant and efficient digital products. Their work is characterized by a collaborative and end-user centric approach. The agency, founded in 2012 and based at EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne, is proud to count today more than 20 employees specialized in the creation of state-of-the-art custom digital products: mobile applications, web platforms, business software and connected objects (IoT).

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Itoday Apéro #5 - Anett Numa

Anett Numa

Digital Transformation Adviser for e-Estonia

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Efficiency, zero bureaucracy, transparency- the formula of successful e-governance in e-Estonia

“Digital transformation” is one of the favorite buzzwords of top leaders worldwide, but the Covid crisis revealed the weaknesses of most governments or administrations in terms of digitalization.
Outdated tools, complex processes, bad UX for the citizen or lack of accessibility. Covid has been the ultimate stress test.

But few countries in the world have achieved true e-government.

This is the case of Estonia 🇪🇪, a tiny European country, the size of Switzerland with one-fourth of its population. Estonia is known to be a world leader in technology and for having digitalized most of its government services. Electronic identity (eID), e-Health, e-Voting have all become a reality, with concrete benefits for its population.

Our next guest, Anett Numa, Digital Transformation Adviser for e-Estonia, will share with us how they’ve built the first “digital society” and give us a glimpse of how the future of our governments might look like.

Anett Numa

Having lived and studied in different countries, Anett has learned to appreciate living in a digital society. Anett believes that all processes and structures of public services should be accessible and simple for every single citizen.

Based on her academic background in political science, Anett focuses on enhancing good cooperation between the public and private sector to create a comprehensive and supportive environment. Her goal as a Digital Transformation Adviser at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre is to explain the Estonian digitalisation
experience and thus inspire leaders and decision-makers alike to create a better tomorrow.

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[Steph Cruchon] Hello everyone, welcome to Itoday Apéro number five I’m super excited to have all of you guys live we have an amazing crowd today and people are coming so this is really really great to have everyone live can I ask you to turn on your camera and just say hi to the camera everyone yeah you can hear the crowd right cool thank you so much for joining live this Itoday Apéro number five!

So if you don’t know what an “apéro” is, it’s kind of a tradition in Switzerland or
France a bit like a happy hour and the idea is to drink wine with friends you don’t need to drink wine you can drink whatever you want but with friends it’s a casual talk and basically, it’s just a good time that you spend with friends and it’s really really something that
that yeah that people enjoy in here so the tradition because we have a little tradition
it’s this my family are winemakers and we love wine in here and we drink wine during the apero so if you have wine if you’re watching and you have one in your fridge just go get some wine
or something else to drink and we’re gonna drink together it’s gonna be cool and I have
three bottles of wine the first one we’re gonna open it in front of you and drink it
during the talk the second one the second one is gonna go to Estonia today because Anett is
gonna get the second bottle of wine for her hard work today and the third bottle of wine
is gonna go to one of you in the world. Not the people who are watching, the people who are live who will ask some great question or interact or just engage and it’s Anett who’s gonna choose who is the lucky person who is gonna get the bottle of wine we are crazy we send worldwide so even if you live super far like like Estonia we’re gonna send you your bottle of wine how good does it sound?

yeah I see that that you look pretty happy here so this is good
so we are based in Lausanne Switzerland and our amazing guest today is Anett Numa and she’s gonna be live from Tallinn Estonia! So just a bit of context of why we wanted to invite Anett so much maybe if you have followed a bit the news or the press there is a horrible pandemic out there that’s called the COVID pandemic crisis and we are based in Switzerland and you know we people weren’t totally happy about the reaction of the country and especially the government especially we are a very innovative country in general, but we felt that you know our tools were a bit outdated they weren’t working well during the pandemic. Just to give you one example: doctors during the first wave of COVID they had to send some paper faxes to
the administration to signal the new Covid cases! it sounds crazy 2021 but yeah that was the case this year and you know Switzerland is a really lucky country has a lot of assets: very
innovative in general but we are not good at being digital… and I guess it’s the case for a lot of countries so we thought what can we do we are designers we are makers we like to help
what could we do to help our country and maybe your country to just get better at digital
and we thought there is one country in the world that is the world’s most digital country little
the tiny state of Estonia and today I’m so proud to welcome Anett Numa because she’s, wait for it: digital transformation advisor for the e-Estonian government the first online fully online
government and you told us just before that you are also officially a diplomat so this is
really really great to welcome you tonight thank you so much for joining Anett please
everyone I would like a big round of applause for Anett Numa from Tallinn Estonia please
so I really haven’t heard any of claps for some time I used to do that every single day
and when I have been talking about my job to my friends it’s like like how can you find something better where I can hear applauses every single day and this was used to be my life before the Covid crisis right now I only see the faces over already seen here but but first of all

[Anett Numa] Thanks for having me over here today I really really appreciated this invitation from your side and I’m always happy to hear what Estonia has been doing here and as we agreed with as well that it’s not going to be just something boring at the end of your day
you have to see the slides and the numbers and everything but let’s just make it more fun
and let me just like make it a little bit more clear for you how did this very tiny
states in northern side of the world has been able to go so crazy with digitalizing
absolutely everything and so when steph also said now that I’m gonna be
the one choosing who is gonna get the wine model then definitely this person is have to
be as active as possible today so I’m gonna keep my eyes on you and see how many questions
actually maybe we can ask you just to write where you are right now in the chat so we kind of get to know you and where you are based and where you’re calling from thank you so much Anett
to join us so my first question basically is just could you maybe introduce yourself
and I would like to know how come you got to that position of representing the e-state of Estonia yeah so that’s a very long story obviously i would just try to make that a little bit shorter.

So when I got the idea like the first place where I got the idea about like starting
to work in this sector was when I used to study in France some time ago I did part of my master’s in Lyon there in university and I was sitting in a class and I had one of my classmates who made a presentation about e-democracy and he was from holland but he talked about Estonia and I was sitting quietly in a class and just hearing someone else to talk about my country and the solutions that we are offering to people and I was thinking there
why I shouldn’t be in this position talking about my own country because I was like a realization for me. I didn’t understand how cool the society was where I lived before I returned back to Estonia after my studies and I was looking for the job offers in this Estonia briefing center for a very long time to be exact for two years I had the eyes on every kind of job advertisement there and I was just hoping that i will I would get the position there I gotta say that that this was like a lot from the first sight in a way when I finally got an in like interview there and I felt that this is the right position for me and luckily they felt the same way so right now what is my job is to consult different policy makers and and business leaders in order to help them to proceed a little bit faster their digital transformation
and as Estonia has had an experience for doing that for more than 20 years
so obviously we have got so many lessons and and so many experiences what to do and what not to do.

So so what we try to do today is that to make everyone aware what kind of things they should be
trying trying to avoid and what kind of things they should follow in a way and I gotta be
honest with you that there are no blue mondays for me still after two and a half years almost
because seriously it’s one of the most interesting jobs you can ever think of because what we do is that we try to map it in a way where one country is currently with their solutions and and and what’s missing how can we support him and and then we welcome the meter here or right now over the videos and try to really really like consult and help them with this entire
process because things are great here but now it’s time to help whilst others so that was just very short how did I get my job but seriously you just have to dream about something very very
like a lot and and and then things will start to happen

