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

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.

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.