Ryan Rumsey
Founder & CEO - Second Wave Dive
Combining Design and napkin math to get leadership buy-in
Ryan Rumsey
Ryan been designing professionally for 20+ years. Over the last decade he’s been building and leading design organizations while supporting some of the most category-defining companies in business today. He is the author of Business Thinking for Designers (2020; published by InVision) and CEO of Second Wave Dive.
Previously, he led Experience Strategy at USAA, building and growing a team of thriving strategists and consultants who served our executive line-of-business teams.
Prior to that, he was responsible for building Product and Design organizations at Electronic Arts and Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences. Before building teams, he designed and developed best-in-class software for Apple.
Links
ITODAY APERO #1
Steph Cruchon: Hey everyone welcome to Itoday Apéro, the very first Itoday Apéro, actually.
I’m Steph and i’m gonna be your host. thank you so much for joining this is really really
exciting, it’s also part of the Google Design Sprint Chapter Meetups and yeah it’s a very first
first time we’re organizing this meetup and i’m super excited to see all of you guys you can just just cheer! yeah we are seeing you so hey everyone thank you so much
for showing up this is really really cool and uh actually we’re gonna have a really good time as you know we are in Europe in the middle of the second wave of Covid-19 and we had to postpone Itoday Masterclasses to next summer and thank you so much our amazing speakers Jake Knapp, Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur also the sponsors and the Swiss Tech Center to have accepted to to postpone the
event and all of you guys uh it’s gonna be really great we have really good hopes
that it’s gonna work in person, the way we want, because now we have good vaccines
(hopefully 94% efficient) it’s gonna be sunny next summer, and it’s gonna be uh in quite some
months… so yeah meanwhile we decided to keep that community together and excited and we had
so much of good feedback and good vibe from the last event from the summer
that we just wanted to keep that community together and we decided to organize Itoday Apéros
so an “apéro” if you don’t know in Switzerland or in France, it’s kind of a time to drink so my
glass is empty now but it’s not going to be after after that so you know make yourself comfortable
just get a good glass of wine if you don’t drink wine it doesn’t matter but just take a good glass
we eat some cheese and it’s really time for you know chatting with friends
and we’re going to chat about innovation today we also want to feature people from the community so
in our next events if you are uh willing to be a speaker yourself please feel free to uh to apply
to be a speaker and i’m gonna be super happy to to host you in the one of the next uh i to the apero
talking about speaker…. today i’m super excited to welcome the amazing Ryan Rumsey live from
Austin Texas! this is really exciting to have you with us Ryan, he’s the author of this
book “Business Thinking for Designers” that was published by Invision
a couple of weeks ago, he’s also one of the world’s best thought leader about design in
general of course, about innovation, he’s the CEO and Founder of a company called “Second Wave Dive“
and this has nothing to do with the second wave of Covid-19- that’s the name of his company (laughs)
and yeah he’s an expert at leading innovation, and big design teams, he led innovation and
transformation teams at companies like Apple, Electronic Arts, Usaa, and also Nestlé because
maybe you don’t know (well, he spoiled it just before the show) but some of you still don’t know that he used to live in Switzerland
and that’s why he’s with us today. Thank you so much for being with us Ryan
please everyone give a big round of applause for mr Ryan Rumsey!
