BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are talking FinTech. We are talking neobanks today. That's right. We are starting a brand new series. And in today's show, we're going to ask how FinTech is shaping up. How is it affecting the future of banking and.

You know, this FinTech industry, you know, pioneered and led by those big neobanks that you probably know like Revolut, uh, like Monzo, you know, all of those guys styling, chime. All of those guys, they've reached a really impressive size and they really acquired customers and got pretty impressive valuations.

So join me and let's take a bit of a snapshot of who's [00:01:00] leading this market. How are they doing it? What offerings. Are actually winning. And I think one of the big questions is how can they achieve both growth and profits. All right. So if you look at the global. Neobank and FinTech market. What's really fascinating.

Is this roughly about 26 companies who are leading a global charge? Of course, there's lots and lots of smaller niche or local players, but there's kind of roughly 26 that are shaping up to be the global influences. The ones that are winning in more than one market. And what's really interesting is when you look at the value.

Of all of these Neo banks, it comes to, this is their market valuation. It comes to $27 million. Huge, huge, huge, really, because it's an emerging market. It is, uh, coming into one of the oldest [00:02:00] industries in the planet banking. And the banking has been around since, uh, I think it was 14 hundreds, late 14 hundreds, a little bank started in Italy.

Um, if you think about such an incumbent. Such a locked-in industry. Pretech pre certainly pre-internet that already. We're looking at a $27 billion market and it's pretty impressive. And there's already more than 20 companies that are leading the charge on a global platform. So here's, what's really interesting.

As we study these in 2021, these neobanks, these fintechs what's what we really can benefit from now is that there appears to be sort of three models, um, that are the kind of growth strategies. That are being employed for success. So this is how neobanks are winning number one [00:03:00] and the biggest one and the classic one.

It's the good old freemium model. Um, so you'll, you'll know that, uh, you know, one of my, uh, Favorite neobanks Revolut. They have really led the charge there with this idea of the freemium model. So massively disruptive because you know, traditional banks, legacy banks love the Goodall, a monthly fee, and the neobanks have just thrown that out and said, no, come and get all your basic services for free and all the add-ons will be extra.

So that's the freemium model. So that seems to be a clear winning strategy for growth. The only interesting thing is some of the other players are coming with more multi tier, um, offerings, multi-tiered subscriptions, um, premium accounts. Um, and they're sort of really looking at what we call the upsell for the customer.

So this is really interesting because, um, a little bit different to, to freemium, but [00:04:00] really pushing towards subscription. And it's interesting that sometimes it's just a really beautiful. Credit card, physical credit card is enough to get that subscription. But it's interesting because now you see two very clear routes.

Do we go freemium, give away the basics charged for the addons or do we play for a subscription? That seems to be the two winning models there, but there's also a third and I would probably categorize this as the niche play. Now you either go niche in terms of your, uh, Demographics niche in terms of your geographies, um, or you might try and go for a very particular segment, um, gig workers, SMEs, uh, tradespeople, you know, all that kind of stuff.

So that's the third one. That's the niche play that seems to be playing out. So there you have it. Three models for success. Going freemium multi-tiered subscriptions and niche segment segments. [00:05:00] This is how these Neo banks and fintechs are really disrupting the world. And if you look at those roughly 26 global leaders, global players in, in their banking, they have acquired not only a big valuation, but between them, they have over 39 million users, uh, is a pretty substantial.

User base. Now, this growth that I've been talking about, and when you put it in perspective in just a matter of a decade, this huge marketplace has, has kind of come out of nowhere. Really. Um, the interesting thing though, is that acquisition of that many customers in such a short time, that high growth has come at the cost of low.

If. Zero profits. This is really fascinating because if you look at what a great product takes, customers need to love it, check it next. It needs [00:06:00] to be technically feasible. Well, that seems like a big check, but is the business viable? And I think it's really interesting that we're at the beginning of a process of a, kind of a new chapter where we're starting to see that neobanks have proven they can grow, but they haven't actually proven can they be viable?

And given the fact that so many of these are not publicly listed, we can't have a little peak in their, in their books and their accounts to see how things are really going. But it's. Unquestionable that they have sacrificed their profitability to grow. So they're really breaching the concept. They breaking the idea of viability because they cannot grow profitably.

They can grow like crazy. So this kind of creates a really interesting paradigm for this Neo bank. And I think the larger FinTech space is can they achieve both growth and profitability at the same time? [00:07:00] I think this is going to be a much bigger challenge than they realize, because of course what happens is they all become growth obsessed.

And then when you ask them to be obsessed with profits, that's a, that's a new mindset they've been growing at all costs. And I think if we just take a step back over the last year, we've seen some rather big, uh, high venture capital backed companies like turbo powered, uh, who were all about the growth fallen, a big heap.

I mean, Go no further than we were. They were just growing at all costs. And then when you said to them, Hey, it's time to actually make a dime, like be profitable. Uh, the whole thing fell apart. They lost the CEO. Every like the whole thing was a shambles. It was awfully public as well, but I'm not seeing that, you know, Neo banks and fintechs are about to go through that.

I think it's a bit early for that, but without doubt now, As the market matures, where you're [00:08:00] seeing that they are going to be forced to consider profitability, particularly if they want to go to the public markets in IPO. So if you're building this product, if you're building growth marketing teams, you're now going to have to do it.

Cost-effectively with a wait for it. Return on investment no longer can. They just rely on these huge amounts of cash. Coming from venture capital, coming from private equity. They really now need to. Become viable. And there's kind of two types of banks that are in this race for viability, because remember if customers desire the product, if the technology is feasible, you just need a business model that's viable and you have the Holy Trinity of product.

Right? So you've got full stack banks. Good example is Monzo in 26 styling. They actually went and got a license [00:09:00] and they operate a full, ...

Hello and welcome to the Bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we're going to do one final deep dive on our trends report. We talked about four really significant trends. Those that really touched upon this notion of collaboration. And for the first time we really went deep in our annual trends report on this idea of collaboration.

What's interesting is we actually. We usually only touch on emerging technology and issues with very specific to technology or usability kind of hardcore product stuff. But this time we went broader because we feel like after 2020, and that whole work from home thing, like collaboration is back on the table, it's ready to be [00:01:00] discussed.

And so what I want to do is a special edition. Of the show for you today. I want to go deep into how we can think about collaboration. Let's take a moment to capture all of those ideas, reflect on them and see how perfecting collaboration is essential for creating an agile mindset in the digital age.

All right. I'm going to do a quick little context here before we look at the actions that we can take on collaboration. Don't forget. Here we are. 2021. We now have customers demanding Omni channel direct to customer experiences, but also on the other side, employees want to be able to work from home and have entertainer hybrid way of working.

