Deanna Lambert: Hello.

Jack Sadler: Hey.

Jennifer.: So I thought maybe just first and foremost, because I don't know that every organization necessarily has these roles, is I wouldn't mind if the two of you would just sort of walk me through how you're working with clients or how you're working with Rangle in an everyday basis. And Deanna, maybe we'll start with you.

Deanna Lambert: Sure. So I work with our clients to ensure that whatever we're building is something that really matters to their business and to their customers and to their brand. And so I work from the sales process through to the design, the discovery, delivery phases to ensure that we are solving the right problems and asking the right questions, and that our solution is aligned with those.

Jack Sadler: Yeah, and I lead the product management team. So the product management team partners quite nicely with the strategy team. So we get involved in everything from how we position ourselves and how we go to market in different verticals to how we problem solve, and then how we define and align a product strategy to the client's business goals. So then we make sure we execute that strategy in real time throughout delivery of a product, and then help you get all the way into market and into test beyond that point. So is it resonating with customers? How do you iterate? And how do you approve your product afterwards?

Jennifer.: So NBD, just another Wednesday, right guys?

Jack Sadler: Right.

Jennifer.: Maybe we could dig in a little bit and talk really about that sort of digital first strategic planning. So as someone who's been in marketing for way too many years, I'd like to think that the majority of my planning has evolved over time to be digital first planning, but I suspect that we're actually talking about something fundamentally different here. So I would love to get your take on that, Deanna first.

Deanna Lambert: Sure. Digital first strategic planning actually means something different to every client and to every stakeholder that we talk to. And it really depends on the size of the business and the stage that it's in its own digital evolution or digital growth trajectory. So it can be as big as a business model transformation or as big as the business model itself, if you especially are a digital native company. But it can also be something that is a more ... I'd hate to use the word tactical, but a more tactical execution of a larger business strategy that is constrained to the digital channels, but that is obviously getting broader and wider every single day. Every year that goes by, what digital strategy means evolves a little bit.

Jennifer.: What's the biggest change you've seen in over these years in terms of how that evolution has happened?

Deanna Lambert: Sure, there was a point probably about 10 years ago where businesses were really just shifting from having what was essentially a catalog or a brochure on the internet to understanding that the way that you needed to interact with customers, and the way that customers were choosing to interact with you was fundamentally different online than it was through the traditional channels that they maybe we're already familiar with. And that as we've moved forward, there's become a more sophisticated understanding that your customers are looking for or expecting a certain amount of control over the experience, a certain amount of personalization, a certain amount of intuitiveness that doesn't allow brands to have exclusive control over the steps that need to be taken in order for a purchase to be made or advice to be had or a service to be delivered.

Jennifer.: Big time, yeah. And Jack you touched on something in your intro that you're working with a number of different verticals. So with Deanna's answer in mind, do you see the same sort of thing happening across all of the verticals or industries? Or is it sort of different by vertical? Or is there a sense of urgency more on one than the other?

Jack Sadler: Yeah, the customer experience is definitely playing a major role in how we look strategically at different verticals. I would say the biggest difference is timing. So the major thing we're seeing if you look at FinTech at the moment, FinTech for the last five years has been completely disrupted by new emerging companies and a different way of working and interacting with the customer, whereas industries like health care are only just now getting to that stage. So now we're seeing an emergence of the startup in health tech, and we're seeing a new focus on the customer or the patient in healthcare, which is something we never seen before. So I would say the main difference in how we look strategically now is just, at what stage the customer already has a high expectation?

Jennifer.: So why the lag in healthcare? What do you think that is? What was the catalyst for change just now as an example?

Jack Sadler: I think the single biggest factor is the amount of new entrants we're seeing into healthcare. So in the last couple of years, we've seen people like Amazon, Apple, Google move into healthcare with such an aggressive speed that it's completely disrupting everyone's traditionalist way of thinking in healthcare. So you can no longer sit down and rest on your laurels that healthcare is more complicated and healthcare is different and unique. You have to look at it and say, "Well, if you're still solving the problem for a customer, and you're still trying to innovate in the context of connecting a patient to a doctor in this context, you're innovating at the ends of the value chain, essentially." And then how do we bring that need to the customer as quickly as we can.