– Ryan Rumsey: Hey everybody hi, so glad to see
you all um like i mentioned before so many uh dear friends that i i haven’t seen in a while
i’m glad to see that you’re healthy and safe and gosh i wish i could be there in person we miss
the mountains a lot um so i thought we would kind of bounce around today um i’d like to be
i’d do better when it’s like just community and we chat with each other uh um just as if we were in
person at a real right apparel um and so i thought i would start by just sort of framing some of the
conversation some of the topics and um you know my work in my career has kind of been to talk
about some elephants in the room if you’re not familiar with the english phrase um you know one
of the things that aren’t often talked about that are usually should be talked about right so today
i want to talk about uh i’m going to start sharing my screen just so we have something to share here
i’m going to bounce around too because i have lots of different things but i’m going to start sharing
because i want to talk about this sort of elephant in the room when it comes to design sprints
so design sprints these wonderful wonderful methods and process that we’ve learned
that don’t necessarily resolve uh um getting permission to sprint if you will
getting the buy-in from our leadership to actually go do these things and create some
change so let’s talk about the sprint to sprint before i do that hey i’m just ryan that’s me
uh as uh steph mentioned here’s some of my past experiences mostly i’ve been involved for like the
last 10 years of introducing new organizational change inside of organizations really all these
transformation type of things and so my job was to transform these organizations into the empowered
product team models uh in support of the growth and innovation that they were seeing as mentioned
this was my book uh steph it was actually published way back in april uh but you know
covid was happening so like that’s too anxious who’s gonna read a book at that time right
yeah it’s free go download it it comes in audible too so as mentioned i am the founder
of second wave day dive what i help uh uh people do is think about the next wave of their career
so we do training coaching and develop communities but it’s all about the next wave of your
self and the next wave of leadership all the things that you didn’t know you needed to know
to feel successful value trusted and confident while meeting the expectations of the companies
that they have of you and we get to work with some rad other companies too anyway let’s get into it
so i want to briefly talk about the current state of affairs let’s baseline let’s do a little bit
of a history lesson right so for the last 10 years design has kind of been all the rage
uh uh we told everybody there was this third leg to the stool uh this venn diagram and it
worked they bought it they totally took it into consideration they were like yeah right
and so now we see all these tools methods and reports that are mainstay including design sprints
a big big part of our everyday and we have all these reports that say design-led innovation and
companies are beating the s p 500 we’re providing more value to the market and we have all these
wonderful rad case studies from companies that inspire us every day that we can learn from and
now there are executives design executives and innovation executives these are all commonplace
ten years ago this isn’t the case we did it y’all like let’s celebrate let’s have a good time right
yes and right so perhaps making it uh is a little bit different than what we have visually pictured
it wasn’t quite what we thought it would be and notice the poker table um many business leaders
are still struggling to sort of understand the value of all this stuff what does this mean i mean
we have it we have it in place but really what is the value of it and i think as a result of that
many teams are still struggling with the realities of everyday organizational change and innovation
so as a result a lot of investment in this type of work is still questioned and when that work
is questioned we have a lot of false starts a lot of frustrations a lot of confusion a lot
of turnover a lot of like we keep doing the same thing over and over again rinse and repeat right
so for the next uh i don’t know 35-ish minutes uh uh give or take let’s talk about some elephants
in the in the room excuse me so from a mckinsey report earlier this year what we found striking
is that some 90 of companies weren’t reaching the full potential and i know i’m mentioning design
but this is really about innovation even in the past five years as they’ve doubled the number of
senior people doing this work that’s striking double the number of people doing the work only 10
people think that they’re getting the the value or potential out of that this is not the language of
business decisions my friends we love post-its and this is not how business decisions are made
nor is this nor are our prototypes and sketches when you’re selling design sprints as a solution
executives actually want the answers to these questions what do i get how much do i get when do
i get it how much will it cost me oh yes they will they want to know those before they fully commit
to incorporating this work and executives won’t sponsor this type of design sprint work
unless they’re seeing the math unless they actually understand how that equates to some
viability stuff okay so what do we kind of need to know about these things well
first and fundamentally when companies hire us either as employees or as consultants
our job is to help them create a competitive advantage right we need innovation so desirable
