Seriously Curious: Organizational Maturity and User Experience

CHRIS: Welcome back to Seriously Curious, a podcast about all things experience for business, strategy and design. I’m Chris Rockwell. I’m president and founder of Lextant, the Human Experience Firm here in Columbus, Ohio. And I’m super excited today to be joined by Heidi Munc of Nationwide. Heidi, thanks for being with us today.

HEIDI: Thanks for having me today, Chris.

CHRIS: So Heidi is VP of User Experience at Nationwide. It’s a leading financial services and insurance provider, and she has a team of over 70 plus UX specialists. She’s an accomplished executive, a pathfinder, I would say for Nationwide, what I’ve seen, thought leadership and a talented designer and then also, just a talented travel and food enthusiast, a creator. I see all the things when I follow you on Facebook and Instagram. Civil servant now, which I think is so awesome.

HEIDI: Job number two.

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. And, of course, a provider for your family and for the community. So thanks so much for being here.

HEIDI: Absolutely

CHRIS: Super excited. Today we’re going to be talking about organizational maturity and user experience. You know, there’s so many investments being made now and experience, you know, not not just at the product and service level where most of us have built our career, but now at the enterprise level, too. And so experiences like it’s come to maturity, we no longer have to get on the mountain and say, hey, this is important.

HEIDI: That’s right. We no longer have to beg for a chair to have a seat at the table.

CHRIS: So everybody has the religion now. But then that begs the question, how do we get better at it? Right? How do we build an organizational core competency, and equip an organization to be customer centric? And so that’s what I’m hoping we can talk about today. And I think Nationwide’s done a great job of that under your leadership and others. And, there’s a lot to learn there. So let’s talk about that.

HEIDI: Let’s get into it.

CHRIS: Yeah. Maybe we can start a little bit with you and your journey. Tell me about, you know, how you’ve got here and, in this kind of position of leadership in UX.

HEIDI:Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it’s kind of a winding path. And I actually love everybody’s origin stories. It’s one of my first, you know, questions. I asked, like, how did you get here? Because, you know, for folks our age, there wasn’t like there was a UX school or, you know, certification. And at once we really had to find our way. And for me, and I’ll try to tell the story quickly because it starts when I’m 13. But I was watching the Super Bowl with my dad. It was 1982, and it was the famous 1982 Apple ad. If you haven’t heard it before, like, go look it up, 1980. No, I’m sorry, 1984. No, Orson Welles Apple commercial. and I was so excited about it because it didn’t show the product and I didn’t know what it was about, and I just went into research mode, like, what is this thing? And finally found where there was one of the computers in town, asked my dad to bring me there so I could see it. And I thought, oh, this is great. Like that commercial changed my behavior and made me do something. I want to do that, which is kind of like advertising, right? Like we’re talking the early 80s when I’m thinking about this. but I wanted to do it for all that sort of like social good things, like, yeah, teach kids not to smoke, don’t litter all that. What somehow got all the way through college with a degree to lead me towards advertising without anybody telling me that job doesn’t exist. Right? Like that’s your pro-bono account. You really get to work on it about four hours a week, and the rest of the time you’re selling stuff that people don’t actually need to them. So I was disenchanted. And right around then the internet was born and I was super excited about the internet. This is going to democratize information. Yeah, it’s going to level the playing field, kind of like equal things out in society. So I got a job at CompuServe, which I still like, absolutely adore. My years at CompuServe were so informative. Purchased by AOL. So it’s like AOL, Netscape, CompuServe all together went through that for nine years. But really the model was an advertising model. You know if you think about AOL back in those days, they were getting you to click on a bunch of things before they gave you the content. And I started to get worried when I was looking at search result queries where people are searching for things like breast cancer. I’m like, oh my gosh, there’s some poor woman somewhere who’s anxious and she wants to know about breast cancer. What’s are the symptoms? And we’re making her click five times before we give her information, like, can’t we just give her the information? So I was starting to develop the language of looking out for the user, looking out for the customer, you know, really getting them what they need quickly. And that was kind of before UX was a term. Yeah. So I just kind of always wanted to be oriented that way. And it took a little while before there was a field for it. So, you know, AOL, you know, that whole story of demise. And that was right here in Columbus, Ohio. And I took a job with Nationwide leading their design department, their digital design department, thinking I would only be there for a year, and then I’d parlay that into something exciting out on the West Coast, but really fell in love with the mission of Nationwide protecting what matters most for people. And it was on the UX team. And it’s kind of like everything came together where I finally had the job I wanted when I was 13 years old, watching the Super Bowl with my dad. So it was a long road, but it was a very exciting road, and I wouldn’t change any of it for anything because I learned a ton along the way.

