Navigating the Currents of Change: Mastering Disruption, Design Thinking, and Customer-Centric Innovation

In this Throwback Thursday (TBT) edition of The Disruptor Podcast, we delve deep into the whirlwind world of digital disruption, design thinking, and the critical importance of a customer-centric approach to innovation.

Join hosts Jan Almasy and John Kundtz,  alongside special guest Nicholas Jayanty, as they explore the intricate dance between disrupting and being disrupted in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.

What You'll Learn:

The Essence of Value Creation: Discover how businesses navigate the complex terrain of delivering value not just to themselves but, more importantly, to their customers. 

Disruptor’s Insights: Kundtz has witnessed the rise and fall of industry giants to help startups navigate these turbulent waters. He provides a unique perspective on the digital age's challenges and opportunities.

Design Thinking at Its Core: Nicholas Jayanty, a principal UX researcher, discusses his transition from the independent film industry to IT and how design thinking has become pivotal in addressing customer needs and driving innovation.

From Empathy to Transformation: This episode highlights the journey from understanding customer needs (empathy) to effectively implementing solutions that significantly improve their experiences (transformation).

Real-World Applications: Through anecdotes and experiences, the conversation illuminates the practical application of design thinking and customer-centric strategies in overcoming sales hurdles and fostering product development that genuinely meets user needs.

Navigating Disruption: Learn how companies, from startups to tech giants, employ design thinking and customer-centric approaches to survive and thrive amid ongoing digital disruption.

This episode is a must-listen for those looking to deepen their understanding of leveraging disruption for growth and creating meaningful, user-focused products and services.

Subscribe to The Disruptor Podcast for more insights into the ever-evolving world of technology, innovation, and disruption. 

Stay ahead of the curve as we bring you stories, strategies, and expert opinions to help you navigate the currents of change.

Stay tuned for part 2

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Transcript

Nicholas Jayanty: 0:00

It really kind of boils down to that question and curiosity around value. The business has a goal they want to make revenue, they want to expand market share. That's value to the business, but then there's value to the customer right. What business goal are they trying to solve? Are they trying to, you know, increase their own market share, increase their own customer satisfaction, increase their own revenue? And how does you know a product kind of fit into an enterprise's ability to actually deliver the value that the customer expects?

Jan Almasy: 0:33

Welcome to another episode of the Apex Podcast, and we are here today bringing back the Disruptor. I'm super, super excited to have John Coons back in the studio with us again today. John, how was your week?

John Kundtz: 0:45

My week has been a bit crazy. As always, it's the end of the month, end of the quarter, so, as we like to say in the company I work for, it's the most important quarter in the history of our company, until next year or next quarter.

Jan Almasy: 1:00

So for everybody that has, you know, listened to the Disruptor episodes in the past but may be joining us for the first time, why don't you just introduce yourself a little bit, and then we can dive into what our segment is going to be today?

John Kundtz: 1:11

My real name is John Coons.

John Kundtz: 1:12

I go by the Disruptor. I have a 37-year career in information technology, so, as my friend Nicholas, who I will introduce in a minute, has coined, I've seen the waves of disruption over the years, and so what I like to talk about on these podcasts is sort of you're either thus being disrupted or you are the Disruptor. In other words, you are either a Airbnb or you're the hotel industry. You're either the taxicab industry or you're the ubers of the world, or, my favorite is, you're either Blockbuster or your Netflix, and so we are in a period of extreme digital disruption, and so this show tends to try to discuss those experiences and those stories from the field and try to empower people that are entrepreneurs to depth in their skills and design thinking, and anybody that potentially is a naysayer maybe try to give it a second look. And so that's why today I've got one of my close colleagues and good friends, nicholas, who used to work with me directly until he defected to a different part of our company. So, nicholas, final chance to introduce yourself for me, please.

Nicholas Jayanty: 2:28

Thanks so much for having me today. My name is Nicholas Jayanti. I'm a principal UX researcher at one of the world's largest open source enterprise software companies. Prior to that, I had the opportunity to work with John at another large technology company where we had the opportunity to help a lot of our customers kind of navigate digital transformation and kind of move a little bit more nimbly than larger organizations typically move and give the context of whether you're the disruptor or the disrupted. It's important to accelerate your time to market and get those things sorted out so you don't end up in the same spot as the taxi company blockbuster or the hotel industry.