This is so great so we are actually
super lucky to to to to have you with us on the show because usually you talk to
you talk to politicians you go to yeah to meet presidents and this is so great to have you
as part of it apero so thank you so much maybe to give you to give us a bit of context can we ask you so I’ve read that this whole project of e-government started actually 20 years ago
in Estonia which sounds crazy because it feels to me we are just studying right now in Switzerland so maybe could you give us a bit of context and kind of like what was the timeline and
the big milestones of these last 20 years even even actually more the first document was
drafted to the parliament in a year when I was born so that was 27 years ago by the day and
and so in 1994, they attracted the first document to the parliament saying that okay now it’s time
to start digitalizing our estate in a way and the need for that actually came because
we had a very rough historical background if you guys know about Estonian historical background
we were under sewer tune in a good patient for way too long time and and and it was a very tough time
for us obviously and then in the year 1991 we finally regained the defendants very peacefully
and still like if you’re thinking about a state that has been under the control of another
country it’s a very difficult time for her country to start everything from a scratch so we were
lacking of money we didn’t have trust between the government agencies and the citizens and then
of course also there was not much transparency and the corruption level was very very high
and our new government was just like okay we need to do something we need to do something
completely different because if we’re gonna do things in the same way as rest of the people do
we’re gonna just fail and and fail like a big time and so they said because luckily some
of them had some kind of technology background already and and they were very young by the way
our former prime minister so who was who’s prime minister during that time
he was in his 30s a very young guy and and and these younger generations like they were a little
bit more I would say open to you to try things out and not and maybe take a little more risky
decisions in a way and and and they did so and they just said okay we don’t have any guarantee
that this is going to work but let’s try it let’s see how this would be start working so as I said
1994 the first document to the parliament and then step by step in the year 2002 so 19 years ago
we established the electronically identity cards already which is compulsory document
here in Estonia today and so since then everyone needed to have this electronical
way of identifying themselves when they use online services and then again it has
never happened overnight obviously this is what i want everyone to understand it’s been a process
that you work so so hard to make solutions working online but maybe like is there
anyone who wants to guess which was the first service that we offered online for our citizens
which service was the first one that everyone could start using by the public I don’t know
like taxis exactly yes yes so taxes were these were this was the first solution that we started
offering by the end of 1999 since the year of 2000. and since then people have been
declaring their taxes online we just got the latest numbers that this year we had
tax declaration opened since february and and right now 98.7 I guess it was the final number
of our people have been declaring the taxes by using the online solutions 98
so it’s a very huge number and it could be that everyone are included for using services online
actually I’ve read that so I think the first e-id card was issued was in 2002 right
yeah and what i’ve read is that you Finland was already doing it but in Finland it wasn’t
mandatory to do to actually take a knee id and you decided to go like it’s gonna be mandatory
what was the gamble and how did the population react to that because
to to my understanding when you force people to do something they they will go the other way around
so let me start with the first side why we made it compulsory and then how people reacted so so
first of all I mean we have to be thankful for our finnish friends because we got this idea from
them obviously and they had this car before with it I mean finland as I said as a very liberal
country decided to do this in a way that we’re not going to make this compulsory. People have a choice
whether they want to have a card or no they can also just stick on a passport and that
that’s enough but think about this first for example for example if you would be in a position
of being a government member or just managing the entire state budget if you allow your citizens to
use either the passport or identity card then you still have to keep your services working
online and all some paper at the same time so basically you have to keep up
two different systems all the time which is a double ghost and tons of just confusion
and when we were just checking for the numbers like how many people actually
applied for the cards and and wanted to get the cards so it was only very like small
and and and today I was just checking that only around 40 percent the finnish population had the
card and in Estonia the number is 98. wow so that’s the difference but regarding how people
reacted to that I always say to the policy makers it’s your responsibility how do you communicate
these things to your people because the thing is if you come and say okay 40 years everyone
need to get the card you will get the card and you will get the card or whatever they say there
it’s not going to work people are going to be very mad and there’s going to be protesters on the
streets but if you’re going to say by using this card you’re going to save this amount of time you
can sign documents online you can use services online these are going to be your advantages if
you communicate the advantages to people and also provide them information how is the background
the infrastructure and your security coverage and then there is a great question from
from Cyril in the chat maybe do you want to ask sure hello Anett thank you for the talk my
question was following what were at that time the highest I mean the strongest reactions against the
card and what were the reasons yeah so first of all I want you to jump back to the year of 2002.
how many likes that was a very long time ago i just started my first first-class it was like very
young so if you think about back in that time i didn’t even I don’t even remember if I had like
a phone like a mobile phone or a computer at home back at that time it was a completely different
time so if we would start with this card today I’m pretty sure people there would be much more
people who would say oh well I know enough about this and I hear from the media and then there’s
tons of like people’s like spreading misinformation and disinformation about the cards
it wasn’t back in that time seriously that was a different time when people didn’t have these
questions because they were not just aware of these things and obviously it was again in our
hands to introduce this car to people and saying how does it work what’s the background how is
your privacy regulated there but when we talk about reactions I really don’t know if there
had been some kind of reactions from the citizens side but I know that there was some just political
conversations there and some of the conflicts that there were some political parties who were
against that and then the other ones were supporting so it’s obviously on a political level
there is always discussions when whenever you want to do something but from the cities inside
again that was fine but what we did which I find very cool was that we also went to different like
marketplaces so you have festivals I guess you’re also in Switzerland have some monthly festivals or
October that is a super cool event right I guess you also celebrate that in
Switzerland as in Germany so obviously if you go to that kind of events there’s
tons of people and it’s a fun event you know that the government representatives not like
specifically the ministers but people who work in public sector they went to these festivals
with a little tent there where they were introducing the id cards and just stopping people
and like have you got already your card how do you start using this how have you enjoyed this process
asking feedback for the people from your citizens is also important so that you would
show them that their opinion matters and if you ask this opinion and at the same time you
talk to them and you come on the same level so you’re not doing these things on in a military
level but you come to the same festivals that they go to and you are there you’re like I work in the
ministry of economics and communication here are the cards have you used them before let me let
me go and help you let me introduce how does it work it’s always how do you communicate things
so so that’s also equal in this reaction level because I find to think that
whatever problems these are questions people have in their heads education is able to solve
absolutely everything and it’s up to you in our hands this is great this is great the
you know like I’m just thinking is it that that you that you were so good at communication in
general that it worked or is it also that you are a small a little country and basically you
can be closer to your population like do you think this will work this strategy with a bigger country
i mean the message is the same you also have media platforms as we did back at that time um
the solutions are the same I mean it doesn’t matter how many people are back there like like
using this and what our or especially when i have been asking the same question from our riced
companies and asking do you think that it would be much more difficult to implement these
solutions in a bigger state and they usually start laughing and they’re just like where I really wish
as a company leader ceo that my solution would be used by 40 million people than just 1.3 million
people so the solution is still just one you just might need more developers and people who
are like actually working in the fields and then helping and helping to setting it up but but
but still there is also one president one prime minister in your country I mean the way they
communicate and I also feel that it’s respond like responsibility of very high level leaders to
communicate these things to people because they are like influencers in a way and
and today we have an amazing chance to also use some some some good influencers again that that
even younger generation or maybe other generation are listening to and communicating these
messages to people but of course you always have to be 100 transparent and honest because if you
lie about something it’s never gonna work and and we can later and also talk about what happened
near 2017 when we had the id card crisis here and and that was also one of very quick lessons
that we managed to communicate this threat that we had to people and ended up completely fine yeah
because I think at this point it’s important to to maybe explain that’s at the center of this
e-government there is the eid project by the way this was a project also in Switzerland it got
rejected a few weeks ago by the swiss population there was a popular vote and the swiss population
didn’t accept e-id I don’t think it’s because population is is opposed to it it’s more they
there was a an issue with the trust like like yeah like can we trust our government that they
have the capability of keeping our id safe and and all of this so how did you deal with that
and maybe if you can give us an overview of how yeah how this eid works yeah so so today 99 of
our services are fully functioning online right I mean all the eyes are an asset amendment
everyone are just looking if the security has been provided and if you don’t like violate the
privacy so security data protection is number one element there and where our focus currently is
but the most special thing about our system which i very much recommend other countries to follow
is that we have such wonderful thing called data tracker so I can log into my state portal
with my identity card and there is a data tracker where I can I can track which government agency at
what time of the day which kind of information have been looking up after me every time that
government agencies are exchanging my information or checking this even the private sector
institutions for example if my bank is checking for like I’m applying for a loan and I gave them
a permission to check above my police background or if I have any court cases or any other loans
if they do check my background I will get to know about this because we have everything time stamped
and encrypted and this gives me a feeling that i have the power over my information in my hands not
the other way around and this matters because if people understand that they are controlling
their information and who is able to see this information they feel much more secure because
if I’m especially comparing one case here that I would like to bring it out as an example
we also have all of our medical records online since 2007 something like this for a very long
time so I remember when I was a small kid and i went to see my family doctor and and she had
the books about like papers of the probations that were supposed to visit there already on a
table repaired in the morning I was one of the first ones in the morning and she left the room
because she needed to do some analyzes I don’t know she said I’m going to be back in 10 minutes
I had 10 minutes I mean that I could have used this time or just checking it like someone else’s
medical records because this information wasn’t paper and there would never have been any traces
that I have been checking this information yeah they this information is online and every single
time a doctor is let’s say they are stupid enough to leave their computer opened and I would just
go there type in a personal goat of my friend and see their medical records yeah what will happen is
that this information would go all the way to my friend’s data tracker and they could see that this
doctor who is who might not be like their tape doctor they would see that they were checking
their information and now what they’re going to do is that they’re going to report about this
and then the investigation will start and what will happen is that they would start investigating
and maybe see some of the cameras that i was in a room I was checking the information
and I would be punished or the doctor would be punished because she left the computer opened
do you trust to have your information on paper more than having this online when you have the
control seeing who is accessing your information that’s where we should start with so all of this
it works it’s based on the blockchain or how do you record all all of these transactions
transactions so so not entire system is unlike blockchain we do use blockchain in there in
around like I think it’s around like 10 top 12 different like registers that
are on psi blockchain and the medical records are fully on blockchain by the way
but but the data tracker works mostly because we have these extra systems so the data
exchange platform that encrypts and timestamps every single move that we do there but of
course when we talk about the blockchain and the KSI blockchain that we use in medical records
why this is so necessary there is because when one doctor I mean let’s say if you go and
see a doctor and say there was something wrong with you you have I don’t know a headache they
have to do usually around four different analysis maybe some of the tests then you go to whatever um
and one doctor I mean there is just one case of you there and then doctors are adding information
the psi blockchain makes sure that the next doctor who is adding information to your case is not able
to edit or delete any information that has been submitted by the other doctor so that everything
will be again tractable in a way and we put the hashes in every single move that we do and
we’re not like even moving the information but the hashes themselves but of course we’re not storing
any information or saving any information on blockchains because that would be against
your GDPR regulations yeah so so everything you do is GDPR compliance you really have to
to be yeah 100 we are the eu country and and GDPR regulation is our law as well great there is
there is a question from Frederic do you want to ask yeah sure hi Anett hi everyone hi I was
wondering with regards to the tracking concept you just talked about you know are you the only one
that has access to this is tracing or you can also give it to other people for other purposes
not that I’m aware of I mean obviously if there’s an investigation then you can you can
give this permission to someone else to see what’s in your in your logbook system but you are
still the owner there are exceptions for people for example who are sick and or very old
so that I can become also representative for some of my family members for example
so so if my grandmother is not able to use their systems anymore then I can
become a representative of her and and i can control her information there too
but having the overview of the data factor yeah I mean we we we don’t need to but of
course investigations police can maybe check that as well when we give a permission
but but of course as well like accessing our information is only possible for
for these institutions who are I would say who are proved to do so in a way so for example
if I’m applying for the loan from the bank then the bank obviously can’t just go randomly and
check my medicare records and make any requests to like to you to basically portal and ask for my
headaches because this is none of their business so every time the different registries want to
exchange my information they need to have mutual agreements which are signed and again so they
just ask information from one point to another but everything is is based on a one single policy
so we as a citizen I only submit information once at a time just to bring it out one of the
examples also I mean it’s clear for me but might be a mess for you so for example my home address
in Estonia is only stored in one single registry and this is population registry do you guys know
how many registries store your home address in Switzerland or whatever country you’re right now
joining us I guess I don’t know like 50 I mean yeah just think about like if you have moved
to a new place yeah how many different registries do you need to inform about your new home address
yeah it’s crazy because it’s all from it’s super it’s really yeah totally spread apart and
totally yeah I’m losing the world but like each state or each city has a different yeah
registry which is crazy and it’s annoying right for you as citizens to think about this to waste
your time like okay I moved I need to inform this institution there’s the other one and
then so on waste your time completely we only inform population registry and if anyone else then
wants to know where I live I know police wants to come over not on my door maybe someone
wants to send me something from whatever like you I don’t know what might be the reasons um
then they request this information from population registry not to me and why
we do that in a way first of all it’s much more secure if information is decentralized not like
just centrally stored in one single place together and and then of course also to make
the life of citizens much easier so that they wouldn’t have to remember these things
by themselves yeah actually I read you know because I prepared that talk a little bit
I read that the average Estonian citizen saves what five days per year
just by signing documents online so this is only with one solution oh wow so so did you quantify
the whole time saving of the whole government we really tried but we currently are trying to
find a university that would do this kind of research because we really don’t have time for
that because you have had things working online for 20 years how can you compare this to something
like how much time do I save but with just signing documents online it’s five days per every single
citizen and raise the hands people who wouldn’t like to have extra week of vacation i
would say no for extra week of vacation because i mean you can save your time so and by the
cost part for the government this is around two percent of GDP every year that we spare,
we say you buy by using the online signatures and by the way this money is equal to the money
that we spend on defense and security to be like a member of nato I mean which one is more important
okay so okay when you present it that way why do you think so many countries including Switzerland
that are so so slow or so reluctant to to go all online what are the reasons so I have had this
conversation especially with countries where life is pretty great I would I would bring out
some of the most like best places to live as just the light quality I mean it’s Switzerland it’s
canada it might be france there on the list i mean there are many many countries there where
the life is absolutely fantastic right I mean if you are in a good position usually I mean
things are working fine for you do you feel a need of having a huge change in the system because what
i have seen for example countries like Germany when we have politicians from Germany visiting
they usually say well I mean things are working we have been doing these things like this and
for years why should we change yeah and I’m like because your citizens are like craving
for this chains because they’re tired of doing things on paper I mean just a comparison here
I know that in Germany setting up a new business would take around five weeks time
and you need to visit at least six different institutions to get the permission I mean all
registration houses and so on in Estonia we register a new business with just half an
hour without having to leave our homes and and and Estonia currently has the highest level
of unicorns per capita in the european union i mean we already have a seven unicorns so companies
whose revenue is more than one billion euros I mean why is that because where business is
easy business will grow and if you have built an infrastructure that lets people to focus on their
ideas but not on going to different institutions doing all the registration process and maybe after
five weeks they’re already tired because that was an exhausting process so let them to be I don’t
know let them to travel somewhere and get inspired there and let them open their company immediately
I guess this is the key here yeah because it’s it’s something I don’t know if it’s very
known but I think Skype was invented in Estonia right or Transferwise is from Estonia as well
and yeah like also my question is like it’s because you had that ecosystem of startups and