they create adopted competitive advantages for organizations so i think we need to retire this
venn diagram because it doesn’t quite speak the truth just having these things does not give you
innovation what the companies actually expect of us is innovations to gain a competitive advantage
and so we should really talk about feasibility desirability and viability within the sprint
and if we look at the high level of what a business model is and what a business strategy
is a business model is simply how a company intends to create deliver and capture value
a strategy is just how they do it different than somebody else so my friends again when we look at
sprints sprints are got business strategy covered what they aren’t answering right now is how to
capture value really what i’m talking about is the the the money factor the viability factor
because the goal of a business model is how to figure out how a company sustains itself
how it is actually soluble if it’s a for-profit company it’s how to make money the strategy goal
is just to create a competitive advantage so again sprints do this wonderful thing on the strategy
but our colleagues are going what does it mean how do we capture value out of this right i’m
going to skip a couple of these questions because they kind of get you know we don’t need to go too
but companies have specific strategies to win that is what sprints answer for us uh but you’ve been
hired to make that strategy a reality they want to know how that’s going to capture value for us
here’s another thing innovation is directly related to the model and strategy in place
so i think a lot of the times when we talk about design sprints and creating innovations
not every innovation is the same let’s just take a look at dell and apple right
dell has a very different strategy than apple
dell’s model is to provide direct to consumer products at affordable prices
apple’s is to provide direct to consumer products at premium prices
dell’s strategy is to do that through top-notch supply chain and logistics
apple’s is to do it through integrated systems high quality buying experiences and
innovative design does dell need the same innovations as apple to be successful no
so i think a lot of this is talking about another big elephant in the room is like we don’t actually
have to develop the same types of innovations as these companies that we love in these rad case
studies right because at the end of the day the executive leaders at a company like dell know that
they win they remain a career and create value through superior supply chain right by the way
math matters my friends when somebody asks the roi they’re really asking these four questions right
an roi is a measurement gauge measurement used to gauge the efficiency or effectiveness of a project
investment it’s not a measure of you as a person it’s not a measure of your worth as a person so i
think we just have to understand the basics of those types of things also decisions are
made easier for your colleagues for executive friends when they understand your rationale
they want to understand right they they are suffering from decision fatigue and they want
to understand that taking them down a garden path of what might be doesn’t help relieve that fatigue
your partners need to know why you decided to tell the story in a particular way so they can
understand their rationale your rationale and argument this is all about the numbers my friend
and what narrative storytelling this garden path sort of thing that we end up producing
at the end of a sprint it inspires everybody but it completely misses the
reasoning of why this is going to be important and the assumption i think that we have is this
this comes from bj fogg a well-known uh uh behavior uh uh change uh uh academic
the assumption is that we if we give people the right information it will change their attitude
which in turn will change their behavior so the big elephant in the room here is that value means
different things to different people and i think one of the things that we do a lot with sprints is
talk about perceived value terms like excellence or simple or easy to use factors that are actually
difficult to calculate and when you’re pitching that to an executive what they’re looking at is
what is this going to look like on the balance sheet if i have to invest in 12 people taking
five days which is actually not really the case if i have to invest in 12 people taking multiple
weeks to do this design sprint activity that’s what you know multiple weeks that they’re not
going to be working on other things can you show me the math of why i should make that decision
and by the way we know this mba skills don’t directly translate to showing that value we
need a combination of things because showing value is a systems problem to solve it’s not just about
a design sprint here or a a financial sheet here we actually need to merge these things together
and i think remixing is the key weird al yankovic let’s take the things that are already working and
actually just smash them together well that happens if we actually just combine them together
what might that look like so i’m going to show you a way that we’ve done this that i’ve done this uh
in my past right so let’s talk about setting the stage a previous organization that i worked at uh
there were literally hundreds of product managers who are being skilled up
at the same time in design sprints safe agile and digital capabilities all at once and they
were being asked to create all these new product visions that aligned with organizational okrs
now if you’ve ever been around an organization that is trying to skill up a workforce all at once