John Kundtz: 3:09

Those of you that have probably heard us before, a little bit of background on how we got Nicholas and I got working together. So five years ago actually, we bought a company. We bought a startup company in Austin, texas, and it was a pretty innovative transformational company that helped with the management of cloud and cloud workloads and those kind of things, and it was very comprehensive and almost looked at cloud management as a supply chain. So sort of from cradle to grave, if you will, we went out and started selling it and we got people excited. And again, much of what we're going to talk about today is sort of how you pull some of these concepts into from the product management, the UX, the UI world into the sales world. Sort of how Nicholas and I got connected is we started trying to sell this stuff. We got a lot of excitement, we got a lot of interest and then all of a sudden people would ask things like well, how much is the cost, how long does it take? And of course we were trying to sell this sort of old fashioned waterfall, the whole shoot and match kind of a solution, and all of a sudden our sales sort of pipeline just stopped. We just the progression of deals just came to a screeching halt and I got a bunch of people way smarter than me and Nicholas was I didn't hadn't met him yet, but some of his colleagues and cohorts. We got in a room in Austin and we started coming up with this idea of what if we started looking at this from a user-centric approach, a human sort of centric design approach. And we came up with this idea and we started. I had no design background. I'm not a designer, I don't profess to be one, I'm just an old, crusty consultant salesperson. Long story short, we did a few of these workshops, we took some approaches and we realized we were onto something and but we also realized we needed help from an expert. And there go, we pulled Nicholas in.

John Kundtz: 5:02

One of the things I want to sort of sort of talk about is sort of the value of design thinking and the experience or the experience disruptor. But before I get into that, I want to tell a little story. This is something I put together actually over a year ago and it's sort of the theme that I want to sort of start to play out, nicholas, with you is sort of how do you get from empathy to transformation and really a lot of this podcast that we geared to small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs, and so why is this, you know, sort of really important now in today's world, and so just bear with me everybody. It's sort of want to take you through, sort of. I put this together back in March of 2020 and it's like what was my typical day during COVID and so, like most of you, I probably my diet was not so great and I sort of put on some weight, and so every morning I would get up on weigh myself and I had the scale that actually sends all my statistics to my phone. Of course I was monitoring all my sleep statistics with the help application. I get up, of course I'm old, so I gotta go find my glasses and I'm searching the house for my Werby Parker glasses.

John Kundtz: 6:17

I brew a cup of coffee or two or three or maybe four on my sort of cool looking curate coffee maker. I shave with these the stuff I get every month from Dollar Shave Club. Might listen to some music or a podcast like this on Spotify. Get to work. I start to communicate with my team on things like Slack, work, my network on LinkedIn. Of course, there was never ending video. Still are never ending video conferences.

John Kundtz: 6:50

After a long day, I order some food from DoorDash. I get a bunch of packages delivered, right? I use this example because I gotta have a dog and I wanna make sure my four-legged friends are taken care of. I might do a little binge watching on Netflix and then, after a long day of what knows at that time sheltering in place, I fall asleep on my Casper mattress, and so you might go well. So who cares?

John Kundtz: 7:15

Why is this story relevant? And why now and it really comes down to because all of these are experienced disruptors right, we buy these products from people because they give us a good experience. They may or may not be any better or any even cheaper than others start other companies, but we buy them because of the experience. So this is actually one of the things that Nicholas taught me early on. Right, this coffee pot is not an experience, but this is an experience.

John Kundtz: 7:49

Right, starbucks creates an experience, and by doing that they can get you. You'll still pay $5 for a dollar cup of coffee. So it's no longer a distinction and this is a quote from a VP at IBM. There's no longer any real distinction between organization strategy and their design, in other words, the best experience that anyone anywhere has is the one they had last. So if you're not working on providing a great experience and oh, by the way, that's not just building your product and your services, it's providing an excellent sales experience Tell us about this whole notion and how you sort of came about getting into this design world.

Nicholas Jayanty: 8:32

It's interesting. I came to the practice of design actually from an independent film background. Prior to working in IT. I was producing independent films with documentary and narrative, had some films do the festival circuit World Premiere at Sundance South by Southwest Seattle International Film Festival got some New York Times critical acclaim and it was really interesting because, when I reflect back on it as an independent producer, my end user is a director. Right, I'm there to support their vision. I'm there to help remove blockers. I'm there to help them get the right resources they need to communicate that vision, whether that's people, money, time et cetera. But what's interesting is that the directors in the independent film space that I had the opportunity to work with thought very little about their audience. They very much more are taking more of an inside out point of view where I have this I'm an artist, I have this vision that I wanna express. I'm an a chore, meaning I'm the only one qualified to express that vision because of my unique lived experience and I feel like the story is really important and so I'm gonna invite 300 people to sit in a theater in the dark next to each other and not talk, because the story I have to tell is so important and it's kinda interesting when you start to apply that point of view to the technology.