tech companies that you have been able to do it or it’s because the government
went really fully online that fast that you managed to create that context I would say um
there are so many aspects there I can’t say that there is one like one single answer here but
I guess it’s a combo of different things obviously but definitely there has
been a very huge collaboration between the private sector and public sector since very early days and
and I guess the government members shouldn’t be there in their positions and just thinking
hmm what we would do next but what they should be doing is that they would need to have private
sector company leaders being sitting on exact same table with them and these are the people that
they should be asking what are the next steps we should be taking because I mean I work for the
government and my salary is made by the taxpayers in Estonia I mean they have employed me in a way
and and and I need them to have a good life and and things need to be working nice in private
sector so that I could be working here so I work for people not the other way around and
and this is the thing that it’s in my opinion elementary we should understand about that first
and then work fully together with private sector companies do you understand what they have
to offer to us and what are their needs and and so that we can do this all together because
i mean there is there is no different sectors in my opinion but it’s it’s a one society that needs
work hands and hands this is super interesting actually and I think that was one of the key issue
with the vote in Switzerland because like the population didn’t accept that idea of eid at least
as of today because the government said basically it will be managed by private companies
and people felt really bad about you know that the government will give our data personal data
to private companies like could be banks or insurance companies so yeah what is the right
mix like should the government own all of these and create all the all the technology or should
we should they distribute you know some parts but not not all of it like what is your take on that
I really don’t understand why people had to be against that because unless tony everything is
managed by private companies I mean I seriously i have met tons of different government members
across the world and i’ve never met a government who would be able to do these things by themselves
yeah honestly I mean we don’t have people working in public sector who would be having
like this technology background and who would be developers themselves we need to buy these
solutions from private sector and and just one thing needs to be clear here a state needs to be
smart enough to sign agreements with the private sector company so that they are not the owners of
anyone’s private like private information they’re just there to store this information and we even
have regulations that they can’t even see this information but they are just storing them and and
and luckily we have all like I mean usually they don’t even store our information but under our
names but we all have personal goats so just a number that you have been given already when
you were born and the number is just nothing also I don’t know a random number that they would
just give it to you which many many different especially if they’re very religious are against
but the numbers are or something that belongs to me because it has my gender it
has my birth date it has a city where I was born and then the last number is calculated between
the other ones because obviously I wasn’t the only lady born in the state on this day in the city so
so that’s and then it’s just like it’s just like a number and it’s easier than to first of all to
exchange information and secondly also to store this so that you wouldn’t be violating anyone’s
privacy there so so definitely if you’re interested in in this process in Switzerland
I’m not aware how what kind of agreements or or just ideas that they have by the story but just
make sure that you’re not against something that is actually safe seriously you need to understand
and private sector is not a bad thing and and and one more thing then I understood that someone
has a question there are two people with questions our former president mr Hendrik he liked to say
in many conferences that we shouldn’t be afraid of a big brother but we should be afraid of a
small sister big brother as we all know should be someone who is looking going after our information
from the public sector and controlling right there is no such person existing here but we should be
afraid of a small sister can anyone guess who is a small sister and we should be so much afraid of
who has an idea I have no idea like is it a is it another country that is an enemy country
think about this a small sister that we should be afraid of when it comes to data and your
private information are you having any kind of concerns in your head if you post something
to facebook on your social media platforms i mean facebook google twitter linkedin all these
kind of platforms are the small sister because are you 100 sure that they’re not selling your
information to someone else I mean this is what they do facebook does that all the time they sell
your private information to you I don’t know to other private companies and they are
getting money from that is our government getting any money that they’re storing our information
no because they’re not checking that and if they would do that
i would be informed are you ever getting any notifications when someone from who works
for facebook or google will check your private information and and and sells this to someone else
and this is a small sister that you should be afraid of great so
we have I think two questions so one from Federico and one from Cyril so first Federico
hello Anett and hello everyone thank you for this webinar I’m really enjoying it my question
Anett is is the following I have read in a couple of places that like the key issue the uniqueness
of the Estonian involvement and digitalization has to do that from the very beginning what you try to
achieve was to radically change the bureaucratic system not to take what existed let’s say
you know there are countries that have 70 taxes okay let’s have 70 taxes being paid online
we have you know 200 bureaucratic procedures let’s have two 200 procedures being done online but to
dramatically change that radically change simplify do you agree with this how do you
see it thank you absolutely that that’s a very good point here and and having a zero bureaucracy
was this the name of the strategy I would say the secret name of the strategy because
bureaucratic processes I mean they’re annoying and they waste money and time and everything
from public sector rights and they make people angry so so definitely we did these
things very drastically by changing the entire system and trying to find ways to take this
radical level down the zero and especially today as hopefully soon we have time to also
talk about the future because we have some some wonderful future plans where we are planning to
make everything working proactively so that honestly there would be zero bureaucracy so
that you as a citizen wouldn’t even have to do anything but the services the benefits to
I don’t know like whatever like services that you can even think of
would be offered for you proactively so that you wouldn’t have to reach out to government
agencies and asking for them and this is something that is is pretty special
amazing so we have a question from Cyril who really wants to win the bottle of wine
we have some but thanks it’s more about the topics it’s it’s really interesting thank you so much for
for putting that together it’s it’s in the same direction as as the question before I just have
the impression that what you did and what we feel is to do a bit like Steph is putting the customer
in the center what do customers need and I have the impression that
our government during the last decades or even 20 years haven’t done anything like that but
also you said because people they don’t see the value when you don’t see the value you don’t see
a reason to change and it’s only when you say out loud well you’re gonna save five days per year in
a time queueing for changing your papers you’re going to save so much money for
your government why why don’t we see those numbers more often do you think because
i’ve read a lot about about digital transformation but that’s the first
time i’ve heard those shocking numbers and I want to know why
well that’s a good question now and honestly we’ve been trying to to promote these numbers and and
to I would say to market them a little bit more so that everyone would understand about that but
but that’s one of the reasons why the Estonia briefing center was was built in a way because
in in 2019 where the borders were still opened we hosted more than 11 000 people physically in
Estonia at the Estonia briefing center and and that was a place where you could make people to
you I would say to crave for digitalization and these solutions because what we do at the briefing
center rooms is that we actually show people how these things work and and talk about the numbers
and and and so then they go home and then they gonna start really really craving for for these
things I mean you can’t crave for the things that you’re not aware of right and this is what I see
especially and then what’s your point as well you have to see life in a better side and to be
actually craving for that if you live in a small village and you have never seen how is life in
paris then you can never dream about like being in paris but but if you have been there and
and then you can you can start off wishing things to be in the same way so so definitely I guess
we should do a little bit more work even on also promoting the advantages and
and the numbers and everything so that people would understand about this but
but but I really wish that they could be also I’m a very big fan of the european union
but I guess that could there should be also a little bit stronger approach from the eu side
regarding these numbers and and pushing people to you to start taking the actual steps because
i mean the pandemic time was was a clear example to us that it is already too late we should have
done these things over the years and years and especially when it comes to medical records which
are not online in in most of the countries so so yeah I guess that’s the key there
so so about that sorry sorry just yeah just to conclude so I think citizen tend to
forgive more things to the government than they do to private companies if I’m not happy with
the phone if I’m not happy with my car I’m gonna I’m gonna ask for more and I’m gonna change it
and I think what happens with with everything we have to deal with the government we can’t
change I can’t say oh I’m going to go to Estonia it seems to be to work way better I can’t I can
do that and if we could I think government will be playing the same competition as private company to
put customers in the center and to be okay what can we do to serve them better but since there
is no competition and this is what we said in the chat before it’s like well it has been like that
for the last 20 years what should we change and just it’s it enraged me so that was it sorry for
you that I also I just wanted to say Estonia also have this fantastic thing called the e-residential
card so that everyone even like you in Switzerland or paris or we have people from Norway joining um
so that you can be there but you can become an Estonian here is the decade and you can start your
business in Estonia without actually physically being in Estonia or never coming to Estonia and
then we’ve had around I guess from Germany right now we have right I guess it
was around seven thousand six seven thousand people who in in the past five years already
have have gotten the card that was a wake-up call for Germany and and we received so many
again policymakers coming to Estonia because they were like hmm our people are starting to register
in their business in Estonia there has to be something there and and that was a point where
they realized okay we’re gonna stop using people because they’re gonna go somewhere and register
their business in an environment that is it’s more flexible and and that’s the key there I mean if
people are starting to saying okay you’re not changing anything internally in our country I’m
done with this I’m gonna go somewhere else where things are working fine but what you can do as
i said that you can’t do anything you can do you can become a politician and then make the changes
run your campaign of of making Switzerland fully digital states and then I can promise
to you that I will ask my friends in Switzerland to vote for you great so so I don’t think we
are yeah we are we’re going into politics right now but the yes so question about
about government by itself like you said it’s not the government who should build these solutions
it’s way too technical and they are politicians but like what is the percentage of politicians
in Estonia who are tech savvy and who have a role like yours you know into digital very hard to
bring out some of the numbers what I what I do know is that it becomes more and more popular to
know about these things because we we like to collect the data in order to make smarter
decisions and and that’s why you need to be tech savvy to heroes so so we have tons of people
who work in different ministries almost in every of our ministry we have the innovation department
where obviously far people are very tech savvy even in our prime minister office there is
there is a different department who is responsible for for the digitalization aspects so
i would say more and more and and what I have also seen that some of our former ministers
when they have finished their jobs they have moved all the way to the private sector and in ict parts
which is super cool as well in in my opinion that they they finish their time being a politician or minister and then they’re going to move on onto the private sector and will start working for it sector because why not and and so I see this becoming more popular do you think it’s important to be elected at a prominent position in Estonia the no president or prime minister to understand digital or it’s still the case no other way around so I mean to be working on a field is in my opinion where everyone should start I I’m not a big supporter of young people going all the way to politics and and just staying there but but they have to see the field first
and then do you understand like about like what kind of decisions they should be making because
they can see then that what is working what’s not working but that’s a different story here
great so there is a tough competition about the bottle of wine from Frederic he has a question
yeah no I just wanted to go back to serious topic and ask you know about the development of
the e-id concept you know do you feel like that the tech choice that you made to support the product
influenced a lot like the functionalities and the interactions possible at the end or was
it the other way around where you really said you know we want those features we want those
way of interacting to to be possible and then we will find the tech or create the tech for it
the thing is that the id card has changed also in time and and quite a lot because obviously i
guess the most difficult thing about like just developing digital services in public sector
is that you have to keep up with the chains of technology and hackers are getting smarter um
i mean systems are getting more advanced and then obviously it’s up to you also to keep up with
this so definitely what we did in a right way i was the data exchange platform first of all
like how do we exchange information and then and the decision that the card should be used
both by the private sector and also by the by the public sector there was some kind of
just link infrastructure and the basis and the framework that we did by the id card that was that
was very very okay and fine and good but of course again the technical background has been
changing in time drastically and will continue to do so because as I said in 2017 we had some
kind of crisis with this because there was there was someone like a researcher or something
who who discovered a threat in a system and and they addressed this to the the government and
and they investigate investigated this and and it turned out to be the actual threat what we did
was the prime minister was talking on tv and said everyone who had been issued the car between this
time please do you go use your cards online and just update this entire like security system there
again I mean you have to be open for the changes in assistance you I think actually
i read it was the very first time a whole country got attacked right 2007 was the attack 2017
was just the the id card crisis but 2007 we we had some internal crisis here as we’re
live so I’m not going to go in details with who at that guest Estonia but I mean we can all guess
that’s a little sister and and and that was a wonderful lesson by the way to us because that
was like not brandon or saying like okay there is a threat and then we need to address this um
and of course we got some lessons luckily we didn’t lose any information only some of the
private sector like banks were attacked and and then the media platform were taken down but
none of the government inflation was it was leaked there’s like I don’t know it’s just attacked
in a way because of the exotic system and everything was decentralized but but of course we
since then we started focusing much more on on the security aspects and and a year after nato
brought it cyber security headquarter ccde to Estonia italian do you ever come to visit there
the headquarters is right over here if anyone is interested in working in cyber fields come all the
way here working and work in Tallinn with nato experts and you can live in this beautiful
city there is actually a fascinating con concept it’s data embassy can you talk a bit about that
so I guess everyone also in your everyday life you sometimes still like to have backup plans when
you’re taking some risks or doing something new then you’re still thinking about what if things
gonna go wrong or what if something very bad is happening having a backup plan is always a great
thing and and helps us to sleep more peacefully Estonian backup plan is called data embassy
and our data embassy is based in luxembourg today and what is the data in this there is that we have
backed up 10 of our registries and institutions to use servers in luxembourg so there is a backup
store in luxembourg servers and and and lively which is put information there so if something
would happen here we could get this information back from from the luxembourg server so there is a
backup store and and and why this is necessary because we can never be served that there is no
like I don’t know a huge storm I mean in Estonia there are usually no stores but think
about a country that would be caribbean and there is are always storms and and and if you
have even your server places then you should have a backup store somewhere else too any guesses
why Estonia chose luxembourg as a first place for our state embassy why luxembourg is special that
we were like okay because because not Switzerland i don’t know well there are many reasons for that
obviously I mean first of all they had a very great infrastructure secondly also they
they had some competence in this sector and and then one important thing in my opinion is that um
luxembourg is also a politically very independent country so I don’t know any country who would be
in patrons with luxembourg I mean yeah we are pretty independent in other ways and so obviously
we can’t choose countries who are in fights with with other countries all the time because we can’t
trust that there but but the server there it’s actually based on the vienna convention so
like having a like the physical embassy the same regulations apply but there are no people working
there or just like like an embassy but but this server room where our stuff is stored there and
no one by the way can access this room if you’re not Estonian if there is even a fire
even on in a case of a fire no one from from luxembourg can can entrance the room without um
Estonian being there that’s crazy so you need extended firemen to come to extinguish the fire
yeah which takes quite a lot of time I guess so yeah so so maybe to wrap up and maybe if you
guys have questions don’t hesitate to add them in the chat we still have a couple of minutes um
so my last question really is about what’s the future for for the e-government of Estonia
how much better can you make it and yeah what are your plans
the future looks very bright in my opinion we have some great plans so we’re working on having
a very much proactive government so as I said before we want we want to be the ones that are
approaching to people and saying okay you can get the benefits you can get this service like
whatever so we would like to remind them things beforehand that they would even think about these
things and and and one of the examples just to bring it out what the proactive government means
when a baby has been born here in Estonia then the doctor is going to register a baby’s birth
parents will officially become parents and then they can register a as baby’s name online without
having to go anywhere and then automatically proactively the government system it can be also
in the middle of the night will contact you by the email which is again automated and we’ll let you
know that congratulations on your newborn baby you are now able to get also your family benefits
so we will kindly ask you to choose now if if a mother is going to stay home for the entire time
or if you want to divide this so if you want one year for for the mom to stay at home
and then like half a year the dad will stay at home and and and then you choose these things and
then you confirm your bank account and then you will get the money I mean this is how we want to
like reach out to people so that they could they could be focusing on the baby and
and and just like their their family stuff not on on asking us something and then of course also
ai technology will be something very essential because we have been replacing just in last
year already 50 public services by ai technology this is linked to justice sector mobility sector security sector in in so many different ones of course also more and more in healthcare sector
so so ai technology proactive services and of course also cross-border data exchange and so that
we already exchanged information on a cross-border level with some of the countries that are
on the same level that we are today so I really really do hope that
all of these plans are going to work out then and our citizens will get the best customer experience that they can even dream about their way great i think that was the the the world of the end

