 I started a UX consulting firm way before time in 2005. Ran it for five, six years. Did a equi hire with another large product development firm called Claris Technologies, if you guys have heard of, which is now Global Technologies. Very interesting times. Way back in 2005, when we used to go to clients, hardly knowing what UX is about, but still going and pitching to them doing UX projects and all of that. And now in 2017, when you see the fraternity in terms of people and the clients both maturing, and you see quite a lot of acceptance given to UX design, development which is led by UX, user-centered designs, and we keep on hearing all of these across when we go and pitch as well. How many of you here do a client facing or a sales-based role in terms of selling UX to your clients? Okay, but you as internal champions of UX, you might be selling something or the other to the product teams, right? For people who are in pure pure product play, you don't go out and sell UX, per se. You are in-house team doing UX, but obviously there is a cell which happens. And that cell is to your internal stakeholders, maybe the product guys, maybe to the tech guys, etc. And how many of you face these problems of a power struggle between the tech team and the UX team? Tech team and the management wanting to have some other designs and all of that? All of us? So what I thought was I'll take a little bit of step back, maybe for you guys to also understand when you look at UX from a management consulting standpoint. When you go and engage with the clients for large scale transformation projects. So these are not projects where I have a tangible value to show to the client. So we go and do a deal with that all and tell them that we will improve the sanitation and hygiene for first time pregnant women. We have smaller numbers or smaller ways to kind of define and quantify these numbers. But we don't have a definite measurement system for us to say how good has been the UX or digital transformation. And how they are going to measure the overall return on investment. So for some of these engagements, we typically have to take a step back. What I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly jump to what my talk is going to be about, but I wanted a little bit more participative than a TED format because I think from a business standpoint, when you're looking at a topic like this, it cannot be just one way monologue. So when you guys came in, what do you think you were expecting to hear from me? Two or three main bullet points, wow factor for UX, okay? How you get buying from the management? A story that convinces, what else? Fantastic, I think that's a larger question which we need to focus on. Almost all of us, so say for example, like when we are talking about convincing the management, when you are in the room, the elephant is the management, right? The power struggle which happens essentially happens and you want to find out how to make that elephant dance because you want to make them understand what's the importance of UX and you still don't want to be rude to them or be impolite when you want to emphasize a specific point. So I'm going to break this talk into three or four main pointers. The first pointer I would start is how do we identify what the elephant needs? How many of you find problem when you're management or when you are on a client engagement? You feel that the management wants something different and you necessarily know that you as UX designers are going to give a different output altogether, okay? You feel that? Now, how do you make the management understand that they need to have a UX output and not something else? So, I'm going to give a few anecdotes about these three, four bullet points which I think are very important for you to understand that from a business standpoint, why UX is so very critical. This is about a recent engagement. The elephant which I am talking about is one of the largest clients for us as KPMG. It is the largest public sector bank in India, okay? Just because we are a management consulting firm, I cannot give names. But I'm sure all of you know it, okay? The largest public sector bank in India is the client we are talking to. And imagine, I mean, I'm sure all of you would have had experiences of walking into a branch of this bank or going to their website or reading a leaflet about the credit cards. And would be wondering that will our organization like this adopt UX? Are you guys with me? Okay, so, sorry? Yes, so as, again, an audit and consulting firm, we can give an answer, yes, no, we cannot name. But to my pleasant surprise, and we had to do quite a bit of drill beforehand, but the acceptance which we received was phenomenal. But I would also like you guys to understand that for you to get a phenomenal response like that, what are the few dos and don'ts which you got to know because you are dealing with an elephant, okay? You cannot go with your agile scrums there, it doesn't work there. For stand up meetings, people will actually show resistance because they know that there is a specific process. People know that things will happen on pen and paper before you can start shooting out mails. So you have to adapt and that's what you would have to learn when you have to work with your internal management as well. That when you want to sell a concept on UX, when you want to be a user advocate, you got to make them the advocate first, only then they will be able to understand. So for us to identify what the elephant wanted, I mean, I'll take you back a year and a half when we started doing conversations with them. And some of the very typical things which happen in a sales conversation because we have still not got contracts from the client and we are coaching them, saying why is UX important? So I go, suited, going in front of the client, a large panel of 15 people sitting there. And we say, I'm talking to the center of the seat is CIO. And I say, hey, Mr. CIO, we know that just because you have a mammoth IT organization, we want to do design thinking for your IT guys. And he says, come back after a week, we don't have IT teams at all. So I say, all right, I go back. I understand that they don't have internal development team. Almost 95 to 99% of their work gets outsourced and is done by vendors. So why would he want to invest in design thinking for his IT team? So I say maybe there is some other route. I go and set up a meeting with the CMO to understand that maybe from a customer standpoint, and I do more of user and customer advocacy. Maybe this guy is more willing. So a similar large panel sitting in front, the CMO sitting right in the center of a large ballroom table. And I say, hey, Mr. CMO, I'll help you get more customers. And he says, you know what, I'm not interested, because we have already too many of them, okay? Now for people in the room who go out and sell UX, you have to be very, very conscious of who you are talking to. And when you know that, you got to also understand the pulse in terms of what they would want. So this identifying part of, does the