So what happens is technology teams plug together all sorts of platforms from CRM, CMS, payments, ERP, you name it, everything's getting pointed together. And it's a little bit of house of cards that leads to complexity. And it's not only complexity from a platform. [00:02:00] Point of view. There's also complexity on the people's side because Hey, who's the systems architect who knows how this whole thing works together.

So what we have is this obligation to get technology into all the different touch points, to be everywhere for everyone. And it's hard, right? That's the pressure that product teams are under right now because they're serving more stakeholders than ever serving more platforms than ever. Stuff just got complex and it's changing real fast.

And that's why the agility mindset is the essential thing to have. If you want to survive in the digital age, in that knowledge worker age, otherwise you're going to get snowed down by all that complexity. So I want to now take a moment now that we kind of set the scene. We've got the complexity conundrum.

We know we have to be agile. We're going to get that tech under control, but equally, if, if you know another word for tech is all the platforms [00:03:00] need to be under control. Then it's also on the other side of things. It's the people who run that. Have to be under control, have to have clarity, have to have a lot of different things.

And one of the biggest secret ingredients for getting your technology and your products under control is to have people working well. And to have people collaborating, you know, for me, collaboration is when one plus one equals three. When two people get together, you get an unexpectedly good result. Like, wow.

Because two heads are better than one. So for me, that's, that's my pitch for collaboration, but let's look at like four key segments. It's almost a little architecture of collaboration. Let's look at what they are and let's look at what we can do in each of them to get our teams collaborating well. So they can be more agile so they can solve complex problems.

And Hey, in the end of the day, they can go out into the world and put a product that's worth building that [00:04:00] social problems for its users. Okay. So there's four things that I mentioned. Here's what they are. So if you want to collaborate, here's the magic four things that make up collaboration, alignment, learning, engagement, and connection.

So I'm going to dig into each of those and give you a quick recap on what you can do to get your team collaborating better. Number one, alignment. Well, for me, the saying here is to get the band singing the same song because actually one of the interesting things is every team, every business has a discreet unique way of working and thinking.

But actually I challenge you. Where is that written down? Just pause for a moment. I want you to think where have we written down in our company? How we think, what models do we use and how do we work? And what you're going to find is invariably, it's never written down. It's [00:05:00] not written down, it's just done.

It's just the culture of the organization. So this is particularly challenging. If you want to get aligned with new people on a team, There's no textbook to read. There's no playbook to pick up that says, this is how we think we use these to three different models and here's how we work. So if it's not written down, if it's through the doing, what are the things we can actually do to help people get aligned?

Well, what we discovered in our trends report is there's two big things you should connect and be with. Your fellow band members, your team members daily, do not enter the estimate, the power of daily connection. It's something that came up a lot in the report, but in surveys and interviews with all these great product experts from around the world, definitely industries daily get together.

So you might think about a standup or a scrum, or even just a sink. This is essential. The frequency [00:06:00] needs to be daily. If you want to particularly help new people. Understand how you think of work, or if you really want to kind of bring people back in the tent, as they say, you need to reconnect with them and to remind them of how we think and work.

Now, the other big thing that we learned is it needs to be guided. And what I mean by that is you need to do a bit of show and tell. But then you need to start transferring. So don't make the mistake of, Oh, I'll just do it. Cause it's quickest. Maybe you do it once or twice. Maybe you do it once or twice and then give a voice over to your colleague.

And then you might say, Hey, why don't you give it a go, I'll be right here. So if you want people to truly get it, how you think and how you work as a product team, then it should be daily rituals. With a lot of guided practice. There's no shortcuts here. I'm afraid. If you want to have people aligned, if you want to have them connected, there's no magic pill.

They can take it's daily [00:07:00] rituals with guided practice. That's how you get people singing. The same song. Okay. So that's alignment. That was number one, number two, the second part of the world of collaboration. So first of all, you're aligned now you need to engage. That's. The second piece engagement starts with putting your teammates before yourself serve your teammates.

And the first thing you can do there is welcome everyone. And every single idea that they want to bring to the table. Because if you want people to be engaged, this is actually where it starts and I'll show you how it works. So you need to drag, kicking and screaming people into the room and give them a voice, let them share their ideas.

Welcome them. Don't criticize don't judge celebrate the contribution, all people and all ideas are welcome. This is really fundamental. [00:08:00] Then once that has happened. And all the ideas are up on the wall, invite everyone to challenge those ideas, improve those ideas, own those ideas, because here's, here's the real secret with engagement.

If I've had a chance to challenge and improve the ideas about what we're do...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are finally here at trend number eight, the end of our deep dive into the 2021 emerging trends report. And. The subject of today's show is connection. So the context of this is that if we're going to collaborate together in a team, if we're going to get things done as a team, uh, it all comes down to connecting.

And we discovered in our emerging trends report that sharing success together builds team rapport, builds that connection. So let's dig into it. Celebrating success is really important. It plays a [00:01:00] significant role in how we feel as employees. Uh, so it determines a lot of our employee satisfaction, but also the fulfillment that we have in a team building a product.

So the act of commemorating achievement, forges, a connection between ourselves and the group, and it really serves as a strong validation purpose. Cause if you think about it, if we're all acknowledging our own individual, Progress our own individual success. If we're all celebrating the team's success, then together, that means we're all feeling pretty good about things.

So let's learn how we can create a sort of a flywheel effect with both personal and group success to build connection. So, as I said, we did this very wide range, emerging trends report. We spoke to over a hundred people. Different countries, different industries. And it was really interesting looking at this data.

We [00:02:00] asked them, which of the following activities is the most challenging for you business and trying to create connections with teammates. And there's a whole list. Is it creating transparency amongst each other, checking in with each other, recognizing each other, sharing success or onboarding new people.

And it's the sharing success to feel like you're part of something was the number one response hitting up at 40% of all respondents. So it's a very strong signal. So let's unpack that let's get into this and, and work out what is happening. I think when we are. Going out and building something that really matters.

So let's say it's a brand new product in a brand new area, or perhaps you're in an existing category doing something wildly different. Um, it really to build a team, you really have to invite everyone's contribution. And we talked about that a lot, you know, in terms of [00:03:00] engagement in the previous episode, which was one of our big trends.

So you need to open it up for everyone. And then, you know, obviously learning is a really key part of the process. And we've talked about that as well. And so if you're going about doing something new, there's going to be some unknowns, which means you're going to learn something new, which is great. And this is the cornerstone of the context of this insight.

And what you have to remember is that if learning is so damn essential, This is really a proxy for personal growth for team growth for business growth. Because if you're learning, it means you're doing new things. If you're doing new things, you're growing. And so growing together as a team, learning new skills, learning new technologies, new tools, new frameworks, new methodology, it's all part of this story of growth.

So if we want to build connection within a team, this is where sharing of success. Really plays a role [00:04:00] because success can be something, whether it's really big or really small, it can be personal or it can be something that's shared amongst the group. I think the key thing here when we talk about connection is that if we learning, if we're growing.