thank you so much Anett for being with us tonight we are super honored
to have welcome you so everyone I would like a big round of applause for Anett Numa please
thank you so much that was really really great by the way so Frederic and Cyril
were battling fiercely to win that bottle of wine who do you think should deserve to get the wine it’s so difficult to make that decision because I was I was just hiding in my head
these two people here let me do this in a way because it’s very hard to use
for my side just because you asked almost the same question like almost the same amount of questions maybe you can just tell me which city you are at the moment and I’m
gonna choose the city that i liked more I mean Lausanne…
no but I think you should actually read the chat because one of them said it’s Frederic, he said
he doesn’t really drink wine so I think you should give it a series okay so that goes all the way

okay cheers thank you so much Anett for being with us tonight and thank you
everyone for attending live this was “Itoday Apero” number five, and have a great evening
see you thank you so much thank you very much bye everyone!


Itoday Apéro #4 - Ed Orozco

Ed Orozco

Product Design Consultant

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Leading Future-Ready Asynchronous Teams

Remote work opens a world of possibilities for companies of all sizes. It allows people to choose the working environment where they feel happiest and most productive.

Fewer distractions, less commuting, and considerable savings in office spaces are some of its many advantages.In the context of the Covid crisis, remote work is today more relevant than ever before. And highly collaborative disciplines such as design can benefit a lot from improving their remote processes.

Ed Orozco

Ed is a product design consultant passionate about helping remote design teams be more effective through asynchronous collaboration.

He has worked with multiple distributed teams, building products for companies like IBM, the WWF, and Adobe.

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Itoday Apéro #3 - Rémi Rivas

Rémi Rivas

Innovation Strategist & Partner at Ignited Kingdom

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Good Design Spreads Itself

In a world where it has never been easier to spread new ideas, gaining the attention and trust of people just gets harder every day. To overcome this challenge, Rémi Rivas will talk with us about how Design is expected to play an ever more important role in the success of innovations, and how the most ingenious products generate their own marketers.

Rémi Rivas

Rémi is a consulting designer. He helps companies to design, product and market new products and services.

His job is to allow innovators build value creation systems that are efficient, profitable and remarkable, both for their organizations and for their clients.

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Itoday Apéro #2 - Adi Mazor Kario

Adi Mazor Kario

Product Innovation & Value Creation Expert, Founder, InvincibleInnovation.com

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Innovating Through Chaos - why NOW is the best time to create innovative products?

Adi Mazor Kario

Known for her ability to take creative business ideas and turn them into massive revenue, she leverages her proven strategies to create leading-edge business growth for the world’s most forward-thinking business leaders. She has worked with the likes of IBM, Intel, Google, and Waze — along with literally hundreds of startups in Israel, the “Startup Nation,” and played a crucial role in the Google Accelerator for 7 years.

Her mission is to show ANY business (including yours!) how to innovate their way out of ANY challenge and create unbeatable products — ESPECIALLY during uncertain times.

In fact, the biggest lesson Adi has learned in her time as a design and innovation strategist for today’s fastest-growing companies, is that change is your BEST opportunity for growth. And she would love to show you how.
www.Invincibleinnovation.com

Links

STEPH CRUCHON

Hey everyone good evening I’m Steph I’m gonna be your host for this Itoday
number two we are live from Lausanne switzerland and we have people from a bit
everywhere around the world so that’s really really exciting to have all of
you guys please everyone can you just say hi to the camera oh yeah really good
really good to see you and thank you so much we are the fourth of a fifth of
january and everyone is here so this is great um so maybe you’re wondering
about the title of “Itoday apero” why an apéro? An “apéro” in the swiss or
french speaking culture is just a great time to you know enjoy your time with
friends to have a glass of wine to drink and to eat a bit of cheese and you
just talk with friends casually about the world and that’s what we are trying
to do with these eye to the appearance also for this apéro i have a little
surprise maybe some of you guys know that my family are actually wine makers
in switzerland that’s why that’s what my name means “Cruchon” and so they make
wine and the windows are right there and what we’re gonna do maybe this could
become a little tradition if this works is the first button I’m gonna open it
in front of you guys and drink it in front of you and yeah that’s too bad but
you can go to your own fridge and get some drinks and it doesn’t need to be
alcohol it can be coke i don’t care just make make yourself comfortable so
first button I’m gonna open the second bottle of this wine I’m gonna send it
to our speaker of today in Tel Aviv Israel yeah are you excited good very very
excited the third battle because i have three of the same one will send to the
person in the audience who will have the best question for Adi today and it’s
going to be addy choosing who is going to get the wow how cool is that yeah
that’s so fun um about our amazing speaker of today so we really want to
highlight people who are trailblazers in innovation who have something to say
about innovation also who are you know part of Itoday community and Adi was
the perfect person for that and Adi has released a book called Innovating
Through Chaos that was released oh this is good yeah so so i was reAding on
the e-book and anyway e-book or in paper it’s an amazing book about that
really captures the the time of crisis you know of now it was written during
the covet crisis and yeah your talk is going to be about about this very
specific times for innovation i met Adi i met Adi it was google right in 2017
we actually did a workshop together and i met her and i was like wow yeah
she’s great she has such a great energy and Adi is not anyone she has helped
literally hundreds of startups and very large companies to innovate companies
some of them are like ibm intel google waze you name them and yeah you your
mission is to show that any business or any company can innovate even at times
of crisis and that’s the content of the book and yeah you can assure you show
us how anyway it’s very very exciting to welcome you thank you so much for
coming all the way from Tel Aviv israel please everyone give a big round of
applause for Adi Mazor Kario, please