Nicholas Jayanty: 9:53

A lot of times, a lot of these companies and one of the reasons I started my design career at the United States Geological Survey and then moved on to IBM because one of the things that IBM was doing by investing they invested $100 million in bringing human-centered design to the core of their organization is because they realized that there's a lot of really great visionaries that are creating technology, looking for a problem to solve. Design is brought into IBM really to help reframe that Say what are the unmet needs out there? What do our customers need, what are the things that they're struggling with and how do we develop technology to actually meet that need, as opposed to develop technology and then look for a problem to solve. It's inverting that point of view from an inside out point of view to an outside in point of view. As a user experience practitioner and researcher, a lot of the work that I do, before we even get into the tactical aspects of it, is just helping people reframe how they think about value.

Nicholas Jayanty: 10:53

Value is co-created. Like John was saying. The coffee pot example the value isn't created just by the coffee pot object. The value is actually realized when I take that sip of coffee in the morning. It's beautiful outside, maybe I'm reading paper, maybe I'm sitting with my partner and we're enjoying that moment together. That's what the value of that coffee pot actually gets manifested. It's important for us to think that, a value in the sense that it doesn't exist until a person picks up that coffee pot, uses it and sips. The outcome of that object.

John Kundtz: 11:27

Tell me a little bit about how you work. Design in the research mode that you've been, like I said, was really what we hired you to do and I hijacked you to go actually out and talk to customers and try to help you sell stuff.

Nicholas Jayanty: 11:43

You might have smelled my former producing hat. Definitely love to sell stuff, but it really boils down to that question and curiosity around value. The business has a goal. They want to make revenue. They want to expand market share. That's value to the business. But then there's value to the customer. What business goal are they trying to solve? Are they trying to increase their own market share, increase their own customer satisfaction, increase their own revenue? And how does a product fit into an enterprise's ability to actually deliver the value that the customer expects?

Nicholas Jayanty: 12:19

But beyond that, a lot of times in the enterprise context the customer the person that's purchasing the software or the product isn't the end user. Value is subjective. What's valuable to a VP of information technology or information technology operations may not be valuable to the developer or the assist administrator that's trying to use the tool. Being able to collaborate with John gave us a real world context in terms of what value looks like and how end users actually articulate value in their own words, which is a very powerful thing. When someone can sit down and write a value proposition of what would be valuable to them in their role, you're getting the pure assessments of what a value prop could look like for the specific end user that's going to have their hands on the software. In our collaboration it was nice to sit shotgun and help these people articulate what value looks like in their own language.

John Kundtz: 13:12

I was surprised how and when we started this approach, that so much of what I thought was really this whole idea of co-creation and value and design thinking. It's almost like there was this wall between the product management, the developers, everybody sort of in the back office, if you will. And then all of a sudden we had this wall and then everything was then sort of pushed over to the front office, if you will the people knocking on doors, shaking trees, trying to sell stuff, and we were still trying to sell, like it was 1985. You have a sales mentality, but you were not paid to be a selling person. So what did you see from I said from your view or your world, when you sort of started seeing what we were trying to do, both on the sales side of the house?

Nicholas Jayanty: 14:02

Yeah, absolutely. Well, at the end of the day, right, your sales team is communicating a value proposition and they're communicating why that value proposition works for the context of the customer and as a user experience team, our responsibility is to deliver that value, right? So we've made all these promises, we've set all these expectations. Now the product actually has to live up to those promises. So, having first hand knowledge in terms of the user's, the customer's context, the value that they expect, and then seeing how you know, being in the room with the customer and seeing what they needed, seeing that how that kind of showed up in some of the project product management kind of apparatus you know from like ticketing systems to requirements. A lot of the requirements were very much kind of sanitized from the customer context.

Nicholas Jayanty: 14:54

And there's a balance there, right, where in an offerings business you're trying to standardize as much as possible, meaning I don't want to do a bunch of custom solutions, I want everything to be standardized. So you are kind of walking that line between understanding customer's needs and then figuring out what to prioritize in your product roadmap. But you want to find those patterns across customers and if you can find that same need across five to six customers versus a one off need for a specific customer. You're going to handle that differently, you're going to prioritize things differently and as a researcher, our job is to kind of identify what are those patterns across customers and how do we help our product manager and our engineering counterparts understand those patterns so that they can make, you know, prioritization decisions on what's going to come out each quarter.

Nicholas Jayanty: 15:39

So a lot of that is outside endpoint of you. But then there's the inside out point of you that you've got to navigate right Technical debt, shortcuts that were made to get the product to market, all of the things that the product management and the engineering organization are already sensitive about. Perhaps you have executive, you know vision kind of in entering the product development conversation as well, saying like I think the market's going here. You know, I read this analyst report and I have a strong hypothesis. So how do you balance kind of that strong top down kind of influence, kind of hijacking your roadmap? How do you balance customers hijacking your roadmap? And how do you kind of triangulate all of these different inputs and outputs to make sure that what's coming out each quarter is what your customers are needing or what your potential new prospects are needing in order to either deliver the value of what you sold or close new deals.