Celebrate that, because this is the moment when you see that you have learned a new thing, that's a win, that's a success. When you see that your peer learns something new, that's a win, that's another success, and you should be so keen, so enthusiastic to celebrate their success, set the example so that they will share.

Their personal goals, they will share when they make progress on them and you can celebrate them because it's that moment. Then you, when you say, well done, Bob, well done. Jane, when you say that this [00:05:00] forge is a connection between the two of you, because you're acknowledging them before your own success, before your own learning.

And this, this is almost like. Servant leadership, putting the success of those around you before your self. So when we talk about sharing success, it doesn't have to be the big multi-year multi-billion dollar deal. It can be, Hey, I learned a workaround for this bug. That's really been annoying me about the product and I fixed it.

Good on you. Hey, I learned how to improve conversion on our funnel. Good on you. And you know what? The more that you go out into the world and that you recognize the growth, the learning, the success of your colleagues, the more you do that, the more they'll recognize you. So we start getting into win-win territory here, everybody's winning.

And when everyone is [00:06:00] winning, when you're sharing those success, when you're celebrating that success, You'll find that if you help your colleagues and they achieve something, you will feel some wellbeing in that. And that's connection. That's empathy. That's understanding, Hey, we're growing as individuals, we're growing as a team, we're growing our product, we're growing our business and you know what.

That's a pretty good vibe. That's kind of somewhere. I want to work where it feels good to grow, to learn together, to celebrate the successes. You know, this is, you know, work, shouldn't be a labor. It shouldn't be all doom and gloom and obligation. It should be. Growth abundance opportunity and vibrant and celebrating those success amongst each other, again, to create those long lasting connections.

Right? Think about it in life, the best teams you've been on, you often still [00:07:00] have really good connection with those people. Maybe don't see them so much or chat so much, but when you do see each other, those feelings that shared success, that connection comes back pretty quickly. Doesn't it? So now let's go into another thing that we learned in our emerging trends report.

So we were really digging into this broad area of how we collaborate together. And specifically today, we're talking about this connection and I think we've established growth really important. So when you're building something, you've got to learn new things, and these are things that are wins when you learn those.

And you should share those bigger, small, personal shit. Okay. That's where we're at, but I got two more things for you to really bring home some learnings and insights around connection. One of the most powerful things you can do when you want to recognize your peer is know that peer recognition is the best.

[00:08:00] It is really the most powerful, in fact, it is in not only in our study, but also. Commonly understood that actually, when the boss gives recognition, it's kind of good when your peers right. When they give it, that's kind of great. And I think that's great because the team doing the work with you. So that's why it means the most.

They know what do you put into it to deserve that shared success, that personal growth, that team growth. So please recognize that. You should be actively celebrating the successes of your peers and your colleagues. And here's the big thing, do it publicly. Don't just say to them, Hey, well done. Take the opportunity to recognize the success, the growth, the achievements of others, big...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we are continuing our deep dive into collaboration. And today we're putting the spotlight. On engagement. And if you really think about it, that couldn't be a better topic to be talking about. Then employee engagement, you know, getting our team alive, contributing, listening, learning, discussing.

Contributing to the product, you know, doing something that matters together, not sitting in silos. That's what we mean. When we talk about engagement and boy did we come across a really solid insight and here it is around engagement. If you want to have that thriving, vibrant culture, then the starting point for that [00:01:00] engagement is this everyone and their ideas.

Are welcome. Let's talk about that some more. So the context here is that nothing has killed employee engagement, like forcing everybody to work home for a really sustained period. It's like, come on. When will this end? And as the novelty wore off during quarantine in 2020, the new challenge sort of percolated up to product teams.

When they're, when they're thinking about working together, it's all about getting out of just doing. The essentials, just plodding along and coping with all of this change. It's all about finding out how we can ensure our teams. Our teammates are involved, contributing. They're vibrant. They're feeling satisfied and fulfilled by our work.

And that often comes to contributing and often comes through engagement. And if it's. Contributing to the product, to the product vision, or maybe the company's vision [00:02:00] itself, no matter where you channel that energy, the engagement is essential. If you really want to have a thriving environment. So let's dig into the data that we found from our trends report.

Now here's, what's really interesting. We were. Asking over a hundred survey, respondents and interviewees for all around the world. We said to them, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business? When you're trying to align with teammates now, you know, a lot of them said actually creating professional and personal boundaries.

That's no problem setting clear goals and objectives. Take getting everyone together for a tricky conversation. No problem now what's interesting is that tricky conversation? I, Hey Houston, we have a problem. That's really interesting about that. It registered very low as a challenge when you're making a product and aligning with teammates, [00:03:00] but here's the big one.

This one got a lot of feedback. In answer to the question of like, okay, what is the biggest challenge when you're trying to align is getting people in engaged in the brainstorm and out of their inboxes. So you've all seen it, that people will be on calls, hardly contribute there. They're looking off to the side because actually they're in their inbox, cleaning stuff out, or maybe better still there on Facebook or what ever.

The point here is that you desk, you, you really want that contribution, particularly in a brainstorm because unlike the tricky conversation, I, cause that's really just reacting to a problem why it's so important to have contributions in brainstorms. As you can bring people into the present that you can really enjoy [00:04:00] sparking ideas  thinking about how might we, what if these kinds of really powerful questions and prompts and getting out of the drudgery of the day to day and exploring the potential of the tomorrow.

And what you'll find is that your colleagues are a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration. If. Given the chance to engage properly. And this looks to me to be one of the biggest problems we're going to face in 2021, getting people, dusting them, all the cobwebs out and saying, come on, let's think together where we can entertain possibilities and new things.

So let's break this down and see how we might solve this as well. So, what we know is that 51% found getting people engaged is the most challenging practice in team alignment. Huge. If you benchmark that against all the other data in the pot, it's one of the strongest [00:05:00] signals that we got and the way we can unlock this is welcoming.

All people and all of their ideas, this needs to be a deliberate, purposeful, rigorous practice, because we all know that there are certain people in the team who are just not naturally going to speak up. And to be honest, between you and me, they're the ones that probably have the best ideas too. So you've got to go.

And hunt for those. So the first recommendation I have is how you in your role can make that happen. You need to serve your teammates. You need to ask yourself how you can help your colleague contribute. What conditions would they need to contribute? To provide insight, facts, data analysis, recommendations, whatever you need from them.

What do they [00:06:00] need to do that? Because remember, a lot of people are not like me. I'm a bit of a chatterbox, but some super wicked smart people can be sitting there and they could have great ideas, but they just don't feel comfortable contributing, ask yourself how you can make them comfortable in. Setting conditions that they actually would like to share.

So a great thing you can do here is always be the last to speak. Let, let your colleagues contribute. Now, if you are interested in this, this is what we call servant leadership. Just Google it. There is a ton of work written about how you can serve your teammates and your colleagues. I think this is the underlying recommendation, serve your teammates.