ADI MAZOR KARIO

thank you steph you you should come with me anywhere and just present me and
then i’ll feel like very very good you’re doing your job so well as a
moderator thank you so much i wanna welcome you all and thank you for I’m
showing my screen tell me if you see it right you see it all yeah perfect
great so i want to thank you to so you joined me after all these hours in
front of the screen and still you’re doing it with me just to listen to me so
I’m so honored to be with you today and i would love to you to to take part so
if you feel that you have any questions just right in and steph could i i urge
you just to stop me in the middle and ask any question you know whoever i came
to to tel aviv or israel know that we’re very outspoken just stop me and i’d
be so delighted to answer so you don’t need to wait for a specific moment just
ask me while you’re doing it i think it’s going to be more like fun for us so
now we can start so what we’re going to talk about today is one of my favorite
subjects and and one and it’s about product innovation but it’s more than that
it’s product innovation right now in the covered crisis in in uncertainty when
everything is chaos all around you so the question that I’m trying to answer
here with you is why now is the best time to create new products and it sounds
a bit weird because everything is changing around us and everything is unknown
so let’s think about it together so what we’re in the middle of is what we
call the black swan so it’s something really rare that happens once in let’s
say 100 um years and it’s really extreme so it has this big impact on our
lives and when people think about it in retrospect they say okay we could have
known that it’s gonna happen so i want you to imagine that you’re in this
really big change but it’s not covered can you imagine something that happens
to you and it’s a big change maybe in your life maybe something that you
encountered it doesn’t have to be a huge bad um pandemic and think about the
situation that everything is changing it could be the birth of your first
child it you it’s like you going to first kindergarten from home or something
like that and the situation is changing really really all around you and as a
person it’s not that different if it happens to everyone and only for you if
you’re a kid for example and when this really really big changes happen you’re
going into a survival or growth mode so you need to decide if you’re gonna
grow from it or you’re just gonna hang out and just wait till it passes and
and you could do whatever you’ve done before and you’re waiting to go back
home from from kindergarten for example or you want to go back to your jeans
after you had a baby so you can just imagine how big chains could could affect
you as a person and after all companies and and innovation is all from people
and how their experience their lives and and their what they’re doing right
now so let’s start because i want to get to know you i usually talk to people
in front of them so i at least see them and and i would like to ask you for
the first call so so steph would you could you share the first ball so i’ll
see who is like in front of me yes tell me if it works yay it works so tell me
who is in front of me so who am i talking to so i’ll know more or less i would
love to see it h people are answering yeah they are they are ah so sorry i
thought that you were seeing because I’m seeing it and I’m really enjoying it
you’re the only one okay yeah so i need to end the pro but people are still
voting like if we are 2 000 but no perfect so that’s the end of the pro so
tell me what’s the result because we see everything yes yeah there you go wow
we have lots of people from strategy and innovation so welcome and from design
where i come from and I’m gonna tell you in a minute and others so that’s
really intriguing what are the others and maybe you could write me in the chat
so i’ll know so thank you for sharing that and now we know more or less who’s
like in front of us so before we start i want to introduce myself and and why
like why am i here how did i come here and what’s my story more or less and i
usually tell it like when people see me like full and not only in my square
here but i want you to um to be connected to what I’m doing and to really
understand where i come from so my story begins and when i when I’m about I’m
pregnant with my second child and I’m doing my master’s degree and i i was a a
product designer in cyber security company in tel aviv and i really wanted
this stable company but but i had this vision that i want to be the best
designer ever and change the world at least like steve jobs i would say but
this company did not really change much they were like small and they didn’t
want to invent too much and um i felt like I’m not having any impact i felt
like a bit disappointed with what i did and a bit like a failure because many
people who were in my face degree in design and they some of them started a
startup some of them got into very big companies and really succeeded and i
felt like I’m a bit disappointed but you know i was pregnant with second child
so i forgot about it and then when i was in maternity leave a really big
change happened an unexpected change and i got a call from the office i stayed
at home for a few months with my kid and um they told me come to meet the ceo
he was my manager and i i know it was not it sounded not good but you know i
didn’t have any option so i took the small baby and placed it in the baby
carrier and and went to the office and i don’t remember like anything from
this talk it was like a i think like 20 minutes talk but i only remember that
when he fired me my baby started to cry because my heart pounded so fast
against his chest when he said it so that’s the only thing i really remember
and it was such a shock for me that everything is like changing and so fast
and i thought to myself like i came this is my baby that’s his daught my
daughter his sister and i said okay i will i pay rent how will i do my studies
how how could i do both career and and take care of my kids and do my m.a so
it was like a total shock and i was really afraid at that moment and after a
few weeks i got a call from a friend and it was really surprising and he told
me you know i can i can give you a client i someone i know is looking for a ux
and product person so why wouldn’t you do it and this company that i started
to work with the first company i worked with is klausen they’re very
successful company for product management and they’re still successful till
today which means they were very very successful startups to work like 20
years after my first time and what i really found out there is something that
i did not know the pm called me the pm from clarizen and showed me the the
matrix so show me the numbers they’re they were gathering all the numbers and
it was not that that’s a common that day today everybody’s is co have data and
measuring everything but back then it was very uncommon and he showed me the
numbers it was the first time i saw how many people started working with the
application and never left it after i came to work with them and it was the
first time i really understand the power and the impact of innovation powered
by design and what I’m doing for this company and and at that moment i decided
that i will work with as many products as possible and as many clients and
really understand how to create value and these are like some of the things
that i’ve done i’ve done hundreds of them and for me i i always try to make it
better and better and i got obsessed with product innovation and what makes a
product perfect and through the years i i knew that many of my clients and
many of the startups they failed because they didn’t have these methods that
we have today in order to learn and to get better and i wanted to collect what
i understand from all the projects and and all the smart people that i work
with you know we have lots of startups in in in israel so i had lots of them
and i decided to get better and better so at one point um i was called from
google to be part of their accelerator and i went through the the design
sprint methodology certification in google and then i they they took me and i
flew all over the world just to pass on like design experience innovation
workshops and and talks all over the world and i learned from each location
how people do innovation differently and and then entrepreneurs all over the
world work a bit differently and i learned from there and for me the
experience of really knowing from creating and and failing and learning is the
most important part that i try to pass on to to my clients today so i work
with lots of big companies and small companies and i learned through this
process and through this all of these people that i worked worked with i
learned from it so i created this invincible innovation method which is a bit
like design thinking and link startup and design screen and it’s it’s a it’s a
bit of all of that that could help clients in general and that helped me to be
a mother to my four kids today so i could either be like a career woman and
still be with who i love and and support them as i want so now more or less
you know who i am what we’re going to do in about like 25 30 minutes from now
so we went through the intro now we’re gonna understand why now why now one in
in this middle of this really great crisis and and it’s not only health it’s
financial it’s it’s everything is changing why why should companies innovate
why is this the right time then we understand how to gain advantage in in a
changing market what could companies do and and then we’re going to have a q a
so and what steph mentioned in the book is like these two parts one is
theoretical and the second one is practical what we’re going to go through
right now so we’re going to start step do you have any questions or we can
start no no i think i think we can stop you can just do this you know just
tell me okay so let’s start so what we see here is the stock market since
1971. so you see the stock market is going up and up and the gray areas are
recession when we had a very very bad time financially for the world and you
can see all the companies that are on the gray areas are companies who were
born within the recession for example you see um ibm you see lego you see h m
cnn so these are really big big companies that were established during the
recession and the question is is it like so so strange or not and and does it
make sense so you could see that if you’re taking the 1930s the big big great
great depression in the us you see that many innovations were created in the
30s the air condition the color film the commercial tv which are very very
important for our daily lives today and the question is is it like by
coincidence so you could say okay so many big companies were established
within the recession it doesn’t mean anything there are many other companies
that we know like amazon google facebook tesla they’re all created not within
a recession so what does that mean so we want to see how many of the
successful in general the number of successful companies were established
during the recession and we see that 57 of of successful startups companies
they were startups in the beginning started then so it means that they have a
higher option or higher um opportunity to be successful when they started
within the recession when it’s very very hard and what we’re gonna understand
is is why so we can say okay we see it right now that many people you see on
linkedin they’re changing their um title to ceo for a new startup you see many
entrepreneurs changing right i guess that’s it yeah i i live in on linkedin
actually this is not my house I’m on linkedin so i see many people changing
their titles and why why is that why are so many people changing so you could
say okay there there are more entrepreneurs many of them left or was fired
from big organizations they have lots of information and knowledge and data
and experience they could use that in order to be entrepreneurs maybe we have
more access to really great talent so if you have a company right now many of
the people who are fired could work for you maybe in the past they all worked
for someone else and now they are available and there and more than that you
could say only the very specific um prone to succeed startup would get get
funded so it’s like we have less capital vcs invest but they invest really in
the best startups and maybe this is why it works you could say that maybe
these are the reasons but I’m asking is that all of of of the reasons is that
all of it and one of the answers we could find is in this ted talk i guess
some of you have seen it and i hope not all of you because I’m going to ask a
question about it so don’t spoil so what’s the single biggest reason for
startups to succeed and this talk is um was like i think five years ago and um
this person researched he had a like a vc or accelerator for startup and he
researched the startups they worked with and i think it was 200 of their
startups and 200 outside their organization and he wanted to understand so he
took these aspects there are five aspects of factors for succeeding the idea
the team timing business model and funding so he he wanted to know which one
of them will make you more prone to succeed so this is my second poll and
steph will will join me with that and i would love to hear what you think
which one of these is the most important factor for a success of a startup
perfect wait for it so I’m selecting the second one I’m launching and you
should sit yeah so i see some people are voting that’s good you will see on
the replay it’s kind of cool you see the bars moving like that that’s good
like like we have our fourth election in israel we’re so used to these bars
all the time i think it’s like 50 of what we’re doing for the last two years
oh yeah because you guys are totally digital we’re gonna talk about that later
yeah yeah we don’t have electronic voting here yeah okay 22 vote persons voted
so perfect and I’m sharing the results so people say timing and team so when i
first saw the the ted talk i said it’s all about the team that’s what i was
sure and and it’s not surprising that most people think about that because
when you’re talking to vcs and and i just recently talked to one of the
biggest entrepreneurs and and vc founder in israel and they all talk about the
team okay so team is really important but apparently the second um the second
place takes everything so it’s all about timing so 43 of the success is
related to timing so that you have a great idea but it’s too early or too late
you’re you’re not going to do anything with it if it’s too early nobody’s
going to use it if it’s too late they will use the competitors or the one who
got it there first so this what happens and and it’s really important to see
that it’s 42 percent um important and team is only 32 which is like for me
it’s it’s really surprising and and you see that funding is only 14 the fact
that someone from a vc decide to fund a company doesn’t mean that it’s it’s
much better although it could be funded really like in the beginning for a
seed and more not further than more but still that that means that vcs don’t
know and everything so how do you as you know entrepreneurs someone who wants
to create innovation within the company could do a empirical and deliberate
understanding if it’s the right time for your idea how do you know that and
that’s the question so we need to understand the customer behavior we need to
understand first as us how when we woke up today how how much did we use
products like we woke up used a touch breath and we went to to use the soap
we’re doing makeup clothes everything we use so many products today but the
other question is how much of these did we buy today and we’re not talking
about groceries which is daily but how many of you did buy new shoes right now
or a new tooth toothpaste or new toothbrush that’s that’s the question and we
see we’re using much more than we’re buying because we we’re getting used to
this specific shoe and we are not going to change it so fast or we’re getting
used to the specific um i know monitor or computer we’re not gonna change it
so the question is how do we change behavior so we have this kind of trigger
we woke up or we want to start our day and we want to feel clean and this is
the need that we have and therefore we are going to do something we’re going
to go to wash ourselves to brush our teeth to to sing a song whatever but we
have a solution so some of you will open their facebook some of you will go to
to the bathroom whatever but this is the solution you currently have for this
unmet need that you want to feel fresh in the morning but if i want to make
you take my new product i need to really verify that it’s much much better so
in order to to make you change to my toothbrush i need to really make sure
that you understand that my solution is much much better and then you will be
able to think okay I’m willing to switch to an electric tooth toothbrush for
example because it will clean much more and it this is what the dentist is
doing and so forth but when we want to change we have this internal um
anti-power i would say first we’re anxiety from the new thing we’re not sure
it’s that good and second one we’re so used to one thing so why would we
change so we have the power to maybe we should try it but the other part is no
I’m so used to what I’m doing right now i wouldn’t change anything and when i
want to convince you to come to my product i need to deal with these
objections and you can you can think about any product that you’re using right
now i need to convince you to go from um let’s say using skype in order to use
slack why slack is better i need to really um make sure that you understand
what is the benefit another thing that could make me switch is that i have a
new need so right now when I’m buying food i want it to be healthy too because
I’m caring about my immune system person for example so it’s not enough that
there is this kind of um juice it could be a healthy juice or with vitamins
maybe i’ll do that so my need for healthy ingredients will will overcome the
need for just eating so when something is like i have a new me and you need i
will probably do it and we have lots of them right now for example um the hand
sanitizer it could be a bracelet with a hand sanitizer or a cream with with
sanitizing or all the cleaning is like sanitizing it’s not only cleaning and
making it look fresh so we’re giving this a gain creator so we have something
more and when we think we have something more not just cleaning but sanitizing
we still have this anti powers but we can overcome that because we believe
that we need to sanitize the room for example but the best way to to switch is
when i want to go to my usual solution and it’s not there could you think
about something that happened in like in the past few months and it’s not
there anymore right exactly yeah yeah so i think the best example here is zoom
because every time i see it and we’re using it right now i tell myself this is
the proof that design is not needed you just need to have a need to do
something because it performs the task but no not more than that it doesn’t
need to delight the user it doesn’t have to be super user-friendly it doesn’t
have to do anything I’m just using it because i cannot walk right now and and
and fly to stefan and drink with him the wine right so i don’t have any other
option so what we’re doing is customers are looking for another option to
communicate to go to work to to talk to their families abroad and you say okay
i have a pain reliever you zoom instead and when you’re saying it’s not only
giving you a gain and you’re getting more you’re getting a pain relieved
because i really need to go to work and i really need to communicate so when
it’s a pain reliever it’s so much easier and more than that i don’t have any
other choice so maybe I’m very ex i have anxiety i don’t want to use zoom but
do i have any option and maybe i I’m so used to going to my clients offices
but who cares so the anti-powers are so so low so this is so easy to make me
go for zoom i don’t need to think about it so what I’m saying is the change is
not because it’s it’s it’s also what we said right now but it’s not only
because the there are more entrepreneurs and more human capital and and and
the the vcs are investing well it’s because there are switches and it’s really
easy to switch people need different things and what they need is not working
anymore and then i want to as a consumer to have something else and then if
somebody offers me an option i would go with it so covet is the biggest
switching event in your lifetime you will never see people switch hopefully no
other option no other option because you know this is such a big event and
people are changing and you see everything is changing around you and it’s not
only the way people react and it’s not only the solutions they have it’s the
way that people think if i can share something from from switzerland you know
street people are very risk averse i will say and not too willing to try new
things and i think kovid brought a lot of flexibility in trying new things um
you know doing things a different way and yeah i can really see that that
could should change in switzerland at least yeah i think it’s it’s all around
you see people who are more strict with the way they’re thinking they see it’s
not controllable controllable so they wanted to believe they can control
everything and we will do this and this is what happens and they think and
they see it doesn’t work anymore so they have no other options just to make it
more flexible in their mind because if not they will be overwhelmed like for
nine months or or more right now right and they need to adjust that and say
okay what could be done so what i told you right now is like yeah you could
say Adi really nice but the leaders did not hear about it because most most
companies are not going out with new products and we don’t see that many
successful startups out there we don’t see the innovation budgets going to to
to the sky and saying yeah we have to to invest so is it something that nobody
heard about that’s a question so apparently mckenzie asked this question so
they had this research a survey and they asked it was called innovation in
crisis why it is more critical than ever and apparently 90 percent of the
leaders that they asked believe that kobe 19 crisis with fundamentally changed
the way they do business over the next five years and 85 percent of them said
that it will have a lasting impact on their customers need and want over the
next five years so if we’re saying that you see two-thirds of them are not say
they’re they are they don’t feel that they have the this is very challenging
for them but 90 of them know that this is what they need to do because they’re
saying it’s imp impacting our clients and what they need and what they know
what does that mean we need to answer these needs these are the opportunities
for us to grow right so my question is and and now and now we have another
information that nearly three out of four executives said that this is a big
opportunity for growth so most of the 85 for technology but not only from
technology people from consumers people from farmer financial retail they all
think it’s a really good opportunity to grow so this is like all over the
place Adid there is a really great question on the chat from sharon maybe
sherhun do you want to ask it sure yeah of course and this is not the only
statistic that i come across these days and this is statistic of june 2020
let’s say five months into the crisis we’re now in january 2021 six months
later if we would do the research again would the statistics be the same or is
the mindset of business changing because the investment potential that
organizations have is dramatically reduced now six months into the crisis yeah
i think that I’m not sure it will be i didn’t do the the i didn’t check it
right now but i believe that there is this mental process emotional process
you go through when you have this big change and it’s people we’re trying to
avoid it first we’re trying to okay let’s just put our head down it will pass
and this is what we’re doing and then we see it’s not passing we’re starting
to understand things have changed and only when we have understanding yet yeah
this is has changed now I’m ready and i have the energy to do something
different only then you could do it you cannot do it before that so i think
that leaders and people in general working employees everyone who believed in
the beginning that it will pass know right now that it won’t pass and more
than that even if it passes it will not be go back to what it was we know
things have changed so and it’s fundamentals change so the companies are
selling their stores in like they’re not renting anymore they’re they’re not
coming to the allowing everyone to work from outside especially in technology
people are reluctant to go to to educate to a big conferences or to sports
events even if you had a football game right now I’m not sure that everybody
would come the same as they were they will be more afraid okay so this is what
i think and my question to you why most companies are not innovating right now
if they know they need to do it so what would be your answer steph tell me
what people are saying because I’m not looking at the chat right now yeah so
don’t hesitate to write you to write your answers um if i can share my my own
perception i think i totally agree with you the first wave in europe at least
was very scary and everyone just sat at the side of the road and waited that
it’s gonna pass and you know we are a company working with innovation and we
saw that there was quite a freeze of all projects and nothing happened second
big wave it’s very different we can see that now there is probably more
maturity in the whole situation and companies have yeah have accepted that
there is a change and that you need to move forward so at least from our own
perspective we don’t see you know we didn’t see a huge top of the business or
interest in innovation and even the opposite we we see that it’s catching up
like people are really they need to get together you know they need to find
ways to work together to move forward to accept the situation and you know
there is that exploit explorer thing and companies are more willing to explore
yeah i totally agree i feel that in my business too so um i i agree what
you’re saying so tell me what what people are okay so yeah um so there is can
you just repeat the questions so i don’t so why most companies are not