Deanna Lambert: Yeah. And just to add to that point, I think that that is one of the reasons why, from a category to category perspective, the comparison that I just made about 2008 verses now, doesn't necessarily make sense because you're going to have some categories like healthcare in some countries, in some places banking is also sort of in that same category. Where really they're making the same kinds of changes, or they recognize the need to make the same kind of changes now that some retailers recognized about 10 years ago. But the problem is that they can't make those changes now because their customer base expectations are 10 years ahead. So it really becomes a transformative project where you can't just do the same sort of one foot in front of the other sort of evolution of digital experience that a retailer might have done from 2005 to 2010 to 2015.

Jennifer.: So that brings up an interesting point, which is how do organizations get to the point where they're willing to have this conversation? Because most organizations, it would be a challenging thing to say out loud, "Strategically, I'm not so sure we're aligned." So how do you know when it's time to reach out to someone else?

Deanna Lambert: That's a great question. I think that there is a couple different things. The thing that's usually the catalyst for that conversation is some sort of external threat becomes apparent, or you see it happening in parallel industries. And so you say, we either want to be the disruptor, because it hasn't happened yet in our category, or we can see some disruption coming and we want to get ahead of it. And as far as going outside, really it's the same as sort of any other somewhat consultative engagement, where often it's easier for people who are outside of your organization to have the perspective on what's going on more broadly around your organization.

Jack Sadler: Yeah, and usually you see this happen when the pain is being felt in the company, right? So that might be because they're using old systems and they have an old way of working, so digital transformation is the main thing they need to address right now, but it might also be the new disruptions in the market are forcing their hand to innovate quicker than they've ever done before. So one thing that bringing in external specialist can do is help you balance those two priorities. How do you balance your need to transform and go through a digital transformation journey with your need to innovate and to launch new experiences, and to help your customers in new types of ways right now?

Jennifer.: Because it is a challenging sort of sensitive conversation to have with organizations, you come in and you sort of reflect back to them the challenges that they're facing, do you find that generally people are, "Yeah, you're bang on. You got it." And giving them a path they're willing to accept it? Or do you find that most people are, "No, I feel like that's the path we were on."?

Deanna Lambert: So in general, I haven't felt a ton of resistance with clients in the past. Once they've usually gotten to the point where they're engaging a company like Rangle, it's because they do recognize some kind of need. What does happen frequently though is that they engage us or an internal team sometimes, because they're trying to execute against a symptom of a problem, and they haven't necessarily recognized the breadth of what they should be looking at. And so we'll come in or somebody else internally will say, "Well, we need to build this piece of technology or add this tool, because this will solve this specific metric." The benefit of having an outside partner is being able to take a look and see the sort of cascading effects that that one tool could have, and how limited it might be, versus the impact that you can have from a real point of view of longevity if you take a look at the structures and the approach to the business itself, and how that integrates with digital tools.

Jennifer.: And Jack, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on ... You and I have had conversations in the past around framing up language so that verticals or industries or people within those industries know that you get it from the get go, because it is a sensitive conversation. How important is it for you to fundamentally understand someone's business prior to walking in or is it part of the discovery process that makes it more organic?

Deanna Lambert: Yeah, it's absolutely critical. We need to make sure we do the right amount of legwork before. The main skill comes from understanding the challenges that happen across industries and the types of challenges that different enterprises go through. And you get that experience by seeing the same problems at different companies, because generally, overall, different problems are not that different. They're all trying to solve, how do we better meet our customers needs? Or something to that effect. How do we better optimize our business model? But it's always with the customer in mind, at least in recent times. The main challenge with the specificity of the problem comes when you're dealing with teams and you get into that more granular level, especially in the product management side.

Jennifer.: So that sounds like there's a lot of people that need to be at the table when you're figuring this out. So if you were to look at an organization and you say to yourself, "Okay, we're going to come up with a strategic alignment to help us on our roadmap," who are the stakeholders? Who needs to be at the table?