they can’t possibly learn all these things at once
and so the opportunity for my team was to help them create just good enough product vision
create good enough product visions which could inspire and align cross-functional partners
and so how did i uh uh sort of lead my team in doing this well uh uh i didn’t tell them
what to do instead i gave them a request for a proposal this is my own team and i said you
tell me how are we going to solve this problem i’m going to give you a request for proposal
and i’m going to facilitate a workshop where we can converge on our own ideas and concepts
into creating some type of new structure no format to help all of our partners in product management
and i gave them a big hairy audacious goal how could we impact 50 different product visions in
one calendar year so rather than just doing heavy service design and journey map types of things
that we might be able to do three or four how might we actually generate in one calendar year
50 product visions really around innovation so i facilitated a workshop for us where we were going
to develop our new value proposition and vision and working agreements as a team that allowed us
to capture our own strengths and gaps when it came to our own skills and the types of activities that
we did that allowed us to identify how we might look across our partners and our organizations
and find willing cross-team partners to actually try some of this new stuff out with us and allowed
us to create some type of working agreement where we had clear expectations of what we as
a team were going to provide and what we weren’t going to provide to the rest of the organization
and we created a value proposition statement for us to sell out to our executives what we
came up with was a novel approach to management consulting so i ran an internal team that was a
management consulting team two colleagues and peers and what we looked to do was address the
gaps between business design and digital strategy to actually help teams create some new innovation
uh we had to prioritize uh the senior leaders across what p l functions who are really
interested in what they were going to get how much will it cost them all these types of things
and uh initially our own measurement was just to see if this was working was
just around utilization where people gonna knock on our door and ask to work with us
and to see how that would happen and so what we did was built a prototype program complete with
activities and targeted test pilots within one week we actually used the design sprint
process to develop a prototype program to then design sprint with other people right
what we did was we modified a full five-day design sprint into a two-day design sprint
and it was focused on developing uh visions that combined not only human-centered design
uh in practices and prototyping and all these things but also business strategy so that we
actually had a balanced view they went out and produced not only these sketches on day one but
we actually looked at some napkin math and how the viability of each one of these favorite sketches
might play out so this was quick sales funnel type napkin math that we would quickly identify the roi
and after a year we didn’t hit our goal of 50 but we did hit a goal of about i think it was just
under 30. we helped approximately 30 different teams develop new innovative ways that they could
either affect their existing business model or propose new business models and our initial uh
uh target of utilization went from uh uh well it increased by 400 percent uh we helped teams
produce hundreds of new capabilities across the organization but more importantly we helped uh
leaders know that the investment in these small types of experiments that are actually cheap to
run over the long haul were a worthwhile investment so i’m going to bounce out here
uh because what i want to do is maybe get some questions first uh before we jump in
great so wait i’m just typing your screen yeah i just have a first question did you
see a difference of culture between switzerland where you worked and in the u.s in this regard uh
yes and no i think switzerland has a genuine appetite to innovate um
whereas in the u.s i think it’s a lot of words are kind of said where i think they’re they’re
both very much in common is the appetite for risk in switzerland is yeah relatively low um but the
appetite for risk in a large uh uh you know this was a financial institution that i worked at with
over 30 000 employees um the appetite for risk at an executive level uh tends to be low right if
things aren’t too broken let’s kind of keep going so i think really the the uh similarities there is
around the appetite to really do and try new things uh is relatively low which is why we
had to even reduce the risk of a five-day sprint down to two days because the initial
reaction was five days that’s that’s so much i can’t take people off their work for five days
let alone 12 people you know so um we’ve heard that a lot too and uh there is the workshop
part that is short and then you have the full prototype and testing part that is longer but yeah
maybe you have some questions from from the crowd
so what other ways of de-risking the innovation process uh maybe you could share ryan other than
maybe reducing the sprint and so one of the ways is is to actually invite non-typical design sprint
people into the room so we would bring people who were like business strategists or business
analysts who were really good and quick at doing napkin math at looking at something like a sales
funnel and saying oh according to our okrs we’re targeting this segment there you know they already