innovating right now yeah so oh there is a lot to have so jiren says a lack of
funds paying salaries first eduardo says perhaps we don’t yet see them they
are working on their products right now that will be launched in the coming
months for years xavier says they believe innovation is expensive marcus says
afraid of taking additional risks they really want to win the wine mihai says
still barely surviving from inertia isabel uncertainty believe there is still
a way back to what was normality vaccines are helping to go back paul says
innovation pissed up innovation is not in company’s dna so that was changed
right mihai maybe lack of cash because not a good time andrea oh my god so
much yeah thank you for for taking part in that yeah why some companies
understand they need to change they are still so many afraid of the challenge
to the status quo another priority seller is first okay yeah super super cool
answers actually yeah a lot of reasons yeah so so i totally agree with some of
you and first innovation is risky and you always feel that you don’t have to
risk something when you’re in risk so people are at risk but the main reason
that i talk about mainly in my book is fear and there is always fear from the
unknown and there is always fear from innovation especially right now because
companies say okay currently we have money and maybe lots of it but will we
have that in a year or two and the question is how can we maintain our core
products services what we are doing money out of right now and still do
something different and most of them say okay now we’re gonna close everything
just go into a um survival mode we asked about growth of survive so they’re
going into survival mode and not doing anything different but they know that
they are missing the opportunities and they are not taking it because they are
afraid and the question is like when we are thinking about fear is it’s
actually the fear of the unknown is possibly the fundamental fear underlying
all anxiety forms so there was a research trying to understand anxiety and why
people are afraid and when we think about us as kids we’re all afraid of the
dark more or less to a certain degree when we grow up we’re less afraid but
why are we all afraid of the dog because it’s the unknown we don’t know what’s
going to happen the biggest unknown of of course is death so this is what we
are afraid of so the unknown something that we cannot control that we don’t
know what’s going to happen we don’t know how can we what will happen and what
how will we confront it and how will we handle it is something that we are
very afraid of as human beings especially right now that we have all this
stress of we don’t know and if we’re healthy what happens to our parents what
what’s going to happen to to the financial situation the economy everything is
changing so we’re saying okay in this situation I’m just going to survival
mode and this is what most leaders are doing and the way the leaders are
handling uncertainty is related to if they are trained to work in uncertainty
if they are experiencing uncertainty for example innovation is something that
you do and as insurance you are doing insurance when you are not sure you need
it and when you need it you use it so if you have this skill and ability to
work under uncertain conditions in in uncertain times you know how to do it
when something like that happens if you don’t have these capabilities within
your company right now to start it’s it’s kind of difficult you could do it
but it’s more difficult and one of the things that i write in the book is that
we are in israel so used to being in an uncertain situation yeah this is
always yeah so we’re always living in uncertainty we’re always like nothing is
like stable here everything is changing all the time and we’re kind of used to
it so one of the words that i we have in hebrew is called balagang is like a
mess everything is chaos everything is not working and we’re used to it so
we’re a bit fond of the word so it’s when you go into a room and you say this
this room has balagan it means that yeah it’s it’s it’s not a bad thing so we
we get used to it and it’s a bit messy but it’s part of our lives and this is
how israelis see their life and they are not settled in i think that in
general they are not calm and not settled so we’re always in in uncertainty
and steph told me that there is another language that this word is used in in
the same context more or less yes yeah so so it apparently it’s not only a
hebrew word but i think this is why when something happens we’re so prone to
do something so you know like there is the freeze fight or flight right so
many companies would go into freeze and maybe even like avoiding we don’t want
to do anything with it and some of them will do something which is like the
the fight thing and and this is what we have in israel we’re always like we’re
doing more thinking less but doing more we’re always proactive and that’s why
we’re doing more innovation in general i think a great illustration is what’s
happening with the the vaccines of kovid right now like israel is just
refreshing it and all the other countries they are kind of somehow trying or
starting to think about it now and yes you know yeah i think that i think that
i read that we have like 11 percent of the population always already
vaccinated and yeah we’re a small country but still it’s it’s much more than
other countries and i think it’s connected to what we do when we’re anxious
we’re anxious as others so we are afraid of what’s going on in as any other
country but for us we need to act we need to do something you know to fix it
and and when you if maybe some of you have been to israel and you know that
everybody has an idea how to do things we are not going by the rules most of
the cases like if you have line for i know for a shop or you have a line for
the bank you will never have a very strict line you always have people going
around it because they have other ideas how can we build this line although
it’s it has been tried in the past i guess and this is how we do things so i
think that the way that we handle as a country in the way that that israelis
are thinking is something that i i I’m trying to convey to other companies
when i come it’s not like I’m telling you you have to live in uncertainty
because somebody who is like born i know in sweden for example maybe we have
someone in sweden so from the first moment that he’s born he has like i know
that i will have a job i will have a roof on over my head i i will not need to
work their hard to to have university it’s all from the state so we there is
something that you’re you feel very safe within and when you’re very safe and
stable you are not looking to change anything right there is a great story in
your book about you freaking out at the beginning of the the first wave and
getting a job proposal maybe can you share that story yeah yeah so what
happened is like before the the copy started i think it was even november
before i was a um i was called to one one of my clients called me and we
worked and when they were a startup when they just beg had the beginning and
the the first beta version and they were very very successful and they were
purchased by a amazon so now they are part of amazon he told me you know come
and work with us be part of amazon and i thought about it and i really love
them they’re a very very good clients and i really enjoyed working with them
and it’s in tel aviv and it’s like it was a very good option but i said no i
said like i can do it like half a half time but i cannot do it and then when
it started they covet crisis i think in about middle of march he called me
again and they didn’t find the right person for it and he told me maybe right
now when we’re all working from home you don’t need to be commuting every day
maybe you would come to amazon and work for us and although i said no way i
knew it’s not for me i was so anxious and afraid and i said okay why what will
happen right now do i need to to try new things and to to go into like
changing my business toward more innovation and selling new products and why
would i do that i have the option that jeff will pay and it was it sound
really nice for me and i said yes because i was afraid not because i wanted a
job and luckily they said no so in the end I’m still here with you instead of
working nicely with amazon maybe it’s an assumption but i have the feeling
that probably entrepreneurs are handling a bit better with that unknown you
know that’s being scared of the future because we know how it is it’s always
the same we never know in five months or six months if we gonna have business
or clients but i guess for employees who chose the big corporate life and the
regular salary i think the kobe situation was super scary because it’s totally
out of um you know right of course i think that in general people who are
entrepreneurs who self-employed they have their own business or company if
they know that there are fluctuations in what they’re doing sometimes there
are too much work or too much clients and sometimes it’s much less and you
cannot really navigate there so you have you don’t have like what you have in
big companies they will hire 10 more people will fire 10 more people no
problem it doesn’t work when you have a small business but i think that the
fact that we’re so used to these changes as people and even we seek these
changes because we want the challenge we want it to be interesting we want to
we don’t want to be bored in the same position because this is what we love to
do and i think that at this time although it’s scary and i gave in a very good
example from the book that you mentioned and um i think that people who are
used to creating new things and to to be entrepreneurs and and to really try
things out and see sometimes it works sometime it doesn’t but they are living
in this uncertain situation many years many years or many days of the year
they’re feel they feel less threatened i would say um Adi you know we have a
challenge about winning a bottle of wine for the best question right and i
would like to hear if some people here do have questions and don’t be afraid
to unmute yourself and ask your question if it’s a good one who wants to start
don’t be shy yeah um thank you for your speech and writing all these ideas and
this energy just one little thing that bothers me a little bit is that the
idea of you know you need to take risk and to feel unsafe to take the risk and
go in on innovation and i was checking on something on my mind and when you
said that fountains for freedom it has been ranked like the second most
innovative country in the world by the world economic forum i put the link in
the in the chat so how do you explain that because it seems like not very
congruent with what has been israel it’s nice to me you’re asking about israel
why is it so why we have so many stories sweden is second and israel is the
second yeah I’m very surprised to hear that i would love to hear the numbers i
know that they’re they’re they’re not considered an innovative country but i
don’t know the numbers as you show them but i guess is that the world economic
forum so it’s quite i would say and i don’t know many companies who big
unicorn companies coming other than spotify maybe coming from sweden but maybe
maybe i don’t know it well enough tell me what what are the big companies who
came from sweden other than spotify i would love to know i i don’t know how
how do they skype for instance i don’t know maybe i should read more about
sweden but i know it depends on how what do you see as as innovative right i
think behind what mija is mentioning ikea in the chat yeah it’s pretty ikea
it’s pretty i don’t know if ikea is is an innovative would you say it’s it’s a
design-oriented company but I’m not sure it’s innovative you see they’re doing
more or less the same thing and by the way about ikea i was one of the
speakers next to a speaker from ikea and they changing all their business
model in the next three years so they know that things are not working as they
wanted and for many years they had more or less the same idea and it worked
really well and they didn’t change it and so i i i cannot answer something
that i don’t know but if if i would measure innovation i would ask how much
budget so how many of the vc funding is going to this country that’s what i
would ask and i know that per capita so per person the first one is is the
silicon valley and the second one is israel per person how much money per
person you have but maybe it’s measured differently so i cannot really know
you have the link i’ll read it i read it okay thank you um who else has a good
question there is a butternut sticks if somebody asked you could read me yeah
there was a question from matthieu mene about startups you want to ask it yeah
sure hi eddie i was i have a question marie to going back to the right time
for for launching a project because sometimes they say okay if you are the
only one either you find a gold mine or other you didn’t understand the
situation that was a question more already to the right timing so do you think
that’s the right timing to launch the product is when you have other teams or
other startups working on the same idea meaning that the society is mature
enough to receive it i think that when you build the product to match the
needs then you need out there you will probably have more options to succeed
when you’re going from a technology what you believe would be a good idea it’s
not the same as going to really understanding the market the needs the what
has changed and going from there and once you are doing the right path and
understanding what are the things that might be relevant right now and test it
out again and again you have much more um less risk and more possibilities to
succeed and right now there are so many new opportunities out there so many
things has changed so many needs our unmet needs are out there people need
things and they don’t have any answer for it people would like to go and laugh
in in a stand-up show they would like to go to a football game they would love
to go to an a conference they would love to so many things they would love to
be within groups of gathering together feeling the energy of people and they
cannot do it so if somebody would find some kind of a solution to any of these
problems and any of these needs they will surely be more prone to succeed
thanks yeah definitely great if i may um are we talking strictly about
startups here or are we also including innovation that can happen in existing
businesses and if we’re talking about birth what would be um the let’s say the
biggest difference in approach between the two right i totally i thank you for
a question it’s a great question so first I’m talking about innovation in
general either from entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs so it’s either startups or
within companies companies could create lots of new product solutions for
their current clients or for the new clients so you can see it like the most
obvious example is amazon right so amazon is going into health right now and
they invested four billion dollars for things that are related to kovid so of
course it could be done from within companies and the difference is how you do
innovation within big companies compared to small ones so um many of the
things that i’ve done through the years are with startups and small companies
and in general we don’t have many established companies in israel so we’re so
young so we don’t have like companies as you have in europe with 40 50 years
company in the same like a father and son inheriting the the factory whatever
we don’t have that so when you’re doing innovation with is something which is
more established or a bigger company it’s really different than doing it with
a small team of two to five people and they are brainstorming and working from
morning to night and morning to night and thinking together and what they need
to do is so so different so the fact that that companies have the abilities to
have lean startup and they know how to do it doesn’t mean that they do really
exercise and execute well because there are so many preconditions and so many
obstacles they need to to um to to think about and to um to tackle on their
way and that’s why it’s it’s it’s like taking what is working for small
companies maybe in the silicon valley and taking it to bigger companies and
what i’ve been trying to understand is what is different what is this gap that
we could in in product innovation how can we do it in bigger companies and and
i and the first thing is i think the connection with the users so when you’re
a small company a small startup you’re you have to to talk to people you don’t
have any other option if you will not talk to people you will surely fail but
when you’re a big corporate you say okay we have so many clients we’re not
sure we have to talk to them we have our sales team we have a customer care
and we we know everything about them they’re working with us currently so
what’s the problem but the problem is they might change maybe they bought your
solution two or three or five years ago and now they need something else maybe
the market is changed the competitors change maybe what you’re doing is not
good enough maybe you could make it much better and you’re not really
understanding what is needed so the connection is not there in big companies
although they have so many advantages they are not really using it and they
have so many advantages and they’re not using it well when they’re innovating
yeah okay thanks a lot if i can share something from our perspective is um the
cove and the going remotes brought us easy access to customers users now
everyone in the world knows how to use zoom for example you can send the link
the person is going to be here answering your questions and i could really
compare you know like how hard it was to get testers back then you had to
invite them to a specific venue to it it was super complicated and now you
just send the link people are like oh yeah I’m on zoom anyway they click on
the link they are here and you have the right person this is amazing yeah
right right it’s it’s in in some certain degree it’s easier for sure do you
want us to continue and then we’ll have another session for q a of course yeah
yeah yeah yeah okay so first we you could i’ll have a link to the free version
of the book so what we talked right now is part of what we have in the book
and we’re almost in the last part of the discussion so i would love to answer
a question about that and the book has quotes and one of the one one of the
quotes that i really love is the riskiest thing you we can do is just maintain
the status quo and who said that is bob iger he’s the ceo of disney which is a
very creative innovative company and i really believe in that so people say
that innovation is risky but in the long run and and they’re true they’re
right because many of these initiatives innovative products innovative
projects they are not working so i think like 90 or 94 of these um internal
startups or in startups in general are not growing and they are not coming
into a full mature successful product truly not a unicorn as everyone wants
but still if you are not doing innovation you’re risking yourself because the
the world is changing and you’re staying in one spot and everybody could just
come and win the competition if you’re staying in one in one specific place
and you have so many examples from from the business world so the third part
of what I’m going like the last part before the the q a is how do you gain
advantage in a changing world and i think it’s connected to what mihai would
just ask me so how can you as a company find a new opportunity for future
growth right now so I’m teaching people and we’re where we have hands-on a
program called catalyst and we’re I’m taking these groups of innovators it
could be like within within a company or from different companies and we’re
going through these stages you might know some of them it’s very it’s very
connected to design thinking or design sprint or lean startup but it’s going
from analyzing understanding what’s going on so i’ve done so many design
sprints and sometimes i felt that the beginning is lacking we need to
understand what is the the challenge we need to understand what is the
situation before you jump on to the solution which is very a good solution for
creating a new product within design sprint but what happens before so we’re
analyzing the strength of the company first so there are so many strengths we
need to analyze the market and the clients so once we understand that we’re
deriving all the ideas from the analyze stage and then we have what i call
focus most company most um systems will call it id8 because we are we’re
having so many ideas out there but for me the focus on a specific the right
idea is the most important because you could have lots of ideas and many of
them you could not create they are not visible they are not the right solution
they are great for another time so forth so how can you take all of what you
know and to focus on the right one then we are making a prototype or a way to
test it out we’re testing and then deciding and we’re going in iteration so
this is very similar to other things but it’s stretched in order to allow a
more successful initiative within a company it takes longer time and then it
relax trips into the organization you could talk to your users you could talk
to other people within the company you could talk to stakeholders you could
get gather more information you have more time to really test it out
thoroughly and and you have the capability to really understand what is the
process of innovation while you’re going through these stages and not only
like in one cycle what is the typical time the like time frame of this so it
takes like six weeks so each week we’re going to one of these stages but it
could take a few months but it’s not more than that because we want to go and
drill into each of these days so each week we’re taking one of these steps
they were taking an exercise they need to go out of the building try it out
give the results and we’re discussing it and we’re seeing where we stand and
then we with this understanding we’re going to the next phase and while we’re
doing that we’re connecting with maybe our managers or our stakeholders
whoever is responsible for the budget maybe someone from finance maybe someone
from legal we’re trying to make it merge all together and to have a buy-in
from other people because in many cases when i go and do like very short
workshops it’s really great for small companies who want to adjust something
but to create really new things you have to get the buy-in from other um
people and other roles within the company and this takes time and without that
you might be very disappointed if you have a great idea and it will not go up
and will not grow in any sense make sense cool so i want to focus on the
analyze part so how can you know what opportunities to seize the what are the
opportunities that you should seize today and I’m going to take you only a few
points in this analyze stage and first is analyzing the market what is the
trains what are the competitors what are the risks how can you learn from
others and others mistake which could be very valuable for you and how can we
pre-validate and what everything maybe your commit competitors or someone else
pre-validated some of your assumptions so you could take it from there so
what’s going on outside then we’re analyzing the strength of a company and the
strength of of the company is their market how are they compared to these
competitors what are there in the domain their expertise the data the ip the
the knowledge within the company the technologies their brand so forth so
there are so many advantages you could use and analyze in order to understand
okay we have this data we have this ip maybe we could utilize in order to do
something with it and most companies do not start with it and what they’re
doing there is trying to have this swat understanding what are the strengths
what are the downsides what are they not good at but usually what we grow as
people from is from our strength even like when we are kids we know there’s
some of the subjects in school we’re very good at and probably this is
something that we’ll grow from i don’t know many people decided to take a
profession of a subject that they really hated at school because it doesn’t
happen because you hate it and you are not good with it so why would you do a
profession out of it right but once you have a talent for something and you
have strength this is where you could surely grow and if you know as a company
what your strengths are it’s really important and the last one which everybody
knows is to analyze your customers so we really need to understand and to
listen to them and to do interviews and to understand who is doing and what is
doing and how in in this certain situation and and we’re doing how might we
and empaty mapping and user analysis user research and these are things that
are very established right now within companies if they have very profound
research department but not all companies have that and not all companies know
how to really understand what’s going on outside they know it surely from the
business perspective perspective but when we’re talking a product or a
solution that is a new one and it’s not there or enriching or reinventing your
current product you have to really think again what’s going on out there with
your clients and we’re going through all these stages when we’re doing the
analyze the last thing i want to show you is some of my clients so the first
one is shamik from from google and i worked with their accelerator for so many
years the second one is the mayor from ibm and we worked on several products
for the ibm security and the last one is from amazon he’s one he’s the one who
called me from amazon it was cloud enduro and work and and then in amazon we
have like a few um meetings there and and and for me just to have this
connection and help these different um and people grow and these different
products and projects grow for me it’s like this is what i love to do the most
and and i I’m sure that right now there are so many people and and that could
find what will grow their companies and help their clients on the other side
and just match that within reinventing your solutions or creating new ones so
this is what i love to do and if you want to know more these are like you can
go to invincibleinnovation.com or to find out about the book you will get a
link to to download the free version