And then I want to come back to what I was saying. You are like. Show look. So you must go in search out contributions from everyone, not just the usual suspects. Who are confident talking in a group, you must go out and [00:07:00] get everyone, bring them to the conversation. Step one, to ask them for contribution, get contribution, come hell or high water.

However they need to give it. You want to get old people engaging because if you create a safety net where everybody feels comfortable to contribute, something starts to happen. All right, so let's just pause it there. So you have to ask yourself, how do I serve my teammates and you, then you, then you need to go out and be deliberate about getting their contribution, getting them in the room, number one and two, then getting their contribution.

So now what happens when you do that? The ideas, or perhaps they're just real facts, data, maybe do some analysis of the data, whatever it is, it could be the big idea. You want to make sure that your colleagues [00:08:00] challenge it, right. Improve it and then own it. This is what engagement looks like. Challenging ideas, improving ideas, and owning their ideas.

Let's talk about challenging him. We have to find a way, if you want employee engagement, if you want your teammates to be vibrant contributing, they have to be in the room. They have to be giving their thoughts. And when you give yours, give them license to challenge those ideas, because I can tell you not one single idea that I have when I sit by myself is nearly anywhere near as good as an idea that I share, because frankly.

All the super smart people that build challenge on my idea. They improve it. They make it better. They add more context. Maybe they sharpen it up. And here's the other thing. Once an idea is being challenged, maybe the facts of being challenged, maybe improve our understanding of the [00:09:00] facts. Then what happens becaus...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue on our wonderful journey into our very recent hot off the press trends report. And today we're talking about learning and the, we discovered this really big insight. That, when we think about learning, we need to imagine that we are so not only students, but teachers as well.

Now the background to this is it feels like these days we're always confronting new and different questions and learning skills, particularly after a year of working from home. And this idea of upskilling has kind of moved from a once in a while. You know, something you might do once a year, once every half year.

And it's really. Transitioned into a continuous activity because [00:01:00] Hey, the world has changed so much. So it is natural that we need to learn a whole bunch of new things. So let's talk about how we can understand our teammates and how we can learn and grow together. How we can be both student and teacher.

Now the report that I'm referring to, it's our emerging trends report. You can get that at bottom-up dot IO. And the fascinating thing that we discovered is that 45% of the people that participated in the survey and in the interviews, I'm talking about over a hundred product experts, gurus. From all around the world, Europe, U S and Australia.

What we discovered is that 45% of them found that learning a new skill from Alice is the hardest thing. When we talk about learning and proving our skills. Now, if you look at the data, it is crazy to see how much this idea of learning a new skill from somebody else is the hardest thing versus [00:02:00] like researching case studies.

No problem. Rob role-play training. Yeah. That's pretty straightforward. Participating in a group reflections and group discussions. That's all easy. It's really, when it come, it becomes. Two people together going deep. And it was really interesting because here's what we discovered. Uh, the whole thing is that organizations have these, these gurus, these individuals have mastered particular part of the business.

I think it's fair to say that. You kind of can feel a little bit held hostage by these guys because they are the guru. And because the knowledge hasn't been captured, everybody's running to that person who is of this source to get the information. And this is highly inefficient with certainly no scalable.

And then it becomes a question of time. It's really fascinating to [00:03:00] see that this practical idea, this practical act of sitting together and learning together person, a training person, B. Is actually the hardest thing. It's way harder than something that I consider to be hard coaching and mentoring. It's way harder than getting a good group discussion.

It is going deep together at the same time in the same place. This came back really strongly. It was confirmed in the surveys and the interviews. It's fascinating to see that learning particularly the sharing and development of deep skills has become so hard and think about it. If your, a modern knowledge worker, chances are at least half, if not more of your day is being, uh, you know, dealing with zoom and Hangouts and, and teams and jumping from meeting to meeting to meeting.

So where heritage attention is so scarce, [00:04:00] we're trying to block out a few hours for ourselves to do our work, uh, and not just being meetings. So I think this is really, uh, at the heart of the context and the challenge that we face in learning. It's just hard to carve out that time and to talk together.

And to now, the reason why that's such a big deal issue is that there's so much to learn. Think about how much the world has changed in just 16, 18 months. Life was all fine. And then COVID happened in 2020 and the world has really dramatically changed. Some might even say accelerated. So this means that there is going to be a ton of new things to learn.

Think about it. Um, how to do multi-channel omni-channel direct to customer, uh, products. That's now not a nice to have it. We can't kind of do it in our own time. It's a constraint that is now mandatory and it has to be done because people can't go to stores or as we can [00:05:00] come out of COVID now in 2021, people kind of like the convenience of omni-channel direct to customer experiences.

So there's going to be a whole new job to do, to even get people back in the stores and to find a reason for shopping in person in a mall. So with all of that happening, uh, in the world of our users, there's no surprise that we need to learn a lot because if that's changed, we have to learn new techniques.

The same thing goes with employees. So on the backend, on the inside of the organization, all the employees are now working remote or hybrid working or working on different roster days. Everything's changed inside and outside of the company. So therefore lots and lots to learn. So the first insight that I have for you around what we can do, what action can we take is we can synchronize this learning time where we actually make it a mandatory [00:06:00] to come together to exchange knowledge, to share deep knowledge.

Tell me how I can do this. Show me how I can do this. And if you don't do that, it's simply it would from our report, it would seem, it is almost impossible to make happen. So this is the first kind of cornerstone to learning. There is you've got to understand that the volume. Of knowledge that we need to acquire now has increased.

You have to realize that time is scarce. So if you're not deliberate about putting that in the agenda, it just simply won't happen. Okay. I got a couple more thoughts to build on this that will help you understand this idea of teachers and students, and the fact that we're both. So naturally you need to make pointing scalable.

You can't have a single point of failure. You can't have just one person that knows or so your idea would be okay, let's go train the trainer. Now, the interesting thing here is training. The trainers means this, that if you step back, we are all teachers. And we are [00:07:00] all students or just, we go into different modes at different times.

This is the only sensible, scalable way to address this need of learning within the organization. You cannot have these choke points where Jane or bill. No, all there is to know about a certain thing. But if you can't talk to them, then you're stuffed. That cannot be the way we work. It's got to be smarter than that.

So the key thing to acknowledge is that we're all, we're all teachers and we're all students. So let me tell you this little story. We did an interview with the head of retail distribution at BCIS sta it's a large bank in Romania. And what they do is they have a process of learning where they actually vote on the topic and they then nominate somebody in the team to teach that topic.

So depending on the day, you might be a student or a teacher, depending on that day, you might be absorbing a new skill from one [00:08:00] of your colleagues, but here's the key thing. You have chosen, voted for participated in the choice of the, if you will, the curriculum. And so therefore you're much more ready to learn and understand.