had these numbers in their head this is the approximate number of people in this segment who
we are targeting we need to then hit 10 of that segment in order to achieve our goals to then look
at a prototype then ask a real question you know not how you know how might we but can we
you know and ask that flip side and this is where the business analyst would be a wonderful sort of
saying say like well we have to hit 10 percent and then that was a way for us to have quick
conversations of like well is this prototype need to reduce errors does it need to improve time on
tasks does it need to do something else in order to sort of equate to that napkin map that was one
of the ways the second and probably more important way adrian is to find sidekicks and that’s
actually to look at the power dynamics inside of an organization so we’ve got a shared mural board
i don’t know if everybody’s in there yet but what sidekicks are let me just pull up another
little slide that i can i can share so this is a just a version of a stakeholder map that i use
and so uh forgive me i just quickly kind of threw this up this is my little stakeholder
right but what i look at inside of an organization is who has power and influence
but then who is willing to experiment and so what i ask are two questions
do the people who want to uh to work with us or are looking to create some type of innovation or
or change trying to do really something different do they need help and do they know they need help
because if they know they need help they’re probably at a stan a point where they’ve
tried as much as they know and that hasn’t really helped them they’re kind of feel stuck
and so we we look for these people down here in sidekicks to essentially say if this doesn’t work
if this quick experiment or this design sprint doesn’t work it’s not going to impact the
business overall so what we want to do is actually prototype running design sprints or running a new
process with people to see if they work if they work we would then build internal case studies
based on the results that these teams got to help get them unstuck oops and those are the internal
case studies that we would then pitch to say the more influential the more powerful and essentially
say hey this random team over here uh uh you know got fifty percent improvement uh in fact i think
i have an example here of the this sort of case study i do let me just share a different screen
so you know here’s an example of what that case study might look like right this
blank blank team has handled 2.2 billion in a year on assets but they faced a 10 customer loss
uh we helped them with a vision sprint to essentially see how they could innovate and
as a result they were to able to improve proceeds paid by 50 percent improve all these types of
things so we would use those case studies to then ship out to the more influential the more powerful
the people who were less willing to take on risk as a first-time colleague
more willing to take on risk when they saw that the method was proven out and already working
great um i think remy amy you have a question right yup i do uh but okay whoops sorry can
you hear me well it’s fine i can yes fine well thank you so much for your generosity and time um
my question here it’s much more practical is just that according to my own experience when
we tend to intervene with c-level people or things like this when we would then to think
that these people have a clear vision of the metrics and definition of success and common set
goals it seems like it’s not that obvious most of the time and access to metrics and data in
order to take good decision is not that easy i was wondering if you had any tips in order
to access the right data and to align people on the common goal and definition of success well
i do so let’s talk about math a little more i’m going to pull up a separate deck hold on one sec
duck let’s talk about math okay so
just going to share a different deck because i think when we talk a lot about
uh metrics and assumptions business assumptions right around all these
things i think a lot of times our leaders will say same something like we need to retain more users
and we go out and we run away and we google how to retain users uh right to our hearts
content uh but our first job before we do that is to actually ask about the math that they’re
already using essentially it’s to challenge the business assumption with math assumptions so and i
i suggest doing this from a very curious and uh humble right uh standpoint but essentially
saying like hey right when people talk about roi there’s actual math equations involved there
so a lot of times they’ll say like we need to retain more users uh hold on one sec there we go
i want to make sure that my sharing is working okay we need to retain more users so i think the
first question we should ask is awesome we love to retain users what’s our current retention rate
because if they don’t have an answer they’re not using math and they’re just guessing
right and there is no way to calculate the return on investment on a guess
so what we can do is say oh gosh you know it’s really going to be a struggle for us because for
us everything aligns to your math if we don’t know what your current retention rate is and how you’re
going to target and fruit your improvement all of our experiments are based on that number and we’re
really afraid that we might do something that screws it up accidentally and that’s a risk you
know that i don’t think either of us want to take so it’s this way to sort of like get there and
just ask a little bit about the math and and see if it’s actually being used because otherwise it’s