STEPH CRUCHON

Amazing so actually they got the link it’s already in the chat so look in the
chat Eglé posted the link you can click there just you have to go to validate
the linkedin or whatever and then you’re gonna get the book for free right

thank you so much thank you so much Adi so please everyone give a big round of
applause for Adi because the q a are gonna be in remo so big round of applause
it was really really great to have you all the way from from tel aviv israel
really cool to have all your perspective about innovation during covet times
and yeah what we’re gonna do now you’re gonna be able to ask all your
questions to Adi and you can still compete for winning that nice bottle of
wine but at the end Adi’s gonna tell me who is gonna get the bottle and Eglé
if you can paste the link to the remo so if you don’t know remo it’s a you
just click yeah it’s in the chat right now so you just click on this link and
you’re gonna be able to join me on remote so you have to validate your camera
your microphone and then you join the event and yeah it’s kind of cool so you
can actually see it wait I’m going to share my screen it’s going to be easier
for you to see yeah so it looks like this basically it’s tables you can just
double click you join the table you want Adi is going to be at one of the
table right there and you can move from table to table so you double click you
move from table to table and you can be able to discuss with everyone who was
here tonight really really great to have you with us Adi thank you so much
thank you for having me it’s been such a pleasure and i would love to see you
there cheers see you very soon on remo see you on the other side bye bye
[Music] bye [Music] [Applause]


Itoday Apéro #1 - Ryan Rumsey

Ryan Rumsey

Founder & CEO - Second Wave Dive

Watch all replays

Combining Design and napkin math to get leadership buy-in

Ryan Rumsey

Ryan been designing professionally for 20+ years. Over the last decade he’s been building and leading design organizations while supporting some of the most category-defining companies in business today. He is the author of Business Thinking for Designers (2020; published by InVision) and CEO of Second Wave Dive.

Previously, he led Experience Strategy at USAA, building and growing a team of thriving strategists and consultants who served our executive line-of-business teams.

Prior to that, he was responsible for building Product and Design organizations at Electronic Arts and Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences. Before building teams, he designed and developed best-in-class software for Apple.

Links

ITODAY APERO #1

Steph Cruchon: Hey everyone welcome to Itoday Apéro, the  very first Itoday Apéro, actually.
I’m Steph and i’m gonna be your host. thank you  so much for joining this is really really
exciting, it’s also part of the Google Design Sprint Chapter Meetups and yeah it’s a very first
first time we’re organizing this meetup and i’m super excited to see  all of you guys you can just just cheer! yeah we  are seeing you so hey everyone thank you so much  
for showing up this is really really cool and  uh actually we’re gonna have a really good time   as you know we are in Europe in the middle of  the second wave of Covid-19 and we had to postpone Itoday Masterclasses to next summer and thank you  so much our amazing speakers Jake Knapp, Alex   Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur also the sponsors and the  Swiss Tech Center to have accepted to to postpone the  
event and all of you guys uh it’s gonna be really  great we have really good hopes
that it’s gonna work in person, the  way we want, because now we have good vaccines
(hopefully 94% efficient) it’s gonna be sunny  next summer, and it’s gonna be uh in quite some
months… so yeah meanwhile we decided to keep that  community together and excited and we had
so much of good feedback and good vibe  from the last event from the summer
that we just wanted to keep that community  together and we decided to organize Itoday Apéros
so an “apéro” if you don’t know in Switzerland  or in France, it’s kind of a time to drink so my
glass is empty now but it’s not going to be after  after that so you know make yourself comfortable
just get a good glass of wine if you don’t drink  wine it doesn’t matter but just take a good glass
we eat some cheese and it’s really  time for you know chatting with friends
and we’re going to chat about innovation today we  also want to feature people from the community so
in our next events if you are uh willing to be a  speaker yourself please feel free to uh to apply
to be a speaker and i’m gonna be super happy to to  host you in the one of the next uh i to the apero
talking about speaker…. today i’m super excited  to welcome the amazing Ryan Rumsey live from
Austin Texas! this is really exciting to  have you with us Ryan, he’s the author of this
book “Business Thinking  for Designers” that was published by Invision
a couple of weeks ago, he’s also one of the  world’s best thought leader about design in
general of course, about innovation, he’s the CEO  and Founder of a company called “Second Wave Dive
and this has nothing to do with the second  wave of Covid-19- that’s the name of his company (laughs)
and yeah he’s an expert at leading innovation,  and big design teams, he led innovation and
transformation teams at companies like Apple,  Electronic Arts, Usaa, and also Nestlé because
maybe you don’t know (well, he spoiled it just before the show) but some of you still don’t know that he used to live in  Switzerland
and that’s why he’s with us today. Thank you so much for being with us Ryan

please everyone give a big round of applause for  mr Ryan Rumsey!