And what was really interesting is a lot of people didn't see themselves as teachers. But what we learned from this case study is they actually discovered. Although it's a bit of a stretch goal that are a little bit uncomfortable, of course, who wouldn't be, but they actually learned that they could gro...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are entering into the second instalment. Of our trends report. We've studied the first to four tech trends, and now we're about to studying for collaboration trends together. And the key topic of today's episode is alignment.

How do we get everyone on the same page? Or what we learned is it's like, how do we get the band singing the same song? Now upon reflection is really interesting. Like I was expecting that the building part, the technology part of our trends report that we just completed. Well, tell us about all of the complexities and challenges of technology and it did, but here's the thing.

If that's all the [00:01:00] platforms and the tech, then the people stuff is equally as challenging. And we have got a lot of insights and a lot of best practices to share with you. So let's kick it off with alignment. Now here is one of the most interesting things from the entire report. Getting everyone on the same page was ranked almost twice as challenging as delivering the work.

Isn't that interesting. So if you think about, um, you know, getting people together, getting them on the same page, it's generally made up of, um, how we. Produce how we learn, how we connect and how we go. You get on the same page. These are all of the things that make up the bigger collaborations. Sorry.

What's fascinating is that this alignment, this getting everyone on the same page was almost twice as hard as the [00:02:00] doing of the work. So in terms of collaboration producing, like, Hey, let's build this thing together. Was actually way easier in the, what should we build together? Isn't that amazing? So this alignment thing is a real challenge and you know, the, the key thing, you know, that we would, uh, take from this trends report is that you have to work very deliberately on your.

Alignment as a team, you need to really understand and define first of all, and this is the first big insight that I have for you in order to succeed at alignment is you have to know what is. Our way of thinking and our way of working, this is almost always never, uh, written down. It's never taught. It's kind of spoken about at best, or it's just [00:03:00] kind of done and you're meant to kind of work it out on the fly if you're a new member of a team or a company.

So define your way of thinking, define your way of working. And that is the cornerstone to this, uh, uh, um, idea around alignment. If you want everyone singing the same song, everyone being on the same page, having the right attitudes, the right ways of thinking, then you need to understand and agree as a team of like, what are they, what is our way of thinking our way of working number one thing here for alignment, you need to know what those things are before we talk about how we get everyone to do it.

You need to know what they are. Now in going deep on this. I mean our trends report, we had a lot of people giving us feedback from all over the world and from many different industries. So this is really widespread. This challenge of alignment. One of the great things is we found that there were some really good [00:04:00] practices, um, that you can can start with the first one.

Is if you want alignment and you know, your way of thinking and working, then you need to use daily stand-ups daily scrums as a way of reinforcing how we think, how we work daily, daily, daily, daily critical is really, really critical. Because this is the chance to increase the calibration, increase the understanding.

Maybe sometimes unusual challenges come up, which become a chance to explore. How do we think about that? How are we going to work on that? And that needs to be reinforced daily. Unfortunately, I know this is going to sound like hard work and it is, but you've got to do it daily. This is how you reinforce the way of thinking and working, which is alignment.

Getting everyone on the same page. Now, the next thing is. You need. [00:05:00] So if that's the sort of daily reinforcement, you know, the talking about reminding and communicating how we think and how we work, the next thing is you need to guide people in your teams on how they can get aligned with the way of thinking and working within the team within the wider organization.

Here. I want to give a really big call-out, um, to a great partner of ours at ING Romania. It's overdue, Slavonia he's head of marketing and customer experience banking, uh, for business clients all over ING Romania. And he had this really great metaphor that it's like a band when we talk about alignment.

So he. Uh, gave us this great insight that we all need to think, like band leaders were the front man, and you need to invite your teammates to come join the band, play alone, and you might start, you know, imagine you're up there with the lead guitar or you're on [00:06:00] vocals. You might like get everybody going, but here's the key thing.

Once you kind of bring people together as the band leader. What you should do is over time, you sort of drift a little bit into the background and then you can maybe not play quite as much. And then over time, let the band take the song in the direction that they want to take it. So it's this idea of you guide them, but then you're able to reinforce on those daily scrums in stand-ups, but actually.

The key thing is if you want alignment, they need to actually not only think, but do in the way of thinking and working, they need to celebrate right. How you operate as a team. What, what is your purpose? All of that should be reflected not only in the leader, but they should make room for others. So it's got a little bit of a servant leadership, uh, notion to it here.

So [00:07:00] I just want to bring this back. This alignment challenge cannot be. Uh, underestimated. Because what happens is it's proving to be one of the single greatest challenges. It's far harder than actually like building stuff. It's like, what are we going to do is like much trickier than, okay. Let's build now.

So this is often why. We see products get built that are not right, because there wasn't alignment at the start of the project. We weren't agreeing on our purpose, how we think and how we work. So this is particularly challenging, particularly challenging for teams. Now, without a doubt, what we have seen as a pattern in some of our interviews for the trends report is that we did see that obviously COVID has made this alignment.

Harder it's tricky because sometimes we can leave people out unknowingly. Um, it's really hard, you know, you don't have everybody in the same room, so you can just say right everyone into the war room. [00:08:00] So alignment. It does become trickier. That's why our first recommendation is to know, define, celebrate your way of thinking your way of working and bring it back daily in your scrums, in your stand-ups in your status calls, make sure you bring it back.

And when it comes to really getting things done, Make sure you think of yourself as that band leader, as we learnt from overdue, make sure that you get the band going, but then actively take a little bit of a backseat. Let them take the song that then play, let them make it their own, because that has a lot of benefits beyond alignment.

You see autonomy and ownership will come out of that. And when people are doing that, they will feel like they are thriving in your team, in your business. Okay. Now, if you want to thrive when you're building products and services, if yo...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons in this I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we continue without tech trends. That's right. And we are going to talk about low code. Maybe no code. Uh, but you got it. We are talking about the big technology that is clearly everyone's favorite. It was really quite unanimous.

Uh, When we did our recent emerging trends report to find how many people are considering low code. So it really deserves our attention. In this episode, let's get into the world of no code and low code and unpack why this is such a big deal for companies that are looking to build new products and services.

So, as I said, we were doing our emerging trends report recently. [00:01:00] And if you haven't checked that out, just head over to bottom-up dot IO, it's all free. You can go there, download it and enjoy the full report. But today we're just jumping into the idea of no code and it was amazing. 26% of the respondents that did this global survey over a hundred people participated.

They ranked no-code as the highest short term priority, 26%, one single tech. And that was the choice. And it's really fascinating because when you look at the others, you know, in th in the second place was. Cloud-first solutions, which is pretty, pretty natural, but, you know, for example, AR VR, uh, digital health, all of those way back in the pack compared to no-code solutions.

