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I felt a distinct feeling the first time I heard someone utter the phrase “product-led growth.” Well, actually, two feelings. One was confusion; the other was sympathy.
Perhaps the most compelling truth about good design, then, is that it is in the eye of the beholder. The range of expressions that good design can take makes available a universe of ways that we can experience it. There are countless ways one might divine and develop good design.
I just had the opportunity to sit down for a conversation on the Breakthrough Builders podcast with Varun Parmar, the Chief Product Officer at Miro. And I’m glad I was sitting down, because he really blew me away with his smarts, his perspective, and his humility.
The going is getting tough. For a long time, there’s been a feeling that assets of all types are overvalued and that we’ve been due for a correction.
Moving from the consulting world to the “client side” in 2020 entailed all kinds of emotional travails, most of which centered on taking leave of the teams at Prophet I’d worked with and grown to love. I’ve heard stories of people being given a week to decide whether they want to take a job; those stories make me laugh out loud (even if just with or at myself). I took no less than a month and a half to make a decision to join Qualtrics.
About 16 months ago, I reflected on the disparities between the experiences of good entertainment content (inspiring/entertaining and story-based) and what passes for good business content (relevant/compelling, yet staid). The takeaway.
When I was 15 years old, I was at the peak of my career - as an athlete. I’d just gotten drafted by an elite hockey team that was in a respected league near where I grew up. And even though I’d been in the role of Captain on just about every team I’d played on, this particular team already had a captain. He also happened to be the coach’s son.
I’m not normally big on predictions. But the events of the past two years have spawned or accelerated so many fundamental shifts that I think it’s important to take stock as to which will be most salient to our experiences of work, life, play, and learning as we move into 2022 – and beyond.
Earlier this month, it was announced that the iconic Staples Center will be renamed Crypto.com Arena as of December 25, 2021, in connection with a 20-year naming-rights deal struck between the rapidly-growing cryptocurrency platform and AEG, which owns and operates the arena. This represents far more than the typical handoff from one sponsor to another as companies’ marketing strategies change and investment priorities shift. It is a cultural moment that deserves to be highlighted and dog-eared in the textbook of economic history that the next generation of business leaders is writing.
While mergers and acquisitions may have slowed in 2020, nearly $4 trillion in M&A activity had occurred as of mid-August in 2021. The federal funds rate is still close to zero, buoying an already-hot bull market and enticing investors worldwide to put more capital to work in US-based assets. Still, the top 25 US private equity shops are sitting on $510B in uninvested capital.
You know that feeling you get when two of your really good friends from different walks of life become good friends with each other?
Civilizations rise and fall. When they rise, it’s because they inspire belief, create opportunity, and promulgate themselves based on some set of shared values. When they fall, it’s either because the orthodoxy on which they were based has fallen out of favor, because conquerors came and knocked it down, or because a new and improved way of thinking came along.
In this essay, I’ve identified three universal themes from the conversations with Alex, Scott, and Jeetu – new rules for how empathy can guide product design. And I’ve pulled excerpts from each conversation for a look at how these builders are specifically approaching their roles and responsibilities in the era of experience.
We all know a great integrated marketing campaign when we see one. Some icons of late have included Old Spice’s Smell Like a Man, Man, Southwest’s Transfarency, and Spotify’s Wrapped.
I wanted to share the steps on my journey to becoming something of a...Podcast Person. My reflection is not meant to be a “how-to guide,” and it is not a list of resources per se. Instead, it is an attempt to share the story of how Breakthrough Builders came to be, so that others might take something from the experiences I’ve had.
The CMO is in fact a Chief Experience Officer - a leader who must not only build brand relevance and generate sales pipeline, but also build an organization based on deep customer empathy to design and deliver breakthrough product, brand, and customer experiences.
In 2001, I made the decision to move from Chicago to San Francisco. There wasn’t anything spectacular about it - I hadn’t gotten into a dream school, I wasn’t going to see about a girl, and I didn’t have a blockbuster job. If anything, the objective mundanity of the move was its defining characteristic.