a setup right and and you know one of the ways that i’ll i’ll stop sharing for now so i can see
one of the ways that i’ve talked about it in the past is like
you know you and me we don’t want to show up in front of the cfo in six months and uh the
cfo is wondering why our balance sheet is all screwed up because we decided to move a button
uh goodness that looks bad that’s a risk neither of us want to take right and so it’s this kind of
um sowing some doubt but also asking for an invitation right it’s inviting people to say like
let’s get serious about our metrics yeah obviously it’s what we do as well these days but it’s so
hard to have like a metric culture implemented yet but it’s coming little
by little be careful yeah yeah the realities of metrics right or first baseline then benchmark
then set right and if you’re doing that for the first time if you don’t actually have those
that’s like a six month process we won’t actually know any targets for six months and that is
like to go through that six-month gauntlet of fear right that’s that’s really really
hard so what we try to do is make those as like micro as we can let’s just start with one metric
see how that goes and if it doesn’t go well you know we’ll keep you know no big deal
and i think that’s one of the the underlying things is it’s so overwhelming we see these great
uh books or or you know uh talks from uh friends that like netflix who have like metrics galore
or right or or at apple you know when i joined apple we were using standard deviations of metrics
not just the metrics themselves that’s such an inspiring thing and it’s so overwhelming like you
have to do these very basic things to even get to a point where those things start to come in
and that is maybe something that the executive has not done in the past
and maybe something that they don’t want to like let everybody know that they haven’t
been doing that in the past right it’s really hard uh ryan i’m having a question um yeah
on the do you have a way to measure the cost of opportunity of not doing something oh sure
oh sure not doing something is the status quo yes right uh not doing something
is uh so let’s just go over here again so there’s when i talk about remixing right uh let’s just do
uh some swot analysis on the status quo right so when presenting recommendations or options and you
have or are working with a team that uh doesn’t really want to change one of the recommendations
that i always put up forward is like here’s the swat of not changing here’s the here’s the
strengths and opportunities of not actually going and doing anything different and by highlighting
that we could say like look we’ve been trying this thing for three years and nothing has happened
we can choose to continue to do the same thing and we should expect the exact same same results uh so
you know it’s it’s also a challenge and i think for us as innovators it also gives a little bit
of window into is this a place that’s going to work for me as an employee um i don’t want
to keep you know beating the same drum and if i put forward a prison you know some type of
analysis that says i’m confident in this analysis that doing the same thing doing the status quo
will result in the same results um maybe this is not really this is not going to work for me
and maybe you know it’s a it’s an opportunity to go work with a new partner or
or look for something else cool who has a question for ryan
or maybe a story of pushback when you were trying to to to sell a design project
from senior leadership i have a question hi ryan hi sabrina nice to meet you um where do i get the
right data so sometimes it’s not really clear you know what will be the outcome of a sprint
so you have different kinds of stakeholder there where do you find the right beta so um
i’m gonna rephrase it in a different way write depends right is contextual right always changes
there is no one piece of data so what i do if i’m consulting before i start the engagement what i
ask them to do is just grab every bit of data they already have and mostly what i ask them to do is
start with two teams your sales team your customer support team those organizations typically are the
most mature in tracking things like sales top of funnel stuff or tracking the costs of support
when you get into uh support organizations and this is where i’ve spent a lot of my background
they measure things like time on task first call resolution average handle time and they calculate
well a phone call costs 12 times as much as a text message so you can quickly do some napkin
math and say can you tell me or if you’re working with a you know like a partner on on the business
side as an engagement on the client side and go can you go to your customer support team and ask
them just what these baseline measures are for the last three months because what we want to evaluate
is some see if there’s any correlation you know we know it’s not causation we know it’s not going to
be a direct link there’s all these other factors but if we do a design sprint the question i would
then ask is what happened to those keys customer support or sales metrics 60 days after the sprint
then you can build up a case study to then go to your next client and say here’s what we did you
can have this too and so it’s the same case when i talked about those internal case studies of
you know even if you’re working in-house is to go just find
whatever data it is i think a lot of times when when organizations use things like nps or csat
our initial like academic brain sort of says like those aren’t those aren’t really showing the value
right and we get frustrated with the metric and instead what i say it’s it’s just just a tool