So let's dig into this and ask ourselves, why is no code so popular and how might we leverage it? Without a [00:02:00] doubt. The promise of no code really comes in the fact that when you're launching a new product or service, or even managing a new product, the effort that it takes for business and design folks to get things happening in the technology, in the application, the software and the data in the UX, it's usually a huge effort.

And what the promise of no code is, is to make that process faster and easier and effectively. What it means is that people who do not have engineering technology skills, who are not developers are able to get products to market a lot quicker and to be more continuous and adaptive as the product is launched.

And you start to learn what customers are liking. So this is the promise of it. And without a doubt, it really is transformative because we know how hard it is to find developers it's even harder to find good developers. [00:03:00] So we're really looking at, um, a solution that really speaks to the deficiency of skills in the overall workplace.

There's just not enough good software engineers. So. It's about this speed. It's a, that's achieved through having a less effort, less blockers to get to launch. But I think it's also equally about the agility to be more in line with continuous development, best practices. So if it's less effort goes faster, I mean, it all just sounds so good, doesn't it?

But I think what was interesting about the report is that we actually had a few insights. That put this into context and give us a sense of what we need to do in order to use no code solutions successfully. Now I think the first and most important thing is that we need what we call in the, in the business world, the configurator, um, persona archetype.

So differently. These are people [00:04:00] who might resemble business analysts are super sharp at understanding the business, the rules, the logic of the business, who are able to then also understand the customer. That's quite a rare role. I mean, these would be almost product owners. If you will. And the reason that these roles are really important is that if you're going to go no code or low code, what happens is a lot of the due process between, uh, designers, uh, business, people and engineering, uh, where there are checks and balances, you create user stories and you do all those sort of things.

They can be bypassed in a no-code solution. You can jump straight into the backend and start. Drag and dropping things around, but the question is who's going to do that work. And it's this idea of a configurator, someone who can really drive the dashboard, the admin, who really understands all of the rules that you have, because not only will you [00:05:00] be dragging and dropping changes in the process, the very best no code solutions, um, have an instant deployment mechanic, meaning when you drag drop and save.

That one is going live immediately. So you need to make sure that it's done correctly. Now in speaking to Jaco, FOC at ONB Pedrom, he had this great expert advice. He said, you have to engage and mobilize citizen developers within your company because they will lead the way they will be these configurators.

And they are the people who are really to understand the systems. From a business logic perspective, they're going to understand all of the implications of thinking, doing a new features, updates, and services tweaks to your product. But they're also going to have the background, the history as to what has worked and what hasn't.

[00:06:00] So. Yes, there is this promise of moving with much more agility, which is very central to the theme of how to work in this modern age of digital transformation. But you need to actually make sure that you don't, uh, Have a skills deficiency in another area. If you're trying to skip over the lack of engineers, you're going to need these citizen developers.

You're going to need these configurators who are really driving the business. So you need to make sure you develop those skills. Now there's another big, uh, learning that we had, which is when you want to go to a low code or no code environment, one of the very important, uh, paradigms. Is to understand, truly understand the business rules, the logic and the flows that work with inside of your product.

Now, what is exposed when you have a no code, [00:07:00] uh, set up is you need to actually. Install and configure the application to respect your business rules, your business logic. And what I often find is that that is easily said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got this, we've got all our business rules, but I cannot tell you after decades of doing new products and services, when you say, okay, give me.

The, um, overall systems architecture of your entire business stack. So I can understand where this new product is going to say, give me all for this particular product. I want all of the offline business rules, uh, logic and processes, uh, all the Gates that it needs to go through. All of the dependencies, the human flows, the automation flows.

I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen. It is rare that an organization is able to provide me with all of those things. This is assuming that they're all sitting there saying, yes, we need to build something new. Let's talk to Mike and [00:08:00] his team. And then we asked for this and they don't have them. You know, usually they have half of them do Thurs, but working.

Honor the system rather than just in the system is actually a far greater challenge. And if you're going to employ no code and get the most out of it, here's the catch is you need to understand those business rules in those business logics in order to apply that otherwise you can't drag and drop. You can't operate no code because there's no underlying rules for which it is going to operate.

And the last thought here. Is, this is the perfect time to ask yourself, well, rather than just copy and duplicate what we're doing offline or what's in our existing digital system, let's take this new opportunity that NOCO presents to ask ourselves what wo...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are getting deep into. The individual trends that all came out of our trends report. This is the third trend, and it's all about the single source of truth. And for those of you who are new to the world of a single source of truth idea, it's essential.

It's really simple. It's essentially. One place one destination, which has all the information for a product. Be it tech, the it design be the business rules that drive it. It's all there in one place. Now we might often use tools like confluence and JIRA, or maybe Simplicit, it might be like a [00:01:00] great, uh, Word document that has everything in it doesn't have to be too flashy.

It can be quite simple, but if you're working in a larger product organization, you'll find the need to have pretty robust tool as a single source of truth. And what we've discovered is that, Hey, This single source of truth idea is essential to get everybody on the same page, but it's actually comes with a few challenges.

So the fun really starts when you start not only getting people to the two, but then you start asking questions about what they find. There is everything they need to go on with their project. Is it there? Is it adequate in order for them to be autonomous? And the answer is it's red, that the entire package is delivered.

So let's dive into the world of a single source of truth. It was quite interesting, uh, for this part of the report, it was a very strong message. [00:02:00] We asked over a hundred product and business experts around the world, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business when trying to produce work with teammates.

So right now we're in that sort of producing mode, not so much learning, it's more about the producing. We've got to make a thing. And what was really interesting is. We asked all sorts of, uh, different, uh, activities to right. The one that was the easiest is making an inventory of the worker to be done. So, you know, you've got your to do you know what your individual role is now interesting when you compare how big an issue, finding the critical information for a product or a new service?

A single source of truth said different. This was over 30% of respondents. Nominated. This is the hardest thing about producing work. It is more than double the next option and it is I'm looking at it right now. And I [00:03:00] think it's like 10 times, uh, an issue than that, of making an inventory. So this is a big issue, so let's, let's break it down.

And then there's, there's really two key concepts. We discovered the report that make up this single source of truth idea. The first of which, now it's again saying sound insanely easy, and you got to be thinking, Mike, that's so simple, but actually it's not. And I've got a reason why the first concept is access to this single source of truth.

The problem with the access thing is a lot of organizations have geared if they have a single source of truth. They've gained their access to everyone being in the office. So here's the thing. A lot more people are working from home and significantly we've found. And it would suggest in the data that I think it is unlikely to go back to five days a week in the office.

I think everybody has found the flexibility and the time-saving quite good. That being said, I think everybody does [00:04:00] want to have a little bit more social interaction. So it's not going to be five days a week from home, but it's certainly going to be a hard hybrid way of working. So access is actually a little bit harder.