CHRIS: Yeah, well, as you know, my career has been as a consultant primarily. CompuServe was one of my first clients, and we were doing out of box experience for CompuServe. Remember when they shipped you that little CD? 

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: And we found out like five of six people couldn’t actually like you know…

HEIDI: Couldn’t install it. Yeah. 

CHRIS: So the first moments of truth were really, you know a challenge. But it also for me really launched this idea that, you know, everything that we make, you know, impacts how we work, live and play.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: And so how do we make sure that we really understand how to design things that add value to people’s lives. Right. And so I love that, I love that story. And I, you know, seeing so many organizations in my career, one thing I’m always impressed with is just how Nationwide has always it’s always kind of been a little bit ahead, you know, especially like, you know, sometimes you think about insurance and you think about, well, you know, is it just about fear, uncertainty and doubt or whatever? No, it’s not, you know, that’s you’re protecting the things that people, you know, have built their whole lives around — their family, their homes and things like that. So it’s a highly emotional, experiential area. And so I’ve really enjoyed, you know, working with you in that area, but just been impressed with how the organization has grown. So maybe tell us a little bit about your team right there at Nationwide.

HEIDI: Yeah. And it has grown a ton. So when I started, I do think there were seven or seven to 10. Let’s call it seven to 10, folks when I started there. And I’ve been with Nationwide for 17 years now, which was, you know, originally not to plan, but have absolutely loved the way we’ve grown. And when I started, it was more of your bread and butter UX, more evaluative research, you know, basically you had your feature backlog and you’re working off the feature backlog and you’re running users through testing. We didn’t really have permission or really the team to be able to look too far ahead and get into that more generative space so that, that happened over time. And it really was really intentional how we’ve built that up, kind of getting permission to go

one step further, one step further, one step further, you know. So one of the first competencies we added on was more that generative research, really uncovering unmet needs, thinking about kind of new to world or new to industry products and services that can help protect people. And moving into that area and then moving a little bit into the strategy space, like really determining that we could be good allies with the business strategy folks as they were thinking about, how does the business succeed in five years? We’re making sure that we’re thinking about, well, what are customers going to need in five years? How are we bridging that gap and making sure that all of those roads come together at some point? We kind of started moving into the CX space, which is so interesting and another thing I love to talk to other leaders about, like where is your CX organization? Is it the same as your UX organization? Where are you organized inside your enterprise? We started learning more about CX because when we started thinking about things from a journey perspective and not a product perspective, it immediately bounces you out of the digital channel and you start thinking about all the different interactions that folks can have with Nationwide or the company that you’re working for. And then that leads you to more of this, like journey-centric, customer-centric approach. All of a sudden now you have to be allies with the folks in the call center and in operations and in claims management, because the ideas you have for improvement bridge across all of those silos. And now with generative AI, it’s sort of like the next evolution of things like, how are we thinking about the experience that folks want to have with a generative AI solution? What do they need to know to trust it? If the associate is working with it, what do they need to feel comfortable with it? So one of the things that I love is that it always feels like there’s room for the value that the team provides to the organization to expand as technology and expectations from customers change.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s so much to unpack there. One thing that strikes me about insurance specifically is that most when consumers buy a product that’s sort of like the promise made, right? And then supporting the experience is kind of like the promise kept, you know.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: And you, you win or lose customers in that equation. For me, especially in insurance, you know, I love when you say it’s not about the digital experience, it’s really about the whole experience. Right. And it’s especially crucial when things in your life don’t go well because that’s when you need, you know, your, your partner in this case, you know, the product that you purchase, the investment that you’ve made in the relationship to come to life. And I remember working early with Nationwide on all different aspects of this. But like the call center, you know, you talk to your agent, then you call the call center, and they would ask you all the same queries. And it was like, you know, there was no sense of who you are in that experience. The relationship didn’t move with you across the journey. Right? I love the way you’re thinking about that now, and even some of the things you mentioned, CX. It’s been really interesting to see the evolution of CX right now. CX went from being a call center to now doing customer journey modeling and personas and having experienced core values. Tell me a little bit about how that’s changed. I’m thankful that some of your leadership have moved up to that level.