right the only way to validate that something isn’t working is to then show that there’s no
correlation right so that’s how i do it when i engage with uh clients is to say
grab any types of metrics that you have do you have mau do you have dau do you
have nps do you have csat do you have average handle time do you have any of these things
and if they don’t if they don’t if nobody has metrics then i just talk about the risks
that we’re going to see it’s like i’m happy to charge you for a design sprint but if we don’t
baseline any of these things you’re probably not going to get the opportunity to do it again and
my thoughts are that you don’t want to just do it once you want to continue to do it again and again
thanks so i i think also that maybe if you don’t have let’s say kind of data with customers
uh you always can relate to date data uh regarding the time a team spend for let’s
say a certain amount of a certain amount of hours that’s right get to us that’s right you know and i
think a lot of business leaders want to know like the napkin math you could take an average salary
of the people attending and what five days might cost the company you know uh of not doing work
sorry to interrupt you you were going to continue
okay i think that’s perfect so i think we need that right steph sure yeah of course uh
also i think in in my experience there is also the how to say there is also the the fact that um
at the end of the sprint a lot of the value um is that it unlocked something that would have never
went anywhere you know like they would have never started this project or never done it because
they didn’t they were too afraid of risking things and i think it’s also part of the value
is that the projects are moving forward versus being uh being killed or not not being done so
yeah how how do you measure that value um that’s yeah just the projects are moving
is that a question yeah like this is why i really see the value of the sprint is that projects are
happening aft after oh yeah so that’s that’s the case of like when initially just starting
the the data point we used for my team was just utilization do more people want to work with
us right and then we as an internal consulting team gave out our own surveys for satisfaction
right and we would then work canon or you know track how people would then do it so check in
with them we had a regular cadence of checking in after 30 60 90 days tell me what’s happening so a
lot of it was also anecdotal you know of working with somebody where they say you know my business
leaders trust me more and and i would then have to ask again that’s you know that’s wonderful
how do you know that they trust you more and so there was other anecdotal evidence where they’d
say you know when i talk they’re no longer looking at their computers or their phones
yeah because you’re becoming someone uh right you know um prior to me run doing this work
nobody asked me to do research up front i now get asked three times a week to do research up front
prior to me doing this my boss never really asked me what uh what i want my future job to be
now my boss is currently working with me to right prior to me doing this my team never
really talked about doing this now they’re asking me every day how can we do this more so there’s
there’s the hard metrics of trying to go find that sort of correlation uh but then there’s
all the sort of qualitative stuff and you can package that up as case studies and it’s pretty
powerful when you when you have somebody say nobody’s opening their laptop while i talk
right yeah yeah i think uh because you are becoming uh someone in the company and you
have been working directly as a human being you know with your boss your leader in one team and
you break all these silos and that’s where i see a lot of value probably maybe it’s hard to
quantify but it’s how many people who have quit their companies if they couldn’t work that way
versus the people you can attract or retain uh in your company if you work that way i don’t
know how to quantify that but i see so i know how to quantify it it’s just a long process uh i can
i can this is like what i teach in my communities so i teach a different version of okrs
uh uh which actually let me see if i could find it real quick uh
go ahead and fill up the space with some chatter but um go ahead so uh about chatter
um we i think we’re gonna stop in like five minutes and we’re gonna meet on remo
so it’s the same like i to the summit you can just click on the link if you have google chrome
you can join us and it’s gonna be like free you can move from table to table and have really good
time with her uh with with chatting and take a good glass of wine yeah yeah all right so i
found it yeah i found it i’m gonna open it up so what i help organizations uh build and create are
these few big huge maps of right if you’re talking about design or really desirability
how do you translate something like reduce login failure over to increase csat how do you increase
engagement by four percent how does that translate to lifetime value by three percent so what i help
organizations do is build out these full maps of okrs uh all these types of things and then i help
them right right sorry again just repeat what okay is because i’m sure in switzerland a lot of people
don’t know i know it’s common so okrs uh the same as kpis if you’ve if you know kpis so uh okrs are
objectives and key results think of them as a high level objectives or outcomes that an organization
wants and how they’re going to measure them with key results kpis key performance indicators
metrics these types of things so a lot of times what organizations might be able to do is um sort