It might be simply the VAP VPN can't handle the load of users, or maybe it's that the product is, is geared for our local area network, whatever the issue is. Access to the single source of truth is actually really fundamentally important. So making a work from home, mobile friendly access to your single source of truth, I mean, that is your to-do list already.

And we haven't even got to the big, the big bit yet. Okay. So that's access. But as I said earlier, that the fun and games kind of really start to happen here. When we think about the idea of quality. And when you think of a single source of truth, the quality of it is really judged by whether [00:05:00] someone can go to your internet, your, your JIRA, your confluence, your Google docs, and can they find all the information there?

So a good test is if somebody is working from home and let's say, it's an unusual time, let's say it's, I don't know, six in the morning, and they're already standing to work. We know the thing is. A great single source of truth, right. With all the critical information would be. So well-managed that, that person could good.

Come on at six in the morning. They're a little espresso coffee next to them. Yeah. They could log in and find all the information they need to continue with their work. That's good. Here's what's bad. Let's assume they got access, but they get there and. Not everything has been saved to the repository. Not everything is in the single source of truth.

So what do they do? The crime of all crimes? They send an email. Yeah. They send an email. And the problem with that is, first of all, it creates more [00:06:00] email traffic to, they can't continue with their work. And three, what could have been posted once properly to the single source of the truth now? In the future, this person is emailing and sending it to all sorts of different people.

But then what happens is if you ask about the quality of this, what happens when there's version control, and then they forget to share the updated version with everyone via email, and you can start to see how things unravel. Pretty quickly when we talk about single source of truth. So my strong advice to you, what we learned is that it really comes down to attention to not only the access, but the quality of your single source of truth.

We have a saying, um, in our company at quad tense, then if it's not in the single source of truth, then it didn't happen. So if it's not there, if it's not self-service, then it doesn't exist. And it's really takes a lot of time to [00:07:00] get people into that space, but we must as a rule live and die by that single source of truth.

Great access, great quality. And you might be thinking, Oh geez, Mike, it sounds like a lot of work or the good news is I've given, I'm able to give you some incentive. And that incentive comes in the form of, we found out from some of the successful projects, uh, from some of the respondents to our survey, is that there's some things you can do.

And there's some, um, most important thing is that when you have great access and quality to a single source of truth, two things happen. One. You're able to provide a better customer experience. And number two, your employees behave with more autonomy. They take more ownership, they feel empowered. They have the information that they need.

To continue their work. So let's [00:08:00] unpack each of these better customer experience. We found that BCI ouster, one of the leading banks in Romania were able to give better advisory advice to their customers because no matter what touchpoint. They engage with the customer, no matter who had that engagement, they have centralized a single source of truth for all customer experience.

So you can avoid that terrible situation where you talk to the bank yesterday, you call them back the next day you talk to a different person and you h...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And I want to welcome you to our hundredth episode. Woo. And it is the appropriate that we are discussing our trends report, which we have just released. And the previous episodes, you would have heard a little bit about that, but today we're talking about a huge insight and it is about the implementation.

With new technology into your stack, into your solutions architecture that drives the production, the creation of your new digital product. Maybe it's some software, maybe it's a mobile app. We're talking about how we tackle this crazy difficult issue of implementing new technology. Now to remind you, we went and talked to a lot of people [00:01:00] over a hundred people all around the world, all sorts of product and business experts about the challenges they face with digital products, and simply put the act of bringing outside technology inside the company is the single biggest technology challenge.

It must be said that there are quite a few challenges with technology, but this was the big one, but it's not all doom and gloom because what we also discovered. Is that leadership plays a real key in actually the successful adoption of new technology. So let's jump into our next trend, uh, from our emerging trends report, let's get into implementation.

Now, the curious thing about implementation is we found it was really, really hard, but it has some good company. We also found that the next biggest two challenges was aligning. The organization around a technology technology [00:02:00] solution and making sure that it actually speaks to the goals of the business and not far behind it researching potential technology solutions.

Ain't that easy. But I think if we zoom out here, obviously whenever you're considering something new, You're in sort of foreign territory. You're not really sure. And, uh, the thing that struck me having done so much customer research in my time is that there was just an overall sense of when people were ranking the difficulties, everything kind of came in pretty hard and there was no clear part of the technology adoption process.

That was really easy when compared to the others. So let's talk about why it's so hard. And another thing that we discovered from our report is that. You've got the challenge with a particular technology in itself. So let's just isolate it. You've drawn up a long list of potential [00:03:00] technology solutions for whatever you need to do.

And we discovered that, you know, there's a pretty strong and clear, consistent line from that consideration to choice implementation and then support. Everybody seemed very clear on that. But here is where implementation gets really hard. Yes. There are challenges with every new technology, particularly if it's a pretty emergent, but far greater is the fact.

And this is the big bit is where it becomes part of a larger system inside of the organization. It becomes another product, another platform in the overall solution. Or technology stack. And this is where the complexity is organizations before they know it. They look around and they look at the tech department and they're supporting 10, 12 different technologies.

If you're in banking or finance many, many more, and it's all [00:04:00] glued together. And it's that gluing together does something. It creates interdependency between systems and a lot of, uh, I'm I'm almost going to say they're almost like bandaid fixes get made on this fragile collection, this fragile stack, uh, of technology.

It's all glued together over years and years and years people come and people go and this leads. To the next insight we have from the report around implementation is that the complexity is not only the platform alone, it's the platforms, but it's not just this whole concept of platforms, it's platforms and people.

This is where the real challenges, because what's really fascinating is when you look at the people side of things, getting people like really aligned on the technology people. Finding people that have the skills to design new [00:05:00] solution, architectures really hard, really scarce person to find, making sure that the engineering, the web services, the API APIs and so forth are all integrated in a scalable way, documented way.

This. Is where the challenge really is. There's not only lots of platforms and products all glued together. It's the people that run them. And here's the thing. If you're a designer, developer, creator, engineer, business leader, you come along to your engine and technology team and say, let's do something. I think new and boy, they look at you and go.

Oh, no. And the reason that they're like, Oh, no is because they've built. All of these products and platforms and glued them together in a very sort of precarious stack and it, and it just works. Okay. It's, it's actually working right now. And then you say, let's add something new [00:06:00] and they're like, Oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that.

We'd have to undo a couple of things. Is it going to create some issues? We don't have the people, the bandwidth, the resources, this ladies and gentlemen, this is why implementation is so hard. Because it's not only what you have and keeping that going. As soon as you introduce something new, it reveals deficiencies in the stack in that system, in that multi-platforms, that you've glued together.

This could be gluing, ERP, CRM, CMS, all together, all these sorts of things have been glued together. So you've got very unusual, unexpected relationships between data, applications and interfaces. Oh, my gosh. It is. It's really tough. And then when you want to add something new on that, it's always like, we don't know exactly what's going to happen when we add a whole new product platform or even sometimes just new features can be quite a drama to entertain.