Deanna Lambert: Sure, I think 100% the person who needs to be at the tables is the person who owns the business result. Oftentimes, these sorts of projects begin with somebody from a technology role, and they often don't have the sort of viewpoint to the broader scope of the impact, and so having a business owner there is absolutely essential. But then anybody who's going to be responsible for either the execution of any of the plans that come out of the strategy or anybody who's going to have a stake in the use or the outcomes of anything that we're creating or building or recommending. Because if you don't have the entire organization behind that plan, especially when you're talking about a true strategic project, a true transformative project, the strategy could be the best strategy in the world, the recommendations could be rock solid, but if people feel excluded, or if you don't have all of the information you need from that organization to ensure that your strategy is complete, it won't succeed.

Jack Sadler: Yeah, spot on. I think the main element is a cross functional team, right? So many different areas need to be involved. And there's often a mindset of, "We know our domain. We know how to launch something in this area. So let's keep the team as small and efficient as possible." Generally, that's not the best way of doing the things. If you can be fully cross functional, and you can take someone from brand and marketing, someone from the domain that understands your customers. Even embed customers into the early phase of the product development cycle, and embed technology and all those areas as well. That's how you get your best results. You need a small representative from completely different disciplines to make sure you get those different insights embedded into the product early.

Deanna Lambert: Yeah, there's a really old cliched expression which is, garbage in, garbage out. And the sort of modern evolution of that would be incomplete information in, incomplete strategy out. And so one of the things that I often push for is to have a slightly longer, slightly more time consuming discovery phase than most people initially want to have, because through years of experience, I have discovered that if you rush through that, you will end up moving forward with really important gaps and information, or really important gaps in agreement and alignment.

Jennifer.: So here's something that I find really interesting about digital strategy is that, you would hope or you would think that regardless of industry, agnostic of that, is that everyone was at one time or another when they started a business, customer centric. How did we move away from that?

Deanna Lambert: I actually don't think that was ever true.

Jennifer.: Oh, interesting, okay.

Deanna Lambert: Yeah, I think a lot of founders, especially tech founders, are really excited about a capability that they have or they've discovered, that they've developed, and they are able to get a couple other people who are just sort of inherently interested. So whether that's other tech people or other funders of technology, they get really excited about it, I call it shiny object syndrome. And it's very easy to raise millions of dollars for something that people don't really want. And really smart people do it all the time. My favorite example, we were chatting about it last week, is Google Glass, where brilliant, brilliant people working over at Google who get paid a ton of money and they spent a lot of time deploying something that nobody wanted.

Jennifer.: So whose role is it in the organization then to make sure that they stay on path? Who is that person in the organization whose role is, "We're customer centric,"? Or at what point are we only focused on the customer experience?

Deanna Lambert: Ideally, it's the people at the very top, because ultimately, if you were producing something that people don't want, it does not matter what you produce, and it does not matter how good it is or easy it is to use or how slick the design is, if people don't want it, you're not going to make any money in the long run. So there's no way to really, to my mind, separate that mindset out into one part of the company versus the other.

Jack Sadler: Yeah. Innovation for innovation's sake is useless. We often see whenever a company is going about digital transformation nowadays, the first step when they're trying to align their strategy to innovation is always to re-org around the customer. And if that's the first step, it generally means it's a misstep for the last X number of years.

Jennifer.: Interesting, I think for the most part, even the way that I've planned things, especially in startup, has been through road mapping, right? So you put everything on a roadmap and someone makes a decision about what you're going to do first. How have you seen this work with regards to digital strategy? Either help, hinder, forward the process? How does that work with regards to roadmap planning within an organization?

Deanna Lambert: Sure, I would love to talk about some of the fallacies and then if you want to-

Jack Sadler: Oh yeah, I have many of those.

Deanna Lambert: If you want to jump in with better ways of doing it, that would be great. So I think a lot of us have sort of seen the history of a waterfall approach to strategy and to road mapping, and a lot of us have experienced the problems with that before the sort of epiphany of agile approaches and lean approaches several years ago. It was just one of those things where you would blame the team or you would blame the documentation approach or something like that. But really what happens is when you do a long term rigid roadmap, when you do a very sort of baton toss or baton handoff from phase to phase, where you accumulate a whole bunch of knowledge, you make some decisions, you just hand those off to another team, they need to keep going with the next phase of knowledge accumulation or decision making or development or design.

Jack Sadler: Yeah, you're totally right. So it comes back to what I said earlier with digital product management nowadays is the real time application of strategy. So the waterfall approach of handing over requirements or handing over spec documents to move into the next step doesn't work. As well as the waterfall approach of road mapping, or even the slightly older agile way of road mapping where you base things on features, like, "I'm going to build this feature on this day." And then you get funding and you prioritize features based on what you think is going to happen when you launch them. That can't be the way you prioritize nowadays. You have to have the customer and the strategy at the heart of all of your planning. So when you doing road mapping, you have to do something like hypothesis driven development and you have to go into outcome based road mapping.

Jennifer.: Is that hard?

Jack Sadler: It's really hard. Instead of trying to say, "I'm going to build this exact feature that will build my clients and let me use credit card payments," you need to say, "My outcome is I want people to be able to pay with credit card, and I'm going to test a couple of different ways of that working." So it's harder because you don't know exactly how long that build is going to take, but you can allocate time and resources to it. You can say, "I'm going to spend the month piloting, testing and getting feedback on this design before I build it."

Jennifer.: So as part of your strategic conversation then, the idea that you can adopt this in a sort of a micro way to be able to test and learn, and for them to get those immediate wins, do you suggest that? Is that part of the strategy approach?

Deanna Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we do like to do is ensure that we're doing a couple different things in parallel, so that we're continuing to gather the information that we need for some bigger picture transformative experiences while we're also simultaneously in parallel, testing the hypotheses behind that strategy as we go so that we can grow that strategic approach in an incremental way. And so that we are doing hypothesis driven development in parallel so that we're not making any sort of guesses or predictions, we're genuinely testing and developing things at the same time.

Jennifer.: What I'm understanding is you're actually involving the team even in the strategic process early on, right?

Deanna Lambert: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer.: To be a part of that sort of test and learn philosophy, right?

Deanna Lambert: Yeah. And so one of the things that we love to be able to do is to start off with saying, "What do we think is the big business problem we're trying to solve? And what do we think is the big customer problem that we're trying to solve?" And develop a few different hypotheses on what we think that those are and how we think they should be solved, and to work in parallel to test those hypotheses.

Jennifer.: So we're asking the people who are having, potentially, a focus issue what they think the customer problem is, but at what point do we ask the customer?

Jack Sadler: Constantly.

Deanna Lambert: Right from the beginning.

Jack Sadler: Constantly ask them. So as soon as we come up with a hypothesis and an outcome and a theory of what we want to build, we're not asking the stakeholders if they like it, we're asking their customers, "What do you think of it?" And we are getting real data from behavioral usage. We're getting real feedback from usability testing, real answers in user testing of how they find the value proposition actually meet their need, or their objective. So it becomes not subjective anymore. We're not debating over, do we like it or not? And do we think it's useful? It becomes hard facts around, "The customer likes it and I can quantify it to this extent."

Jennifer.: Is that essential to being a part of a digital strategic focused company to have that mindset?

Deanna Lambert: I think so.

Jack Sadler: Yeah, it definitely is.

Deanna Lambert: Yeah, it absolutely is. And I actually think that that's essential to any sort of strategic approach where you're trying to create growth. You're always going to have a target whose behavior you need to change in order to create growth, and that behavior might be buying from you more often, buying from you at the same frequency, but more stuff. It might be an internal behavior change where you want your employees to do some kind of different process that creates more efficiencies. And in all of those cases, you are relying on people who you don't have control over to do something different. And so whatever it is that you are building, it needs to do what they want to do. So it's absolutely essential to start from the very beginning, and to make sure that your hypotheses are emanating from consumer wisdom.

Jack Sadler: And don't forget, before we build the digital product, we've gone through this whole discovery phase that Deanna was talking about earlier. So we've done that front heavy discovery where we've defined and created a beautiful digital strategy.

Jennifer.: Walk me through that, Jack. So you say that the discovery process, and we like to think, I think people who run businesses like to think that every day is a discovery process, right? That test and learn, but what is that actual process where you're sitting down with a client and you're saying to yourself, "Okay, let's truly look at what's going on with your business." What does that look like?

Jack Sadler: So the front heavy discovery process will be a huge range of experience tools. So we'll do everything from stakeholder interviews to customer interviews to value proposition, design and test, rapid prototyping, all the way through until we come up with real solutions that we can go through and build. Making sure that that doesn't get lost in the build section of a project when you're actually writing code or you're designing something and you're getting ready to launch it, you still need to make sure we test as we go. So that build, measure, learn cycle, that that feedback loop that we need to continuously strive for during the product development, becomes even more critical to make sure once you've defined your strategy at the beginning, you make sure that, is it still relevant? "Do we need to tweak it? Do we need to adjust it? Are we still on track?"

Jennifer.: Have you ever seen a client fundamentally shift things strategically based on that feedback?

Jack Sadler: Yeah, I think we see pivots of some sort in just about every single engagement. It's probably hard to recall them because it's so expected, right?

Deanna Lambert: Yeah.

Jack Sadler: You're never going to get it right first time.

Deanna Lambert: Yeah. I also think that there's always a theory, sometimes those theories are right. Sometimes there's opportunities to add to those theories and to come up with something else. Usually, there is some inkling that is correct. And oftentimes, what's happening if it's not the ultimate final answer is that there's an identification of a symptom. So they know what's wrong, they know what needs to change. They don't necessarily know what's causing the problem, or how to get the change that they're looking for, and that's often where the evolution comes from.

Jack Sadler: In that case, the biggest cultural shift is to not be afraid to pivot. It's okay to go out and try a value proposition or to try something and fail and get it wrong because you've learned quickly, and now you can adjust it, you can go build something that's better. You've incorporated your customers early on, you've heard their feedback straight away, and you've just build something that's even better than the first one.

Jennifer.: And there's nothing more powerful to brand ambassadors than being a part of that process. The idea that you have a willingness and a wantingness to do better, and you're involving me in that process, all in. If you want me to answer a survey, I'm all in, right?

Deanna Lambert: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer.: Because I know that you're trying to do things better, right? I probably have a higher tolerance because I would want people to fill them [inaudible 00:26:42]. But by the same token, the idea that a company is in fact recognizing and wanting to move forward, and is regularly trying things is appreciated right?

Deanna Lambert: Absolutely.

Jennifer.: So it's interesting. All right, one sentence or less, the most important thing that organizations must consider as they embrace on a lean agile digital first strategic approach.

Deanna Lambert: Do we each get a sentence?

Jennifer.: Yes.

Jack Sadler: Half a sentence each.

Deanna Lambert: I'd say the one thing they need to consider is that their internal culture will trump any strategy. It's a cliche and it's true. If you want to change the way your business is serving its customers, you need to change the way it's serving its customers.

Jennifer.: Love it.

Jack Sadler: That's a good one. So I would say you need to balance transformation with the need to innovate. And as often seriously underestimated, we embark on a digital transformation journey and completely neglect our need to innovate and stay ahead of the market, or the other way around, we innovate without really setting ourselves up with the ability to keep up with what we're building.

Jennifer.: Now we'll end up with Google Word, which is ironic considering the amount of data that flows through.

Deanna Lambert: Oh, God. Yes.

Jennifer.: Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And as always, please like and subscribe to ensure you are notified about all future episodes. Thanks so much to our guests, Deanna and Jack, for being here today. I really appreciate the insights. We hope you got some great insights today, and we'd love to hear back from you. Be sure to send us your comments and feedback. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.