of translate at a high level right the business wants to uh increase revenue by two million
right or or acquire a hundred thousand users these types of things and what okrs allow us to do
is cascade that down to an individual team that says we’re just going to be on time on budget
so what i helped people do is build out these full uh scorecards of connecting
innovation or desirability objectives and key results something like usability or
accessibility or whatnot how that actually translates into business key results who is
the typical person you are talking to in a in a company so people who train with me are usually
design leads through design executives uh we haven’t been taught this uh right but when i
go and work with companies it’s typically a ceo or the c-suite team like the founding team who
may have gotten to a certain point now they’re trying to scale and what worked for them to get
to that initial point is not going to help them get to 10x of that point now suddenly
they have to be mature with measurement and they have to make very different trade-off
decisions and they don’t know what they don’t know and they hear designers talking about
you know things like usability and they can’t actually see how that translates to more sales
so i help them uh walk through and sort of show them the realities of one being able to
do this but then the reality is of like it’s going to take a little time to do this right
one last question for ryan hey i have one yeah ryan you i want to go back to uh something you
said about you have to decide if this organization is for you it’s related to that uh by the way it
was it was a wonderful presentation thank you um well my question to you is having done this
for so long what are the signals that you observe um that tell you that you have to grit it out
or it’s time to pack it in it’s not going to happen in this organization or for this group
because it’s emotionally exhausting work how do you get smart about this but not always
second guess so i actually gave a tedx talk in lausanne hey serge about this which is um what
we’re talking about is like my own individual values and what drives me as a person uh
and so i’ve had to this is nerdy but i developed my own rubric and rating system to essentially
do quick napkin math of like where my desire is and how many times i’ve actually tried to fix
a situation so if i think something is very valuable to me but i’ve not tried to fix it
well it must not mean that much but something if i’ve really got desire to
you know have this and i’ve tried a lot to fix it and it’s not happening that’s when i kind of
look internally and go like maybe this is not a match right and so i go through this exercise
maybe quarterly to sort of uh and that’s because you’re talking right really a combination of like
things that i need as an individual which is like can i be home by dinner uh uh do i have to work
80 hours a week or can i just work my 40 hours a week right all these things combined with am
i motivated by the work uh do i see the morale of the people around me raising or you know or going
down like making that kind of call is a decision between those both those things and so this little
exercise that i do is like how do i combine all those subjective factors how do i try to make them
you know more objective um so i could i could share a link to this nerdy process but
it’s not an easy thing right it isn’t it isn’t that is why it’s i wanted to know thank you
sure this is amazing thank you so much ryan so ryan’s gonna be available
uh for uh the Apéro so you can jump on his table if you want to talk about his
all his nerdy recipes and how to track value uh he has a book so wait let me show it again
okay i’m just putting the code because it’s an ipad it’s an ebook so it’s called business
thinking for designers it was published by Invision you can find it online it’s amazing
it’s free right really really really interesting a lot of great recipes and ryan where can you
where can we find you online so easy you could find me at ryanrumsey.com
uh that’s just kind of where i do some general writing but also secondwavedive.com
and second wave dive is uh where we do these six week intensive courses
where you know i call it business thinking but it’s really about behavior change in humans
and actually knowing very pragmatic ways to develop your soft skills and street smarts
and so you can find information about that at second wave dive and we already have one
one lausanne resident who will be joining us in january uh and we’ve had a few others as well
hello azuro i’ve heard a lot of great things about about you about your course when’s the next one
next one starts january 25th um and uh in fact let me grab i have a coupon code for it
he’s good let me grab that real quick and uh we can give you a little bit of a discount
this is amazing so meanwhile amazing so please everyone please give a big round of applause for
mr ryan ramsey that was amazing ryan thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of this
with us thank you yeah sure this is great so uh everyone if you want to keep uh chatting with ryan
you’re welcome to join us on the rimo room you just need to go uh with the chrome browser
and have a webcam that’s all you need and yeah we meet on the other side and i hope you like that
very first i to the apero which was rather experimental but i think it worked and we were
live on linkedin so this is really amazing and see you very very soon for the next taper thank you so
much everyone for attending and see you with a glass of wine on the other side
thank you Steph, thank you Ryan
(music)