Several years ago when I was at Prophet, I worked with Qualtrics Chief Marketing Officer Kylan Lundeen and his team to divine and articulate the Qualtrics brand. Even though the company had been enjoying tremendous growth and had a ton of clarity around its values, there was a sense that it was the right time to take stock of what Qualtrics believed and why it existed.
For many of us in the US, the pandemic arrived in earnest in March of 2020. Only a few weeks later, despite being a society that had gotten itself used to screen time, we began to remark upon and complain about Zoom fatigue. It turns out that starting into software rectangles nested inside hardware rectangles is not the way to improve upon the hustle-and-bustle of the 5:30 commute.
When I started at Qualtrics last Spring, my remit was to develop and articulate the value proposition of Experience Management for the high-tech industry, and to create thought leadership that would make our brand more relevant to customers.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve made sense of the world through analogies. When I’m in command of a topic, I often use an analogy to lower barriers to understanding (e.g., “Does your brand have a brain?”). When I’m the one searching for a cognitive on-ramp to a dialogue (GPU-accelerated databases, anyone?), I’ll wade into the water with an analogy to start to test my understanding.
Nearly one year on into the global pandemic, it has become an eye-rolling meme to complete the Mad Lib of “COVID has acted as an accelerant to .” And while society hopes for the broad, quick, and safe administration of vaccinations that help end the extended isolation and danger to which many have been exposed, certain trends accelerated or induced by the pandemic will continue their course. One of these trends, contained within the larger theme of the Future of Work, is the hybrid (i.e., non-single place of work) model that represents the path forward for most knowledge workers.
2021 has arrived, and though COVID vaccines are on their way, it’s an open secret by now that we can’t instantly inoculate ourselves from the rigors and realities of 2020. And while it’s (still) too soon to know precisely what long-term effect the pandemic will have on marketing mix and spend, McKinsey’s Q4 2020 research indicates that the digitization of customer interactions has been accelerated by at least 3 years in major world markets, and that the volume of remote work accelerated over 40x faster than was anticipated under pre-crisis assumptions.
Observers of the brand world took note this week of the launch of General Motors’ new logo. Those observers quickly turned to critics, whether they occupied posts as auto enthusiasts (“watered down,” “weak,” mediocre”), tech denizens (“criiiiiinge”), or business journalists (“branding fail”). And there’s a lot to dislike. It draws on every cliché in the modern visual identity playbook without paying off on a single one of them – it’s set in a lower-case typeface, but still manages to look hopelessly out-of-date; its gradient is striking, but merely mimics Qualtrics’ color scheme; and the white space in the “m” is supposed to give us the image of a plug to signal the shape of an electrical plug – a feature that likely will need to be pointed out rather than celebrated for standing out (i.e., they didn’t pull off a FedEx).
Last month at Qualtrics, we launched the Breakthrough Builders podcast, shining a light on people whose ideas and efforts are behind the world’s most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I was intentional about making sure that our First Five guests embodied the kind of leader we want to profile on the show: accomplished yet humble, deeply expert yet always learning, intellectual yet personable.
Five guests, five takeaways. Here are the lessons I learned from this first series of conversations about how to make progress toward becoming a breakthrough builder.
There is nothing uniquely human about empathy. Every species of fauna has it, displays it, and benefits from it. If anything is unique about the human variant of empathy, it is the degree to which we have become comfortable forsaking it for simplicity and convenience.
In the summer of 2018, while a Partner at Prophet, I met Zig Serafin, the President of Qualtrics. Zig had come to the company a few years prior after a successful 17 years at Microsoft, and I wanted to know what compelled him to join. So I asked him. His eight-word answer – “we’re building the feedback loop for the world” was spoken with excitement, conviction, and a faint dose of incredulity. Where else, Zig posited, could one be doing such important work, given the gap between how people want to experience the world and they way that they do experience it?