HEIDI: Right. 

CHRIS: Which gives you some connective tissue.

HEIDI: It does give some connective tissue, which is fantastic. But yeah, I mean, I think our first foray strictly out of the digital business came after I presented to some of the leaders in our property casualty lines of business, and we’re just kind of like showing them the magic of UX and listening to your customers. And you know what that can do from a business results perspective. And I get a call the next day from one of the contact center operational leaders saying, like, I really need your help with this. And I’m super jazzed because it’s a new channel and we get to do work on it. And she’s like, okay, I need you to reduce personal lines, call volume by 50% next year. And I was like, okay, well, we can stop publishing the number on everything, but I think probably we’re going to have to take a more comprehensive approach to this. Yeah. So we worked with her to uncover like, what are the top call drivers, all your standard contact center stuff. But then went that level deeper, like where are people first looking for the information, you know, what should we add to the digital channel so they can self-service there and eliminate those calls? How do we make them aware of those new capabilities so they can actually find them instead of just picking up the call? And then when do people really, really need to just talk to a person? There are certain times when that promise needs to be kept and, you know, like something traumatic has happened to you. It doesn’t matter how good our online system is, they’re going to want to talk to a person. They want that reassurance. That’s one of our customer experience principles. Reassuring. So we just wanted to like delineate, okay, when are the times you’re absolutely going to have to call, how do we better train the call center reps to like be first time final there and to think proactively about what the next couple of calls could be after that. 

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: So they’re solving that all in the first call. And then how do we make people aware of the digital enhancements that we’re making for things that people would frankly rather not talk to someone about. They just want to be able to do it themselves.

CHRIS: Yeah. From a maturity, you know, standpoint, the role of CX has really changed in the last, I would say, five to 10 years maybe. Almost every enterprise-level CX program or organization that I talked to now is doing customer journey mapping and personas. So things that typically we were doing at the product and service level. Right. So tell me tell me about that. Is that just a recognition from leadership that we have to go beyond just answering the phone to really understanding the complete customer lifecycle or how did that evolve? And what does it mean for the work that you know you’re doing across the enterprise and down into the product and service level? You know, because I think that’s where some some gaps exist now, where maybe even some, you know, competition for, you know, who owns the knowledge of the customer and what we’re doing. 

HEIDI: Yes. Yeah. And that competition can be real messy. And we probably can have a whole separate session on that. We’ve definitely experienced it because, you know, you start to grow your UX competency and you might get the marketing team, you know, concerned. Well, we do the customer research, right. The strategy folks. We do the customer research. So there’s a lot of different people who have similar goals. So we can always align on the goals. We’re just trying to make this better for our customers and then figure out who’s doing what. But at Nationwide, we did have this more mature UX team. This is probably going back in the time machine now, about seven years ago, seven or eight years ago, a pretty mature UX organization and really nascent CX organization. So it was happening in pockets in the call centers. And at the time, UX was organized under marketing. So we reported to the marketing leader, and he asked me to kind of deliver a strategy, like, what would a CX strategy look like? And I worked with my business partners and another executive to, you know, go out and ask them like, well, what are you looking for? Well, they didn’t even know what they were looking for. They didn’t know what they were missing. So it was kind of a journey we went on together. How could this be a little bit different? And journey maps came up in that right here is a way to get people to think end to end. Right. And it took a minute for me to understand that when I said end to end, I was talking about the different phases of the customer journey, the different moments of truth. But business leaders and operations people were thinking about end to end, from top to bottom, like, what are the business processes and what are the technical systems and the limitations and the rules. And like the state, the, you know, local and federal governance, they were thinking end to end that way. And that was a real “ah-ha” moment that we’re speaking different languages. So we had this business language, this UX language and this nascent language that we were trying to build a system around so that we could be most efficient. so we started growing CX competency within my team, where we really were thinking about like, what are those customer experience principles? Can we align around three words that the entire organization will use in any role to help deliver a better customer experience? And that’s a lot more focused on how are you working with your HR department to build out the training for that? How are you putting measures in place so that associates are measured against delivering that? So that’s a whole other part of it. That was new for the UX team and was really fascinating. Like people loved leaning into that and learning their way into it.

