Day 1–Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture

— Hi everyone, and I’m excited to be here

  • I’m the cofounder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, where I mainly work with leaders, founders, of some of the most influential tech companies in world to define brand strategy and embed it into employee, product, brand experience
    • My talk is about strategic influence, and hope it will be valuable

— I have the pleasure and privilege of addressing the brilliant researchers here, and I’m glad to be here

  • But I’m not here to flatter
  • In brief, I’m here to give positive provocation, and positive outside perspective on future of industry
    • Go with intent, and hope it will spark things that are useful

— It’s really clear that we are at an inflection point, and many questions asked about where to go from here

 

— According to Saul Alinsky, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”

  • Think of the inflection point we are in as a gift that forces change
  • We do our best work under pressure, where good isn’t good enough, and where things need to change

— Our goal is to redefine value of UXR to world, as this is an opportunity to do that

 

— We need to expand the aperture of what UXR means to wider culture to move from narrow dialogue between user and product to a wider dialogue between users, the broader culture, and products

 

— It’s a gross simplification of that a lot of our work is spent intensely focused on the interactions between users and products, and tactical needs

  • Value though is much more than that, and we can use UXR to contribute to the broader culture

 

— What is meant by culture, and I’m conscious I’m saying this in a room filled with qualified ethnographers

  • My definition is that culture is a shared set of values
    • Manifest in different ways, from ethical eating, multi-generational living,
    • It’s rituals and behaviors, and symbols frothing at the edge of experience

— But why talk about this?

  • Culture is the most influential factor impacting people’s lives today

— Last 20 years of Internet have increased the speed and diffusion of culture, and made it more influential

  • If I wanted to participate in hair metal culture in the past, I really couldn’t
  • But now there are so so many ways to try it on, and be bigger part of people’s lives

— Relative mind-share share of products we are working for the ratio .1% product to 99.9% culture,

  • If we practice putting people at heart of product experiences, but if no intentional program, culture matters a lot

— Culture changes the uses case of a product

  • i.e. think nitrous oxide in rave culture vs blowing up balloons at birthday parties

— If talking about influence, culture can elevate from a product from being a feature to the future of the company

— Before we go further, I’ll do an overview o thef work I do, and work coming from

  • My roots are in research, and I’ve worked as market researcher and market analyst
    • Trained as moderator, with an AQR diploma
  • I’ve been a concept researcher for branding and concept companies
    • Loved work and gave confidence and conviction for power of tech and brands
  • I noticed that the higher-up company conversations I was in, there was less visibility of UXR in company decisions

— And for over 20 years now, I’ve been building the most influential brands of our time and creating brands that can scale

 

— Several distinct pieces have to come together for an excellent brand, including being:

  • Purpose-Led
  • Community-Driven
  • Tech-Enabled
  • Narrative-Based

— Relevance of this?

  • We think good narrative, nice design, good purpose are important, but my experience in building brands is that community-driven and tech-enablement are the biggest drivers of impact

— At brand level to create community and incentivize people, tech needs UXR at the top table

 

— Saw this with Airbnb, and how it had influence that brands of 20th century couldn’t have

 

— We were able to launch brand updates in frame of culture narrative, had greater impact than we would have had otherwise

  • Culture angle of Conde-Nast for example

— User insights and brand leadership working together is amazing, but it doesn’t happen often enough

 

— So it helps to take more intentional cultural lens, to create differentiated experiences

  • First principles are about usability and ease and to challenge with best practices to disseminate and win

— Otherwise we run risk of of wind-tunnel UX, where a product is good for user, but for business perspectives, it’s hard to distinguish product from one another

 

— I’ve seen that a cultural lens for things is not a way of reinventing the wheel, but adding a layer of differentiation and using the power of narrative to help things stand out

 

— So I want to invite culture to the product-user dialog

 

— Get defining features that meet sweet spot between cultural trends, user needs, and product excellence

  • Signature actions

— At most profound level, we have the ability to influence society in terms of velocity and speed, that governments can only dream of

 

— Think of Airbnb as changing what it mean to stay in a stranger’s home

 

— Slack, and how it made introduced new fast, emotional, and cultural dynamics for workplace culture

 

— Or how Apple got us to reconsider privacy

 

— So how do we get there, more often and more consistently?