Ryan Rumsey:  Hey everybody hi, so glad to see

you all um like i mentioned before so many uh  dear friends that i i haven’t seen in a while
i’m glad to see that you’re healthy and safe and  gosh i wish i could be there in person we miss
the mountains a lot um so i thought we would  kind of bounce around today um i’d like to be
i’d do better when it’s like just community and we  chat with each other uh um just as if we were in
person at a real right apparel um and so i thought  i would start by just sort of framing some of the
conversation some of the topics and um you know  my work in my career has kind of been to talk
about some elephants in the room if you’re not  familiar with the english phrase um you know one
of the things that aren’t often talked about that  are usually should be talked about right so today
i want to talk about uh i’m going to start sharing  my screen just so we have something to share here
i’m going to bounce around too because i have lots  of different things but i’m going to start sharing
because i want to talk about this sort of elephant  in the room when it comes to design sprints
so design sprints these wonderful wonderful  methods and process that we’ve learned
that don’t necessarily resolve uh um  getting permission to sprint if you will
getting the buy-in from our leadership to  actually go do these things and create some
change so let’s talk about the sprint to sprint  before i do that hey i’m just ryan that’s me
uh as uh steph mentioned here’s some of my past  experiences mostly i’ve been involved for like the
last 10 years of introducing new organizational  change inside of organizations really all these
transformation type of things and so my job was to  transform these organizations into the empowered
product team models uh in support of the growth  and innovation that they were seeing as mentioned
this was my book uh steph it was actually  published way back in april uh but you know
covid was happening so like that’s too anxious  who’s gonna read a book at that time right
yeah it’s free go download it it comes in  audible too so as mentioned i am the founder
of second wave day dive what i help uh uh people  do is think about the next wave of their career
so we do training coaching and develop communities  but it’s all about the next wave of your
self and the next wave of leadership all the  things that you didn’t know you needed to know
to feel successful value trusted and confident  while meeting the expectations of the companies
that they have of you and we get to work with some  rad other companies too anyway let’s get into it
so i want to briefly talk about the current state  of affairs let’s baseline let’s do a little bit
of a history lesson right so for the last 10  years design has kind of been all the rage
uh uh we told everybody there was this third  leg to the stool uh this venn diagram and it
worked they bought it they totally took it  into consideration they were like yeah right
and so now we see all these tools methods and  reports that are mainstay including design sprints
a big big part of our everyday and we have all  these reports that say design-led innovation and
companies are beating the s p 500 we’re providing  more value to the market and we have all these
wonderful rad case studies from companies that  inspire us every day that we can learn from and
now there are executives design executives and  innovation executives these are all commonplace
ten years ago this isn’t the case we did it y’all  like let’s celebrate let’s have a good time right
yes and right so perhaps making it uh is a little  bit different than what we have visually pictured
it wasn’t quite what we thought it would be and  notice the poker table um many business leaders
are still struggling to sort of understand the  value of all this stuff what does this mean i mean
we have it we have it in place but really what is  the value of it and i think as a result of that
many teams are still struggling with the realities  of everyday organizational change and innovation
so as a result a lot of investment in this type  of work is still questioned and when that work
is questioned we have a lot of false starts a  lot of frustrations a lot of confusion a lot
of turnover a lot of like we keep doing the same  thing over and over again rinse and repeat right
so for the next uh i don’t know 35-ish minutes uh  uh give or take let’s talk about some elephants
in the in the room excuse me so from a mckinsey  report earlier this year what we found striking
is that some 90 of companies weren’t reaching the  full potential and i know i’m mentioning design
but this is really about innovation even in the  past five years as they’ve doubled the number of
senior people doing this work that’s striking  double the number of people doing the work only 10
people think that they’re getting the the value or  potential out of that this is not the language of
business decisions my friends we love post-its  and this is not how business decisions are made
nor is this nor are our prototypes and sketches  when you’re selling design sprints as a solution
executives actually want the answers to these  questions what do i get how much do i get when do
i get it how much will it cost me oh yes they will  they want to know those before they fully commit
to incorporating this work and executives  won’t sponsor this type of design sprint work
unless they’re seeing the math unless they  actually understand how that equates to some
viability stuff okay so what do we kind  of need to know about these things well
first and fundamentally when companies hire  us either as employees or as consultants
our job is to help them create a competitive  advantage right we need innovation so desirable
they create adopted competitive advantages for  organizations so i think we need to retire this
venn diagram because it doesn’t quite speak the  truth just having these things does not give you
innovation what the companies actually expect of  us is innovations to gain a competitive advantage
and so we should really talk about feasibility  desirability and viability within the sprint
and if we look at the high level of what a  business model is and what a business strategy
is a business model is simply how a company  intends to create deliver and capture value
a strategy is just how they do it different than  somebody else so my friends again when we look at
sprints sprints are got business strategy covered  what they aren’t answering right now is how to
capture value really what i’m talking about is  the the the money factor the viability factor
because the goal of a business model is how  to figure out how a company sustains itself
how it is actually soluble if it’s a for-profit  company it’s how to make money the strategy goal
is just to create a competitive advantage so again  sprints do this wonderful thing on the strategy
but our colleagues are going what does it mean  how do we capture value out of this right i’m
going to skip a couple of these questions because  they kind of get you know we don’t need to go too
but companies have specific strategies to win that  is what sprints answer for us uh but you’ve been
hired to make that strategy a reality they want  to know how that’s going to capture value for us
here’s another thing innovation is directly  related to the model and strategy in place
so i think a lot of the times when we talk  about design sprints and creating innovations
not every innovation is the same let’s  just take a look at dell and apple right
dell has a very different strategy than apple
dell’s model is to provide direct to  consumer products at affordable prices
apple’s is to provide direct to  consumer products at premium prices
dell’s strategy is to do that through  top-notch supply chain and logistics
apple’s is to do it through integrated  systems high quality buying experiences and
innovative design does dell need the same  innovations as apple to be successful no
so i think a lot of this is talking about another  big elephant in the room is like we don’t actually
have to develop the same types of innovations as  these companies that we love in these rad case
studies right because at the end of the day the  executive leaders at a company like dell know that
they win they remain a career and create value  through superior supply chain right by the way
math matters my friends when somebody asks the roi  they’re really asking these four questions right
an roi is a measurement gauge measurement used to  gauge the efficiency or effectiveness of a project
investment it’s not a measure of you as a person  it’s not a measure of your worth as a person so i
think we just have to understand the basics  of those types of things also decisions are
made easier for your colleagues for executive  friends when they understand your rationale
they want to understand right they they are  suffering from decision fatigue and they want
to understand that taking them down a garden path  of what might be doesn’t help relieve that fatigue
your partners need to know why you decided to  tell the story in a particular way so they can
understand their rationale your rationale and  argument this is all about the numbers my friend
and what narrative storytelling this garden  path sort of thing that we end up producing
at the end of a sprint it inspires  everybody but it completely misses the
reasoning of why this is going to be important  and the assumption i think that we have is this
this comes from bj fogg a well-known uh  uh behavior uh uh change uh uh academic
the assumption is that we if we give people the  right information it will change their attitude
which in turn will change their behavior so the  big elephant in the room here is that value means
different things to different people and i think  one of the things that we do a lot with sprints is
talk about perceived value terms like excellence  or simple or easy to use factors that are actually
difficult to calculate and when you’re pitching  that to an executive what they’re looking at is
what is this going to look like on the balance  sheet if i have to invest in 12 people taking
five days which is actually not really the case  if i have to invest in 12 people taking multiple
weeks to do this design sprint activity that’s  what you know multiple weeks that they’re not
going to be working on other things can you show  me the math of why i should make that decision
and by the way we know this mba skills don’t  directly translate to showing that value we
need a combination of things because showing value  is a systems problem to solve it’s not just about
a design sprint here or a a financial sheet here  we actually need to merge these things together
and i think remixing is the key weird al yankovic  let’s take the things that are already working and
actually just smash them together well that  happens if we actually just combine them together
what might that look like so i’m going to show you  a way that we’ve done this that i’ve done this uh
in my past right so let’s talk about setting the  stage a previous organization that i worked at uh
there were literally hundreds of product  managers who are being skilled up
at the same time in design sprints safe agile  and digital capabilities all at once and they
were being asked to create all these new product  visions that aligned with organizational okrs
now if you’ve ever been around an organization  that is trying to skill up a workforce all at once
they can’t possibly learn all these things at once
and so the opportunity for my team was to help  them create just good enough product vision
create good enough product visions which could  inspire and align cross-functional partners
and so how did i uh uh sort of lead my team  in doing this well uh uh i didn’t tell them
what to do instead i gave them a request for  a proposal this is my own team and i said you
tell me how are we going to solve this problem  i’m going to give you a request for proposal
and i’m going to facilitate a workshop where  we can converge on our own ideas and concepts
into creating some type of new structure no format  to help all of our partners in product management
and i gave them a big hairy audacious goal how  could we impact 50 different product visions in
one calendar year so rather than just doing heavy  service design and journey map types of things
that we might be able to do three or four how  might we actually generate in one calendar year
50 product visions really around innovation so i  facilitated a workshop for us where we were going
to develop our new value proposition and vision  and working agreements as a team that allowed us
to capture our own strengths and gaps when it came  to our own skills and the types of activities that
we did that allowed us to identify how we might  look across our partners and our organizations
and find willing cross-team partners to actually  try some of this new stuff out with us and allowed
us to create some type of working agreement  where we had clear expectations of what we as
a team were going to provide and what we weren’t  going to provide to the rest of the organization
and we created a value proposition statement  for us to sell out to our executives what we
came up with was a novel approach to management  consulting so i ran an internal team that was a
management consulting team two colleagues and  peers and what we looked to do was address the
gaps between business design and digital strategy  to actually help teams create some new innovation
uh we had to prioritize uh the senior leaders  across what p l functions who are really
interested in what they were going to get how  much will it cost them all these types of things
and uh initially our own measurement  was just to see if this was working was
just around utilization where people gonna  knock on our door and ask to work with us
and to see how that would happen and so what we  did was built a prototype program complete with
activities and targeted test pilots within  one week we actually used the design sprint
process to develop a prototype program to  then design sprint with other people right
what we did was we modified a full five-day  design sprint into a two-day design sprint
and it was focused on developing uh visions  that combined not only human-centered design
uh in practices and prototyping and all these  things but also business strategy so that we
actually had a balanced view they went out and  produced not only these sketches on day one but
we actually looked at some napkin math and how the  viability of each one of these favorite sketches
might play out so this was quick sales funnel type  napkin math that we would quickly identify the roi
and after a year we didn’t hit our goal of 50 but  we did hit a goal of about i think it was just
under 30. we helped approximately 30 different  teams develop new innovative ways that they could
either affect their existing business model or  propose new business models and our initial uh
uh target of utilization went from uh uh well  it increased by 400 percent uh we helped teams
produce hundreds of new capabilities across the  organization but more importantly we helped uh
leaders know that the investment in these small  types of experiments that are actually cheap to
run over the long haul were a worthwhile  investment so i’m going to bounce out here
uh because what i want to do is maybe get  some questions first uh before we jump in
great so wait i’m just typing your screen  yeah i just have a first question did you
see a difference of culture between switzerland  where you worked and in the u.s in this regard uh
yes and no i think switzerland has  a genuine appetite to innovate um
whereas in the u.s i think it’s a lot of words  are kind of said where i think they’re they’re
both very much in common is the appetite for risk  in switzerland is yeah relatively low um but the
appetite for risk in a large uh uh you know this  was a financial institution that i worked at with
over 30 000 employees um the appetite for risk  at an executive level uh tends to be low right if
things aren’t too broken let’s kind of keep going  so i think really the the uh similarities there is
around the appetite to really do and try new  things uh is relatively low which is why we
had to even reduce the risk of a five-day  sprint down to two days because the initial
reaction was five days that’s that’s so much i  can’t take people off their work for five days
let alone 12 people you know so um we’ve heard  that a lot too and uh there is the workshop
part that is short and then you have the full  prototype and testing part that is longer but yeah
maybe you have some questions from from the crowd
so what other ways of de-risking the innovation  process uh maybe you could share ryan other than
maybe reducing the sprint and so one of the ways  is is to actually invite non-typical design sprint
people into the room so we would bring people  who were like business strategists or business
analysts who were really good and quick at doing  napkin math at looking at something like a sales
funnel and saying oh according to our okrs we’re  targeting this segment there you know they already
had these numbers in their head this is the  approximate number of people in this segment who
we are targeting we need to then hit 10 of that  segment in order to achieve our goals to then look
at a prototype then ask a real question you  know not how you know how might we but can we
you know and ask that flip side and this is where  the business analyst would be a wonderful sort of
saying say like well we have to hit 10 percent  and then that was a way for us to have quick
conversations of like well is this prototype need  to reduce errors does it need to improve time on
tasks does it need to do something else in order  to sort of equate to that napkin map that was one
of the ways the second and probably more important  way adrian is to find sidekicks and that’s
actually to look at the power dynamics inside of  an organization so we’ve got a shared mural board
i don’t know if everybody’s in there yet but  what sidekicks are let me just pull up another
little slide that i can i can share so this is  a just a version of a stakeholder map that i use
and so uh forgive me i just quickly kind of  threw this up this is my little stakeholder
right but what i look at inside of an  organization is who has power and influence
but then who is willing to experiment  and so what i ask are two questions
do the people who want to uh to work with us or  are looking to create some type of innovation or
or change trying to do really something different  do they need help and do they know they need help
because if they know they need help they’re  probably at a stan a point where they’ve
tried as much as they know and that hasn’t  really helped them they’re kind of feel stuck
and so we we look for these people down here in  sidekicks to essentially say if this doesn’t work
if this quick experiment or this design sprint  doesn’t work it’s not going to impact the
business overall so what we want to do is actually  prototype running design sprints or running a new
process with people to see if they work if they  work we would then build internal case studies
based on the results that these teams got to help  get them unstuck oops and those are the internal
case studies that we would then pitch to say the  more influential the more powerful and essentially
say hey this random team over here uh uh you know  got fifty percent improvement uh in fact i think
i have an example here of the this sort of case  study i do let me just share a different screen
so you know here’s an example of what  that case study might look like right this
blank blank team has handled 2.2 billion in a  year on assets but they faced a 10 customer loss
uh we helped them with a vision sprint to  essentially see how they could innovate and
as a result they were to able to improve proceeds  paid by 50 percent improve all these types of
things so we would use those case studies to then  ship out to the more influential the more powerful
the people who were less willing to  take on risk as a first-time colleague
more willing to take on risk when they saw that  the method was proven out and already working
great um i think remy amy you have a question  right yup i do uh but okay whoops sorry can
you hear me well it’s fine i can yes fine well  thank you so much for your generosity and time um
my question here it’s much more practical is  just that according to my own experience when
we tend to intervene with c-level people or  things like this when we would then to think
that these people have a clear vision of the  metrics and definition of success and common set
goals it seems like it’s not that obvious most  of the time and access to metrics and data in
order to take good decision is not that easy  i was wondering if you had any tips in order
to access the right data and to align people on  the common goal and definition of success well
i do so let’s talk about math a little more i’m  going to pull up a separate deck hold on one sec
duck let’s talk about math okay so
just going to share a different deck  because i think when we talk a lot about
uh metrics and assumptions business  assumptions right around all these
things i think a lot of times our leaders will say  same something like we need to retain more users
and we go out and we run away and we google  how to retain users uh right to our hearts
content uh but our first job before we do that  is to actually ask about the math that they’re
already using essentially it’s to challenge the  business assumption with math assumptions so and i
i suggest doing this from a very curious and  uh humble right uh standpoint but essentially
saying like hey right when people talk about  roi there’s actual math equations involved there
so a lot of times they’ll say like we need to  retain more users uh hold on one sec there we go
i want to make sure that my sharing is working  okay we need to retain more users so i think the
first question we should ask is awesome we love  to retain users what’s our current retention rate
because if they don’t have an answer they’re  not using math and they’re just guessing
right and there is no way to calculate  the return on investment on a guess
so what we can do is say oh gosh you know it’s  really going to be a struggle for us because for
us everything aligns to your math if we don’t know  what your current retention rate is and how you’re
going to target and fruit your improvement all of  our experiments are based on that number and we’re
really afraid that we might do something that  screws it up accidentally and that’s a risk you
know that i don’t think either of us want to take  so it’s this way to sort of like get there and
just ask a little bit about the math and and see  if it’s actually being used because otherwise it’s
a setup right and and you know one of the ways  that i’ll i’ll stop sharing for now so i can see
one of the ways that i’ve talked  about it in the past is like
you know you and me we don’t want to show up  in front of the cfo in six months and uh the
cfo is wondering why our balance sheet is all  screwed up because we decided to move a button
uh goodness that looks bad that’s a risk neither  of us want to take right and so it’s this kind of
um sowing some doubt but also asking for an  invitation right it’s inviting people to say like
let’s get serious about our metrics yeah obviously  it’s what we do as well these days but it’s so
hard to have like a metric culture  implemented yet but it’s coming little
by little be careful yeah yeah the realities of  metrics right or first baseline then benchmark
then set right and if you’re doing that for  the first time if you don’t actually have those
that’s like a six month process we won’t actually  know any targets for six months and that is
like to go through that six-month gauntlet  of fear right that’s that’s really really
hard so what we try to do is make those as like  micro as we can let’s just start with one metric
see how that goes and if it doesn’t go well  you know we’ll keep you know no big deal
and i think that’s one of the the underlying  things is it’s so overwhelming we see these great
uh books or or you know uh talks from uh friends  that like netflix who have like metrics galore
or right or or at apple you know when i joined  apple we were using standard deviations of metrics
not just the metrics themselves that’s such an  inspiring thing and it’s so overwhelming like you
have to do these very basic things to even get  to a point where those things start to come in
and that is maybe something that the  executive has not done in the past
and maybe something that they don’t want to  like let everybody know that they haven’t
been doing that in the past right it’s really  hard uh ryan i’m having a question um yeah
on the do you have a way to measure the cost  of opportunity of not doing something oh sure
oh sure not doing something is the status  quo yes right uh not doing something
is uh so let’s just go over here again so there’s  when i talk about remixing right uh let’s just do
uh some swot analysis on the status quo right so  when presenting recommendations or options and you
have or are working with a team that uh doesn’t  really want to change one of the recommendations
that i always put up forward is like here’s  the swat of not changing here’s the here’s the
strengths and opportunities of not actually going  and doing anything different and by highlighting
that we could say like look we’ve been trying this  thing for three years and nothing has happened
we can choose to continue to do the same thing and  we should expect the exact same same results uh so
you know it’s it’s also a challenge and i think  for us as innovators it also gives a little bit
of window into is this a place that’s going  to work for me as an employee um i don’t want
to keep you know beating the same drum and if  i put forward a prison you know some type of
analysis that says i’m confident in this analysis  that doing the same thing doing the status quo
will result in the same results um maybe this  is not really this is not going to work for me
and maybe you know it’s a it’s an  opportunity to go work with a new partner or
or look for something else cool  who has a question for ryan
or maybe a story of pushback when you  were trying to to to sell a design project
from senior leadership i have a question hi ryan  hi sabrina nice to meet you um where do i get the
right data so sometimes it’s not really clear  you know what will be the outcome of a sprint
so you have different kinds of stakeholder  there where do you find the right beta so um
i’m gonna rephrase it in a different way write  depends right is contextual right always changes
there is no one piece of data so what i do if i’m  consulting before i start the engagement what i
ask them to do is just grab every bit of data they  already have and mostly what i ask them to do is
start with two teams your sales team your customer  support team those organizations typically are the
most mature in tracking things like sales top  of funnel stuff or tracking the costs of support
when you get into uh support organizations and  this is where i’ve spent a lot of my background
they measure things like time on task first call  resolution average handle time and they calculate
well a phone call costs 12 times as much as a  text message so you can quickly do some napkin
math and say can you tell me or if you’re working  with a you know like a partner on on the business
side as an engagement on the client side and go  can you go to your customer support team and ask
them just what these baseline measures are for the  last three months because what we want to evaluate
is some see if there’s any correlation you know we  know it’s not causation we know it’s not going to
be a direct link there’s all these other factors  but if we do a design sprint the question i would
then ask is what happened to those keys customer  support or sales metrics 60 days after the sprint
then you can build up a case study to then go to  your next client and say here’s what we did you
can have this too and so it’s the same case when  i talked about those internal case studies of
you know even if you’re working  in-house is to go just find
whatever data it is i think a lot of times when  when organizations use things like nps or csat
our initial like academic brain sort of says like  those aren’t those aren’t really showing the value
right and we get frustrated with the metric and  instead what i say it’s it’s just just a tool
right the only way to validate that something  isn’t working is to then show that there’s no
correlation right so that’s how i do it  when i engage with uh clients is to say
grab any types of metrics that you have  do you have mau do you have dau do you
have nps do you have csat do you have average  handle time do you have any of these things
and if they don’t if they don’t if nobody  has metrics then i just talk about the risks
that we’re going to see it’s like i’m happy to  charge you for a design sprint but if we don’t
baseline any of these things you’re probably not  going to get the opportunity to do it again and
my thoughts are that you don’t want to just do it  once you want to continue to do it again and again
thanks so i i think also that maybe if you  don’t have let’s say kind of data with customers
uh you always can relate to date data uh  regarding the time a team spend for let’s
say a certain amount of a certain amount of hours  that’s right get to us that’s right you know and i
think a lot of business leaders want to know like  the napkin math you could take an average salary
of the people attending and what five days might  cost the company you know uh of not doing work
sorry to interrupt you you were going to continue
okay i think that’s perfect so i think we  need that right steph sure yeah of course uh
also i think in in my experience there is also  the how to say there is also the the fact that um
at the end of the sprint a lot of the value um is  that it unlocked something that would have never
went anywhere you know like they would have never  started this project or never done it because
they didn’t they were too afraid of risking  things and i think it’s also part of the value
is that the projects are moving forward versus  being uh being killed or not not being done so
yeah how how do you measure that value um  that’s yeah just the projects are moving
is that a question yeah like this is why i really  see the value of the sprint is that projects are
happening aft after oh yeah so that’s that’s  the case of like when initially just starting
the the data point we used for my team was just  utilization do more people want to work with
us right and then we as an internal consulting  team gave out our own surveys for satisfaction
right and we would then work canon or you know  track how people would then do it so check in
with them we had a regular cadence of checking in  after 30 60 90 days tell me what’s happening so a
lot of it was also anecdotal you know of working  with somebody where they say you know my business
leaders trust me more and and i would then have  to ask again that’s you know that’s wonderful
how do you know that they trust you more and so  there was other anecdotal evidence where they’d
say you know when i talk they’re no longer  looking at their computers or their phones
yeah because you’re becoming someone uh right  you know um prior to me run doing this work
nobody asked me to do research up front i now get  asked three times a week to do research up front
prior to me doing this my boss never really  asked me what uh what i want my future job to be
now my boss is currently working with me to  right prior to me doing this my team never
really talked about doing this now they’re asking  me every day how can we do this more so there’s
there’s the hard metrics of trying to go find  that sort of correlation uh but then there’s
all the sort of qualitative stuff and you can  package that up as case studies and it’s pretty
powerful when you when you have somebody say  nobody’s opening their laptop while i talk
right yeah yeah i think uh because you are  becoming uh someone in the company and you
have been working directly as a human being you  know with your boss your leader in one team and
you break all these silos and that’s where i  see a lot of value probably maybe it’s hard to
quantify but it’s how many people who have quit  their companies if they couldn’t work that way
versus the people you can attract or retain uh  in your company if you work that way i don’t
know how to quantify that but i see so i know how  to quantify it it’s just a long process uh i can
i can this is like what i teach in my communities  so i teach a different version of okrs
uh uh which actually let me see  if i could find it real quick uh
go ahead and fill up the space with some  chatter but um go ahead so uh about chatter
um we i think we’re gonna stop in like  five minutes and we’re gonna meet on remo
so it’s the same like i to the summit you can  just click on the link if you have google chrome
you can join us and it’s gonna be like free you  can move from table to table and have really good
time with her uh with with chatting and take  a good glass of wine yeah yeah all right so i
found it yeah i found it i’m gonna open it up so  what i help organizations uh build and create are
these few big huge maps of right if you’re  talking about design or really desirability
how do you translate something like reduce login  failure over to increase csat how do you increase
engagement by four percent how does that translate  to lifetime value by three percent so what i help
organizations do is build out these full maps of  okrs uh all these types of things and then i help
them right right sorry again just repeat what okay  is because i’m sure in switzerland a lot of people
don’t know i know it’s common so okrs uh the same  as kpis if you’ve if you know kpis so uh okrs are
objectives and key results think of them as a high  level objectives or outcomes that an organization
wants and how they’re going to measure them  with key results kpis key performance indicators
metrics these types of things so a lot of times  what organizations might be able to do is um sort
of translate at a high level right the business  wants to uh increase revenue by two million
right or or acquire a hundred thousand users  these types of things and what okrs allow us to do
is cascade that down to an individual team that  says we’re just going to be on time on budget
so what i helped people do is build out  these full uh scorecards of connecting
innovation or desirability objectives and  key results something like usability or
accessibility or whatnot how that actually  translates into business key results who is
the typical person you are talking to in a in a  company so people who train with me are usually
design leads through design executives uh we  haven’t been taught this uh right but when i
go and work with companies it’s typically a ceo  or the c-suite team like the founding team who
may have gotten to a certain point now they’re  trying to scale and what worked for them to get
to that initial point is not going to help  them get to 10x of that point now suddenly
they have to be mature with measurement and  they have to make very different trade-off
decisions and they don’t know what they don’t  know and they hear designers talking about
you know things like usability and they can’t  actually see how that translates to more sales
so i help them uh walk through and sort of  show them the realities of one being able to
do this but then the reality is of like it’s  going to take a little time to do this right
one last question for ryan hey i have one yeah  ryan you i want to go back to uh something you
said about you have to decide if this organization  is for you it’s related to that uh by the way it
was it was a wonderful presentation thank you  um well my question to you is having done this
for so long what are the signals that you observe  um that tell you that you have to grit it out
or it’s time to pack it in it’s not going to  happen in this organization or for this group
because it’s emotionally exhausting work how  do you get smart about this but not always
second guess so i actually gave a tedx talk in  lausanne hey serge about this which is um what
we’re talking about is like my own individual  values and what drives me as a person uh
and so i’ve had to this is nerdy but i developed  my own rubric and rating system to essentially
do quick napkin math of like where my desire is  and how many times i’ve actually tried to fix
a situation so if i think something is very  valuable to me but i’ve not tried to fix it
well it must not mean that much but  something if i’ve really got desire to
you know have this and i’ve tried a lot to fix  it and it’s not happening that’s when i kind of
look internally and go like maybe this is not  a match right and so i go through this exercise
maybe quarterly to sort of uh and that’s because  you’re talking right really a combination of like
things that i need as an individual which is like  can i be home by dinner uh uh do i have to work
80 hours a week or can i just work my 40 hours  a week right all these things combined with am
i motivated by the work uh do i see the morale of  the people around me raising or you know or going
down like making that kind of call is a decision  between those both those things and so this little
exercise that i do is like how do i combine all  those subjective factors how do i try to make them
you know more objective um so i could i  could share a link to this nerdy process but
it’s not an easy thing right it isn’t it isn’t  that is why it’s i wanted to know thank you
sure this is amazing thank you so  much ryan so ryan’s gonna be available
uh for uh the Apéro so you can jump on  his table if you want to talk about his
all his nerdy recipes and how to track value  uh he has a book so wait let me show it again
okay i’m just putting the code because it’s  an ipad it’s an ebook so it’s called business
thinking for designers it was published by  Invision you can find it online it’s amazing
it’s free right really really really interesting  a lot of great recipes and ryan where can you
where can we find you online so easy  you could find me at ryanrumsey.com
uh that’s just kind of where i do some  general writing but also secondwavedive.com
and second wave dive is uh where we  do these six week intensive courses
where you know i call it business thinking but  it’s really about behavior change in humans
and actually knowing very pragmatic ways to  develop your soft skills and street smarts
and so you can find information about that  at second wave dive and we already have one
one lausanne resident who will be joining us in  january uh and we’ve had a few others as well
hello azuro i’ve heard a lot of great things about  about you about your course when’s the next one
next one starts january 25th um and uh in  fact let me grab i have a coupon code for it
he’s good let me grab that real quick and uh  we can give you a little bit of a discount
this is amazing so meanwhile amazing so please  everyone please give a big round of applause for
mr ryan ramsey that was amazing ryan thank you  so much for your time and for sharing all of this
with us thank you yeah sure this is great so uh  everyone if you want to keep uh chatting with ryan
you’re welcome to join us on the rimo room  you just need to go uh with the chrome browser
and have a webcam that’s all you need and yeah we  meet on the other side and i hope you like that
very first i to the apero which was rather  experimental but i think it worked and we were
live on linkedin so this is really amazing and see  you very very soon for the next taper thank you so
much everyone for attending and see you with a glass of wine on the other side
thank you Steph, thank you Ryan
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