CHRIS: Yeah. You know, one of the I think the most important things I’ve learned is that nobody comes to work saying, you know, I can’t wait to create an experience that my customers hate like nobody has.

HEIDI: Nobody says that.

CHRIS: So we can really leverage that and say, okay, well here’s how. Here are the tools that you can use to be customer centric. I love the idea of this sort of I think you call my experience core values or principles. The principles. Yeah. how do we, you know, how do we, operationalize, operationalize those at every touchpoint of the journey so that we know how to turn those ideas into real experiences, and then you measure and then you mentioned metrics to which I think, is another area that you know, I think is so important to our profession. When you see the amount of investment that’s going into right capability to deliver on experience, you know, organizations, leaders are starting to ask, is that investment paying off? And in fact, in fact, when I saw the huge influx, you know, in during the pandemic, when everybody was a UX person and they just hired a million of them, and then to see it sort of go the other way after, you know, it was sort of a little bit of a signal like we didn’t get it done, you know, like, and instead of, you know, so now we have to, you know, recover somewhat, I suppose.

HEIDI: Reputationally, I think we do need to recover some. And I think it’s an important lesson on having a parallel path approach if you’re going to if you if you are fortunate to work for a company that has decided to invest a ton in a UX competency and build that competency, and particularly if you are the leader who has been hired to do so, and you have been given a lot of money to quickly hire 10 to 50 people to build this UX team, it is really critical that you parallel path your your workload so that you are delivering value right away. Like you cannot wait three months, six months, nine months. To deliver value, you need to find a quick problem to solve that you can measure. And this is where I would go back to call center opportunities, because the operations team knows exactly how much each call cost. And if you can measure that, you’ve reduced calls even 2%, 5%, that is those are dollars that you can put on a sheet and talk to people about, and that nothing succeeds like success. That gets you invited to the party more. And then you can start thinking about those, like, for us, more interesting problems that are a little more creative and a little further out and a little a little a little more complicated. but the business really wants their problem solved right away.  So if you can do a couple of those for them, you’re setting yourself up to not have the spigot turned off in a year because they’re not seeing what they thought they were going to out of that investment.

CHRIS: Yeah. So connecting your work to real, tangible business results, 

HEIDI: right.

CHRIS: And to business KPIs, I think is critical and telling the story. I think for, for some reason, you know, UX people tend to be pretty good storytellers. I mean, in fact, I think user experience is a the unifying language across the organization. You were talking about how, you know, the organization thinks about technologies and policies and procedures. You know, in other companies, it’s like manufacturing is talking about chamfered edges and, clearances, you know, but

HEIDI: yeah, right. 

CHRIS: but the thing that everybody understands is a story about experience. So when you can talk about what are the barriers to it and how you created facilitation to, you know, for it, and then you can tell that story. it just it gets you the traction that you’re looking for, I think. And so, I think as good as UX folks can be at doing the work, sometimes we don’t tell our story well enough, you know.

HEIDI: and sometimes we tell it too well, or we tell it from our perspective too well. Right. Because we are naturally very empathetic. People want to solve these problems. Yeah. And I have I am guilty of falling on that sword, too many times, and then it’s just not as effective as I wanted it to be. And so what I have found is have to vary the blend of the heart, string and purse strings story and weight it differently depending on who I’m talking to.