elephant want to dance? Or does the elephant want to see you dance? Is what should be defined very, very well and much before time. So then we had to use a few other techniques to help them understand. But you know what, when you have so many IT guys and IT development teams, and you are going to have customer who are going to be your existing customer base, the only thing which will help you sustain yourself is going to be the experiences. So if you can create something where you are defining and the IP of the organization is going to be design and experiences, only then you will be lasting long. Otherwise, with all the new startups and fintech boys coming in the play, you'll still lose the game. And that is what resonated. So when I made both the CIO and the CMO, sit in that room and help them understand that the game is different. The game is where both of them come and talk to each other is the game. So you have to understand how the power play is in large organizations. And you also have to understand that what are they driven by? So for majority of the customers who are in CMO positions, would want more retention. And they know that acquisition is going to be expensive. I'll move to the next thing. The next thing is how to make elephant learn to dance, okay? You have to understand that it's an elephant. It is not a deer to whom you can make it dance. The elephant has to learn to dance, right? So we did similar things which were a little bit more practical. So if you look at any exercise which is usability testing, what would you do? You set up a lab, you invite the users. You want to make sure that you do enough data analysis. You do your research, findings are presented. And once the findings get approved, you go ahead and start doing your designs, right? Now what happens is in large organizations, the custodians of the end consumers are different people. Where strategies get laid out in corporate offices are different people. And they, at times, don't look in each other's eyes. Because they are two different organizations, so to say, within a large organization. So what we did was a very interesting trick. And this is not necessarily how you do it as an ideal usability lab. Is we made the customer facing guys who are in the branches. Any idea how many branches this bank has? 25,000 branches. There are private banks who have twice or thrice the number as their customer base. These guys have 25,000 branches. So imagine the power of 1.5 million internal employees. All the internal employees can be your champions. You can make sure that each of these guys become end user advocates. If I involve them in the process. So what we did was very intelligently through the CIO, we started working with the branches to help them be the point of focus in front of the user. So we said, you know what? We will make sure that each of your customer who comes with a specific grievance is serviced by you yourself. You have to be the champion and you have to collect all that data and give it to us. We are just going to facilitate the data modeling part of it, okay? So in large organizations, it cannot be that you do it the ideal way in terms of going and doing the research by yourself. If you want to do it, the champions have to be there first and then you go ahead and go ahead and execute the whole engagement. Once we were through with this, then came the third part, which is how to actually make it dance. So now, just because of all this push and pull, you have a very conducive environment between your branches and your corporate team working very tightly in tandem to ensure that the process of UX life cycle can be executed. Now is the part where you go ahead and actually make it happen. So what we did was, majority of the testing also of the new designs which we used to do were also being driven through the branches. So we actually made the branch manager do sessions with the end users or customers to understand and listen and be positive about the designs even before the designs were launched. So when my designs were ready, the branch managers were doing sessions with the users to hear users saying, wow, these are the designs which we wanted, these are very simple. So the adoption which you are looking for is coming from two fronts. One is from the end users, but your champions also being with the end users and telling them, hey, this is what we are doing for you. So the whole organization is in sync. And the final part, anyone wants to guess? Now the elephant is dancing, what else would you want to do? It should continue dancing, obviously. And you make sure you don't forget the dance, right? Because when you're making the elephant dance, so we have had this engagement for long. And there are scenarios when just because you get clocked up in a day to day affair, you end up missing out on your larger things which should be done. So what we did quickly was for us to make sure that we don't forget our dance, we ensured that for this public sector bank, we started doing collaborative design discussions with international public sector banks. So we started doing different design thinking workshops for this public sector bank to have exposure across the globe in terms of how even public sector banks behave. Quite a lot of times when private sector banks do it, they kind of wiff it up their shoulder saying, hey, private guys can do it because they are not bound by rules. To that extent, compliance is not so strong, etc., etc., and they can do it. But when they started listening to other public sector banks across the globe, they started understanding the value of why UX is so critical. So the engagement essentially started with three main things, which was more revolving around testing, around setting and helping them create standard operating procedures to helping them grow their internal team. But what we ended up doing was space design and we have actually setting up the user experience design center for the first public sector bank in India. So no other public sector bank has this. The second is more in terms of helping them see that there is sustainability when you go on to a UX life cycle. So helping them create standards and operating procedures which they can sustain for a long term, and then helping them do training as well. Because we are doing and growing the team to a large extent, and the need is to make sure that all of them are at a specific level of maturity in the UX life cycle. And finally, we could start creating a UX maturity mapping of how the organization is moving from their previous state to the next defined state. So that is all what I wanted to talk about. I'm sure you would have visualized this large elephant do a little bit of dance. There are products which you would have seen rolling out in terms of branchless banks to digital branches where these are unmanned branches with just devices being there. The majority of it is driven through their experience design center. And that's what the talk was about in terms of making the elephant dance. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks.