Transcript
Hello, everyone. Um, it’s nearly the end of the year, and two last Purple Beach podcasts before the end of the year. And they’ve got two cheeky titles. So we’ll record one today with Christina, who wears two hats. And I’m going to ask her in a second to explain these two hats to us. Um, one will focus really on the fact that our customers aren’t spreadsheets. So really, a little bit of a, no, I’ll, I’ll wait for Christina to tell you what that one is about. And then the second one, we really wanna focus on women in technology, but frankly, anyone who is interested in the topic of assertiveness can listen, and that one’s really focused on power is given.
It’s, isn’t given, it is taken, which sounds a bit provocative. But Christina, Why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone? And also, I’m fascinated by these two hats that you wear. Absolutely. Thank you, Annami, um, and thank you for having me, having me today as a guest. Um, it’s really exciting um to be able to speak about those two topics. A little bit about myself. I’m a product and innovation leader. I’ve always been really fascinated, so by education, I’m an engineer, but I’ve always been fascinated by the human aspect in business, and that has led me to really focus on the customers in all my roles, which allowed me to create two really great products in the process and then most recently found my B2B customer insights agency.
And what that also means is that it’s not only the customers, it’s also the internal, the teams, um, and being able to really notice how much more of an impact a team has when I was leading them, when all the voices were heard and how difficult I personally found it as a woman in tech and manufacturing. To speak up and to really make my voice heard and to share my ideas, so that has then led me to the second venture and the second hat that you’ve just mentioned of um helping women in tech and manufacturing really build their confidence and learn how to communicate assertively to be able to get into senior leadership positions.
So that’s really interesting because I think it’s almost as if it’s a coin. I’m talking hats, coins, everything. But, but it, it’s, I can totally understand how the two pieces fit together. Um, but tell me a little bit. The title of our first podcast is Your Customers aren’t Spreadsheets. What, what do you mean with that? It’s really a an element around. We often in business think very data driven and we have to very metrics driven outcome focused, and in that moment it becomes very easy to make what is essentially a human being on the other side, even in B2B, it’s people running another business and condense it into a very bland data and spreadsheets and What then happens really is you lose a lot of the meaning, you lose a lot of the why are we doing certain things, and you can so easily get lost in the details, and that’s clearly not good when you’re creating products and creating value for a business.
So tell me a little bit about what you mean with meaning. Losing the meaning, right? Does that have to do with the fact that if we have a spreadsheet, we have data, but data without attributing meaning to it is useless, or yeah, just how, how do you, what do you mean with that? Absolutely. So I can give you an example as well. I used to work in a business in a SAS business where We got a lot of customer insights and customer feedback as you would imagine, because it’s a software and then people can just type into the um chatbot, you know, I get stuck here or this is my problem, or they mention it to a customer service representative and they would capture it.
But what would actually happen that we would have this massive database of a lot of, a lot of requests of things that we should add and this and this and this and this we should add. What we never really fully understood was, OK, what’s the journey that a customer goes through? Um, that’s, that’s part of the meaning. How do the dots connect in the spreadsheet? Or uh, is, is this type of customer the same than the other one? Should we really pay attention to that type of data point or not?
Like again, we are losing some of the context, um, whether they’re the same type of customer and whether it’s really a focus for us as a business. Yeah, and I’m quite curious. You mentioned there, how does it all fit together? Um, that’s what I’m hearing you say. I think people often look at data. They then try and come up with insights, but what’s, how, how does one actually bring context into the picture? Hm Right? Because, yeah, what role does context play? In particular context. And that’s the really fascinating because what you’re trying to do is the complexity of human beings.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And what I have found works really well is what I would rather um You could say they’re non-analytical techniques. From my perspective, they’re analytical, but in a more visual way. And what I often do is I bring some of those, um, insights and I visually map them and I see themes from there. Are there any overlaps? or I map them on a journey, or I, I take a whole team through them. And what I find is that It’s almost bringing single points or less points than if you have a big spreadsheet.
But those points, because you discuss them, you create context around them and you kind of mingle them with the gut feeling of a lot of different people. There’s an essence of truth that comes out. So it’s a little bit more creative process, but it actually is analytical at its heart. But how does, how does gut feeling and analytical go together? What’s the role of gut? It’s basically it’s really interesting and you you could argue so many ways, right? Yeah, there, there are certain elements as a human when you speak to another human being that you notice and that you can’t quite put in words.
And no matter how many spreadsheets you create there, you will always get the vibe of, is this person making an emotional purchase decision at this point in time? Like you can gauge a little bit whilst you speak to them. Are they really speaking the truth right now? Like all these different elements and layers of a human interaction. It’s very difficult to go and analyse it and say yes and no. That’s where the gut comes in. But obviously we don’t make business decisions on gut we never should.
What works though is you have the gut feeling of several different data points or several different people, and you, you average that and that’s actually the secret sometimes. So what do you think in your data life journey, as, you know, with your engineering background, customer insight work? What do you think has been the biggest surprise you’ve had? Do you have an example of where you, you know, thought, oh, my, my customers are more than spreadsheets. Do you have an example of where that actually led to a, a really surprising outcome?
I would say that um. When I was working at um at a fire systems manufacturer, like a lot of the discussions that we used to have were all centred around the installer and the person who would basically put the fire system in place. Yeah, that’s what traditionally the business had designed for. Yeah, one of the things that digital technology creates is the possibility of taking the data out of the fire system and putting them into a software interface. So we arrived at that point when I came into the business.
How, what do we do with this data? Like how do we monetize it? And what I found really interesting is you could. You could analytically go about it in a way that you look at all the different other competitor platforms that have been out there. You could speak to all the installers and you can kind of create lists of this is what’s really needed, like if you take all these 20 different data points and you could visualise them and you can analyse and maintain your file system. But the really interesting bit came when I actually went to visit a site or several different sites where those systems were in use, and you would speak to the facility management team, completely different, obviously the end user of the system that we usually don’t consider or design for.
And uh they would have fundamentally different problems about, OK, our team is composed of people that sometimes have only been on the site since 2 weeks because we have a lot of temporary staff so we don’t actually know how the site looks like and if somebody says corridor XYZ, I mean we’ve seen that with Notre Dame in a different but exaggerated way that. The person went to the wrong uh location in the KFC alarm. So even just going, I didn’t expect that I was going to do insights and discover that actually finding a location is the like one of the biggest problems.
I was thinking, OK. Maybe it’s about the maintenance of the system and some sort of more data driven way, but it was actually literally something so human as. I’m new, I don’t understand where I need to go. Um, so that, that for me was one of the examples I always think back. That’s very interesting. And, um, so what advice would you give people to become really curious? Like, if they, how do you prevent someone from treating their customers purely as spreadsheets? What would be your 22 pieces of advice for how not to do that?
The number one is get really clear of who are you creating your products for and create, even if it’s a strawman persona, I’m not talking about um going really in depth because I think that’s where people can get lost and almost get an allergic reaction where you go into a cycle. What’s it called, the psycho, uh, oh my God, I forgot the word and all of those elements of like 40 years old and stuff. That’s too far into the depths and that’s not required. What is required though is be really clear on what type of person am I speaking to?
The usual day to day looks like. And just by forcing yourself to answer that question, you’ll have to speak to them because you can’t find it from a spreadsheet. So that’s like number one, like, force yourself to create a persona and you’ll automatically find where your, your gaps are. Um, and then the second bit of advice is make space for Not having just conversations about your product when you go to the customer, but actually allow and trust in the process that going and understanding them will basically unlock a lot of insights that you can afterwards take into your product development or that you can build on further down the line.
So it’s Not not going and saying, here’s my product. I’m going to have feedback, 10 feedback conversations about my product, and I’m literally going to ask my customer, you know, is there everything that you need? Would you like anything else, kind of like, like a menu, then you will never actually get further beyond the spreadsheet because all you’re doing is taking a spreadsheet of criteria and then adding more and removing some. But yeah, actually instead just going, hey, I understand, I need to understand the context because that allows me then to create a much better product. Great.
So, one last question. Is that for people who are not necessarily um an expert or a specialist, is there anything they can read or watch that you would recommend or Talk to other than you, of course, or where can they find your website? That’s a, um, great question, and, um, definitely there are. I’m just thinking I’ve got a couple of books on my bookshelf and trying to see if I can. We could always we can always follow up, but I definitely, I mean, I have got a website and I have a blog, so feel free to, and I know that some of my.
So what’s your what’s your blog. Yes, exactly. So the website is called. And one day you will find the blog as well. And I know that some of my clients are using some of those blogs as a guideline. Um, to understand, to make their questions not biassed and all sorts of things and they do customer insights. Wonderful. So thank you very much, Christina, for that. I think, actually, we’ve realised our customers do matter. Context is important. They aren’t just spreadsheets. And actually, if you see them not only as spreadsheets, some really interesting insights can happen if you combine that with just taking account sometimes of your gut, not totally 100%, but actually of your gut in some context.
So, um, with that, thank you very much, Christina, and I look forward to our follow-on podcast on power isn’t given, it’s taken, which will focus on Some assertiveness for women in technology, but I’m also assuming for women more broadly. Thank you, Christina. Thank you.