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: I have some, you know, business partners who are just very analytical and I can tell half of a heartstrings story and they’re like, yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s important to people, but then it needs to be followed up with purse strings. And I have other folks that I partner with who was like, okay, if I can bring them three sound bites of experiences that went really poorly or disappointed our customers, which we never, never want to do, they’re all bought in because they don’t want to. They don’t want to hear that people cannot unhear audio. So if you have an opportunity to do like quick video diaries or things like that and bring that to your meetings, it’s so much more impactful than the PowerPoint story, the PowerPoint version of the story. It can really do a lot. You just can’t overuse it. So for me, it’s been a journey of finding the right blend of those two things so that I can be as effective as I want to be.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think for us too, I think, it’s it’s not always about the emotional, empathetic thing for the customer. That’s a, that’s a critical thing. But you also have to connect it to business results in real concrete, you know, like what are we in our case? You know, we’re here to not only create great experiences for our customers, but to make sure our business can survive in the people and get paid and you stuff like that. So so I agree with you. I think we have to tell the business value story as much as we can tell the customer experience story, maybe even more so. Maybe we need to lead with that to get people’s attention, and then we can show how we did it through experience, and then all of a sudden that becomes like, oh, we can wield that as a tool to better and to differentiate and to do all the things that businesses want.

HEIDI: Absolutely. It’s a good formula. Hey business, I see your business problem.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: Your returns are this you need them to be twice as much, right? Here are some barriers that might be getting in your way. Yeah. You know this is the experience part that I can help you us like here’s what we know about what’s disappointing people. Here’s what we think fixing it will do. Yeah. So that’s like a nice simple formula that you can use with your business partners. That’s great.

CHRIS: Yeah, I love it. The, the other thing I think you can do is you can, you can go off of what the business is already measuring. so one of the things I love nowadays is almost every business, you know, for a while there was customer satisfaction. Satisfaction. We’re going to measure satisfaction. Right. And then it was like, okay, well, satisfaction went up or satisfaction went down and everybody was like, okay, why? Well, we don’t know, you know. So and then it was Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter Score intrinsically is a very simple, you know, would you refer this service or product to, to somebody else, which it’s elegant,

HEIDI: but you loved for its simplicity right.

CHRIS: But but it doesn’t. It’s it’s not it doesn’t, tell you it’s not diagnostic, right. It doesn’t tell you what to go change, and it doesn’t tell you what the, it doesn’t predict what the market will say necessarily. So I think some of our work can get much more granular. It’s one of the reasons I like experience metrics. That’s one of the areas that Lextant is really focused on right now, and it’s based on some of our desired experience work. In fact, some of the words, you know, that you’re using for your core values, I think, you know, may have been based on some of that work we did together, but now you now we have that, now we have these core values like let’s use those as measures and connect those to business KPIs and show, hey, when we can deliver more, you know, of X, then we get Y.

HEIDI: Yeah, you guys have developed a great system of metrics for experience, and I think it is so critical that people look at it. I mean, it’s as attractive as the elegant solution is. It’s those those metrics are very lagging. And like you said, it’s very hard to quickly drive real improvements off of them. So you need other things that are further upstream that can kind of help catch that on the way in. So you’re not running around with your hair on fire at the end of like JD power?

CHRIS: Yeah, right.

HEIDI: You know, the month that the month that JD power reports get released, like a bunch of your listeners might right now are like kind of cringing because they’re like, oh, I know that fire drill. And then everybody’s mad about it. Why did the score get this way? It kicks off this flurry of activity and motion doesn’t always mean progress. But sometimes, just like I need you to take action now and then you’re like, put into a corner trying to figure out what’s the right way out of this.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: So looking at those experience metrics up front, I think are critical. And tying that, tying KPIs to KPIs. So you’re thinking about both of those things at the same time. You’re going to get a better result at the end that way by approaching it that way.

CHRIS: Yeah. There there was a client that we worked with that that won J.D. Power Awards for Best New Customer Origination Experience, and they wanted every year, and they had no idea why. So they were afraid to innovate. Yeah. They were like, no, we’re not you know, we don’t want to tell you. And so it’s like, let’s let’s make sure we understand what’s happening in here. What are the levers and dials so that then we can amplify that and innovate even better experiences. So I think it’s interesting. There’s, there’s scores that you get, you know, people get promoted and careers like, you know, die sometimes on some of these words.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: But they’re not necessarily, the best measures I think I’ve experienced. So the more that we can provide the organization support I think is important. So so, so you mentioned some of the how the growth at the enterprise level works. Really. It sounds like it allowed you to sort of accomplish your vision, to go beyond digital and to really teach the organization that, you know, this is not the thing, this is the experience around the whole thing. Right. and so you have an ally, at this level. Yeah. I know some organizations are struggling a little bit with that connective tissue. How do you take some of the things that are coming from the enterprise level and make sure that you can deliver either deliver those on the product and service level or vice versa, bubble up the things you’re learning at the service level to what you should be thinking about, what a successful experience looks like. Yeah, because the moments of truth or are down here or down here, right?

HEIDI: Yeah. And because it’s a podcast, you can’t say we’re pointing at different altitudes here, but it really is sort of an altitude. It becomes an altitude discussion. Right. So when we were tasked with what are the key components of customer experience and how do we build that competency in UX or in Nationwide, not in UX, but we had some of it in UX. Eventually the decision was made to have a C department, and a leader was put in place who reported right to the CEO. So that’s fantastic. That shows you’re like, you really, really for real care about this. We’re adding this competency. And then to kind of kickstart off that leader and help set her up for success. I took a portion of my team and moved it into that organization. So I kind of like seeded her organization with my folks like talent and expertise. and partly that was for the good of everything. And partly that was really selfish because I knew if I had my folks in there, you know, we were going to be setting ourselves off on the right foot for having a good relationship, the two teams working together, because now there’s two teams, and we have to have all those conversations about what happens, at what level and how do we partner. And honestly, for the first year, year and a half, it was a little bit sticky in the middle because it is very hard to snap a chalk line and say, CX happens over here and UX happens over here. Like that doesn’t make sense. So we really started talking about things in terms of altitude. So when we were developing the customer experience principles, it was the CX team that took the lead on that. They owned that then, okay. And they were the ones who went around and said, like, how do we distill all of these things, all of this customer research and insights and marketing and business strategy and experience strategy and distill it down into three words and then get the detail underneath that so it can be actionable in any area of the organization. So that’s a very, very, very high altitude. Right. And requires a lot of training and all of that. So they want to work on that. But we immediately took those three words. And when we were working with our business partners on, you know, our usage based insurance product and experience, you know, a mobile experience for that. We were like, smart, right? That’s right. We’re applying those experience principles to that work and helping our business partners like activate them in the design. Coming out of the research that we had been doing with customers, and then we just consult with business partners to, you know, we’re UX folks, so we know how to apply, you know, frameworks like that. We have a little bit more experience than other parts of the organization. So we’ll just work on a consulting basis where we’re helping them determine how to activate that and that and their area. But ultimately they own the experience. The businesses own their own experience, and Nationwide, and we are there to enable and support them.

CHRIS: So some clear delineation, I guess, from ownership and responsibility, but then also some common connective tissue and we talked about the importance of storytelling metrics. And now, you know, sort of these cornerstone principles that we’re all, you know, seeking to deliver on. Yeah, I think, you know, when I started Lextant, I thought I was in the experience business, you know, but the more I’m in it I think I’m in the alignment business. Yeah. Because, I mean, I know you feel the same way too. So how do I get this organization to agree on what problem we’re solving? All right. You know, the success looks like.

HEIDI: And then how do we get there? 

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: And then some on the path. 

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: One quick thing. Back on the metrics, we did do something we approached metrics in our innovation area. So one of the groups that my team supports is innovation. And I have a whole, you know, like UX group, like 17 to 20 folks who work on innovation, new products, new products, new services, or reinventing existing products and services. And, you know, they there was a significant investment in that group and they were expected to make quick results. And so we started seeing as quick results means you do a little less UX and you do a little more quick, how do I get into it and get this out the door? And we didn’t want to sacrifice experience for speed. We wanted to be able to do both. So the director on the UX team who oversees that group built this system. it’s the customer centricity metric, and it’s basically measuring behavior. It measures the behavior of the team. The teams work together to identify, you know, several critical, customer focused activities that they have to do in order to ensure the quality and a good customer experience. And then they’re just marking off, have they done those? Have they done those? So at the end of a project and throughout the project, that director will work with the innovation and UX team to score. Like how was how are your work behaviors? Are you thinking and performing in a customer centric way? And it really is just measuring the behavior. But out of that behavior, you get a product that is more likely to be wanted by customers and used successfully by customers and have high satisfaction with. And that brings the business results. Yeah. So it’s kind of a quote unquote sneaky way into doing them the like ensuring that you’re delivering a good product with a good experience.

CHRIS: I love that. So you’re, so that’s your own team?

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: You’re not measuring other partners as part of that process.

HEIDI: We’re measuring and we’re measuring an innovation pod. So the innovation pod is comprised of UX folks, the innovation product leader folks and some technical folks.

CHRIS: Okay. 

HEIDI: So that’s the makeup of the pod. So it’s measuring that whole the behavior of the pod. It’s to like really drive alignment. To your point, how can you get this pod to align around performing these customer centricity activities? good UX methodology, right. And make that not just a UX job. So the whole pods getting measured so they’re incented to behave in a way that that score is going to be high.

CHRIS: Okay. Yeah. So that’s great. So you’re measuring not only the organization’s success, but your internal behavior of the team to make sure that you have a chance to see.

HEIDI: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Earlier predictor of success. Yeah. Of the product. Right. And that. Yeah. 

CHRIS: Follow the process. Yeah. User centered design.

HEIDI: Just do it. Yeah. Just do it. Yeah.

CHRIS: I love that. So, so it’s interesting to see how innovation is evolved then, because I know that was sort of an outside organization. And now that, the organization still values innovation, they want to see more timely delivery around it. Is that right?

HEIDI: That’s that’s partially accurate. It also, we went through the very stereotypical arc of innovation at a large enterprise. Right. Which is it starts in a couple of different places in the company with some forward thinking leaders who aren’t, afraid to go off script a little and try things differently. Yeah, they were real happy to use us and that was fun. So we, you know, worked on those projects. We had a large investment in it where we stood up an innovation organization that was a little more outside of the businesses, like we built our own building, you know, which is real fun. We got to like, redo a movie theater and turn it into the user centered design and innovation center. That was fantastic. but you can look around the corner and see what complications that might bring. You know, eventually you’ll start to get asked, is that aligned enough with the businesses and what the business needs right now?

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: So that’s that’s your typical arc, right. And then there’s like a correction period. So you’ve got the pendulum all the way over here and all the way over here. And hopefully it lands somewhere nicely in the middle where you’re looking far enough ahead. That makes sense for the organization at that time, but you’re more tightly aligned with what the business needs now. So that’s the way back to kind of like this parallel paths I talked about earlier. Right. Like what are the ways that you can deliver value right now? And what percentage of your time do you need to be looking out into the future to ensure future success?

CHRIS: So longitudinally but also like locally? Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of organizations have struggled with that innovation center idea.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: Everybody, like so many businesses stood them up. But they were somehow disembodied from what the organization had to deliver to be in business. So there was impatience with it. And, and so there’s a lot of this is like these like, how do you translate what’s happening in this part of the business to something real that’s tangible? 

HEIDI: Yep.

CHRIS: so I think, you know, one of things I’m been impressed with is just the way you guys have been able to do that, to look out enough to go from the micro to the macro.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: And then to go from to a larger business level where the business acknowledges and recognizes that this stuff is important. And I think those are indicators of a mature organization. Heidi, thank you for your time today. We have so much more to unpack. Join me next week for more on Seriously Curious with my special guest, Heidi Munc, we’ll dig into her Secrets of Effective Design organization and how her team operates today. Visit us at Lextant.com for more information on Seriously Curious.