  • Three steps

 

— First step

  1. Clarity on where to focus in culture, and company’s cultural role. Triple-win cultural role
    1. Speak to what company committed to growing to and cultural tensions
  2. Identify 3-5 years, and what are tailwinds and headwinds to cultural role of company, and which ones can the company focus on?
  3. Integrate thinking into approaches and experience recommendations made

— Need to be anchored as part of broader business and brand strategy

  • Make leaders look at cultural role

— Two examples where good results happened from this framework

 

— The first was Pinterest, and headlines from brand blue-print, included: giving inspiration for life people loved

  • Most people blocked from getting inspiration, and by making inspiration inclusive for everyone, meant more users

— We processed a lot of inputs

  • We captured emotions at all stages of journey, and policy leads, DEI leads, product leads, along with macro trends

— We came up with the theme of inclusivity in the world, and people feeling blocked in expressing it

 

— Not a linear process, but got more prominent with leadership commitment

  • We ended coming up with the idea of compassionate search

— Core experience to make search more inclusive and have people select what makes sense

  • Treated as commercial enterprise

— Huge increases in anxiety to block positive inspiration

 

— Example of ‘Flo Health’: ‘Purpose’ about building better future for female health

  • There was cultural opportunity to address this mission

— Other headwinds and tailwinds included

  • The risk of private health data being weaponized and impacting people’s lives
  • Solidarity between groups of women in different situations, like mommunes

— This all fed into process of product roadmap and innovation pipeline

— Risk of data being weaponized and impacting people’s lives

  • Solidarity between groups of women in different situations, like mommunes

— Fed into process of product roadmap and innovation pipeline

 

—We focused on launching anonymous mode with no danger of being tracked or discovered, and make premium service for 1 billion world wide

  • Impact of premium users, increased conversion and propensity to subscribe and huge impact

 

— Final things for me, and parting provocations and getting practical

  • First, focus on inputs and triangulating product research with macro cultural influence

— Sense of synthesized view of culture

 

— It’s about looking at long-term trends and synthesize sources to pitch three big cultural opportunities for brand

— Another example is CultureLab as AI driven platform for where brands should focus with taxonomies and trends

 

— We are also thinking about users, and look for cultural edges to enrich majority

  • Don’t start with middle, and bring work to edges
  • Find edge-case groups and use insights of those to enrich experience of majority

— Personas that are homogenized arenot wrong, but more bland

  • But specific problems lead to powerful breakthroughs

— Even simple workshops help here to bring product DEI teams to work through questions

 

— We leveraged a user-centered journey map, to overlay dialogue on top of a traditional map

 

— Asking for cultural factors that are impacting perceptions of user journey, with new insights to augment it

 

— Example of Zalando

  • Navigating the idea of cost per wear (tracking cost and against purchase price of clothing)
    • Anything you wear a lot, has low cost per wear, and low cost per year is ideal
  • Used to figure out what clothing to get rid of
    • i.e. a $99 blazer wore once for a Zoom meeting, and didn’t wear it since
  • Seeing that emerge and sense of backlash against fast fashion, led to more impactful CyberMonday for Zalando, by focusing on love pieces

–

— We should also look for dissonance in themes of categories we work in having certain themes

  • In fintech we often talk about: progress, control, visibility
    • But we need to look at the gap between how a category talks about somethng, and how users talk about it culturally

 

— Consider the fintech app Monzo, where banks talk about money [get control, and functional], in culture [emotional, where it feel like lives out of control, and control is judgmental]

 

 

— This an opportunity to have a more authentic human-led connection

  • Dialogue mapping good thing to think about

 

— In closing, I’ll recap the main points

  1. A crisis can be an opportunity.
  2. The world needs user research to have a louder influential voice on brand leaders.
  3. Making user research a three way dialog between user/product/culture will increase your influence.
    1. Make dialogue more intentional with tools and tricks to do it
  4. Committing to a triple-win cultural role, and addressing the most relevant headwinds and tailwinds
    1. Address in cross-functional groups

— You do have the power to influence biggest issues of time, so let’s make it count

 

— Thank you for listening

 

Q&A

  1. When thinking of cultural impact of Airbnb, is there a risk of dealing with a symptom by focusing on one problem, and ignoring another problem created by the organization—like Airbnb increasing housing prices?
    1. At heart, it’s hard for companies to have clean net positive impact on society
    2. Even if taking more intentional cultural role, there may be negative consequences, but it’s less likely to have a net negative impact to culture if you are doing it unintentionally