Now don't worry. [00:07:00] There's some light here in the tunnel. And one of the interesting things is that we found that the reality is you will constantly need. To at least entertain new technologies, new products and platforms in order to build out your offering. Particularly as you know, you've got employees that want to work from home.

You've got customers who want omni-channel direct to customer experiences. You're going to have to entertain the new. So here's the thing. We found some successful case studies and it comes down to this simple idea that. This is one of those rare occasions that actually tucked down as essential. If you want to bring a new technology into your organization in order to enable a new product or service, be that for an employee or a customer, it is crucial that leadership truly gets on board.

And that is far beyond just saying, Hey yeah, good idea. Go do it. [00:08:00] There was a very strong case for that. If you want to unblock all those challenges you will have inside the organization, leadership must be all in and they must support throughout the strategy phase, right through, into execution and support because if the leadership of the company doesn't come in and mobilize and open up opportunity, engage the organization, convince people in the organization about the vision behind this new technology.

It will die. So remember that bringing a new technology from the outside, in get top leadership involved and they need to be ready to go the whole journey, the entire ride with you as a product owner, you need to get that support because you won't survive without it because organizations have so many priorities...

Hello and welcome to the BottomUp skills podcast, I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're talking about. User experience. That's right. This is the first of our eight trends from our emerging trends, report and masterclass. And when it comes to user experience, there's one thought that rises above all the others.

When you talk to experts in product all around the world, just like we did. In fact, we talked to over a hundred of them. We said, what's the biggest challenge when it comes to user experience, is it providing a chat app or is it device compatibility or error handling? That's not it the real thing that keeps everybody up at night when they're trying to build a great product.

What's the key thing that they [00:01:00] have to deliver here. It is. The key thought when you're building a product and you're thinking about UX, consistency is key. So when we build an end to end experience for our users, it has to be. Consistent right from onboarding and what you see in the app store ride through to that very first user account initiation, right through to using the core products and services to support, to advocacy.

You have to follow the entire journey and it ain't easy. In fact, almost 30% of the people we talked to said, Hey, UX is their number one challenge when building a product. Now, the thing that I noted about this is if we had done this report five, six, seven years ago, do you know the interesting thing would have been, is the report would have [00:02:00] been inverted.

It actually would have been a lot more about device compatibility, making websites work on mobile phones. Um, But it's really fascinating to see now that the product journeys are longer, deeper and richer, but also those journeys are happening over so many different touchpoints. Just think about the difference between your laptop, your tablet.

Your phone, your television, your watch interface. So I have seven for laps that deliver me native experiences on all those platforms that I just mentioned. Let's say Spotify, Netflix to do list and testicle calendar, et cetera, et cetera. They have to try and create consistent on that. Well, that is the crunch.

So, you know, how do, how do we think about this and how might we find a solution here? Well, it's [00:03:00] fascinating because I think what we have to do is we have to use. A couple of really simple models just to know where we are. So if you want to understand your consistency of user experience, there's a really good model that I find myself coming back to, which is called the basic UX framework.

And it's just five questions. And what I want you to imagine, I'm going to ask, I read out these five questions and what you're going to do is I want you to really. Think about each of these questions for the products that you work on. And if you're not working on a product right now, just think about a product you use a lot and ask these questions of that product.

Okay. These are the basic UX framework and I love them because they will help you determine how consistent your user experience really is. Here we go. Number one is the application aesthetically pleasing. Number [00:04:00] two. Can everybody use it? Number three, does the application make life easier for, is it easy to learn?

Five, do use established design. Patents, some really, really good ones there. So let's, let's explore those for a second. Now for me, aesthetically pleasing, uh, generally means like turn down the noise, um, having really elegant color palettes, but also using color appropriately. To suggest priority to suggest flow within the app.

That's when it's really aesthetically pleasing. Of course, it's got to be nice to look at, but it needs to be smarter than that. You know, those colors need to be put to good use. Obviously beautiful type Paul graphy. I like the idea of spacing, like an app [00:05:00] feeling calm and spacious, not all jumbled up. So that's my thoughts on aesthetically pleasing.

I have to be careful here cause I have so many ideas that I'll, I'll go on and on and on and let's go to the next one. Can everyone use it now? The key thing here is, um, can everyone use it? I like to think of the different modes that people work in. So if my user has an at home or at work mode, that's a good way of thinking.

Can they use it? Um, another way of thinking is if you've got a marketplace, say like Uber, you have a rider and a driver, make sure you test both. Or if you're Airbnb. Can a guest in a host use it. That's kind of everyone. So it's very important for a two-sided marketplace because Hey, if only one side of the market can really use the app and it's terrible for the other side of the market.

Well, you haven't been like an economic imbalance as a result of that. So I've given you some thoughts on aesthetically pleasing. [00:06:00] Can everyone use it, like make it democratic, be careful here. Like you can fall victim to trying to solve every edge case as well. But I would look for those fundamental principles of the main segments of users, the main different types of personas you have.

There's a great way to deliver on the question. Can everyone use it now? The third one does lie. Does the application make life easier? I find there's some great ways to test this. Like. Just tell users they have to pay for it. That will soon tell you if it's making a difference in their life. Um, for testers, when you take it away, do they like say, Oh my gosh, no, don't take it away because those are ultimate indicators of making life easier.

If you wanted to get a proxy measure for making life easier, I think you could try the net promoter score. How likely would they be to recommend this? Um, and I would actually just, [00:07:00] um, get as close to your users as possible here. Maybe do some user interviews, record some journeys, see where they click, how they click, um, see if the effort reward equation is working out.

So that's user experience. Is it easy to learn? Well, there's some interesting thoughts here. I would actually. I would actually sort of say, if you need an elaborate, um, introduction, an onboarding into your app, where you have all sorts of. Explanations of what things do in the interface and so forth. I think that might be a little bit of a tell, um, that if the interface doesn't speak for itself, if it's not so intuitive that it doesn't need a manual of sorts, then that might be a signal to you that it's not that easy to learn.

[00:08:00] Now, another thing that you could do here. Beyond user interviews is look at the data. So if you have an events based analytics tool like Mixpanel, um, you could establish where journeys break, uh, where people are falling off. And those would be indications, particularly if you could segment your first time users, um, you could see.

Just how they are, how far they're getting in the journey. If you have a lot of abandonment through the journey, if you have a lot of, uh, attrition of users like deleting your app, if it's a native app, those are all indicators that it might not be so easy to learn. I was looking today at a product that we've launched and looking at average engagement time per session.

It was interesting because, um, you know, When you get into that and roughly mobile apps, decent [00:09:00] mobile apps you want to be at about the four or five minute per session. Obviously some apps are a bit quicker. If they're more utilitarian. If it's gaming, gosh, the numbers were really high. But the interesting thing is to see how many users co...