 Alright that was a great talk, let's keep the momentum going with yet another interesting keynote from Kim Hailman who is heading the UX design team for Google sales platform. She's had a very interesting career path working at some of the best design driven companies in the world like Facebook and Salesforce. Today she's here to put together all her learnings from her experience at Google, Facebook, Salesforce on users and success metrics. Let's hear it from Kim. Hi I'm Kim Hailman. I've worked as a UX designer and manager in San Francisco and Silicon Valley since the late 90s. I began by working for VC funded startups and design agencies, including 10 years where I co-founded and ran my own business. Over the last nine years I've worked on consumer, B2B and internal products at Facebook, Salesforce and Google where I currently lead the sales platform UX team. At Google we measure everything so today I'd like to share some insights about people and success metrics. Understanding how your client or partner's defined success can help ensure that your designs and research search are informed by the right principles. So first let's clarify some terms. As UX practitioners we're going to be focusing on three things. We focus on users, the people the products are designed for. We focus on their goals which are the objectives that products should help users complete and we focus on context. These are the use cases that products are intended for. This is a very exciting time to be part of the UX community. There are so many ways to practice UX. In addition to being a product designer or UX researcher, UX practitioners map systems, create brands, analyze logs, define haptic controls, write conversations with voice assistants and chat bots, build and test prototypes and create motion graphics. So while it certainly makes sense to specialize, it's very likely that you will find opportunities to span these capabilities or be asked by a partner, hey, you're a designer, could you make us a logo? No, we've all heard that one before. So one of the most important things that we do is facilitate cross-functional collaboration between disciplines. And over the last two years we have learned to do this remotely. We have become adept at facilitating virtual collaboration across time zones. And these are situations where we have to work even harder to understand partner and client needs. We all know that it's easier to miss unspoken communication signals in virtual meetings, which is why I'd like to talk about building empathy for our partners and clients by understanding how they define success. Success metrics are a language. Your clients and partners will respect you when you speak to them in terms that they understand. So if you work for an agency, these people could be your clients. If you're at a startup, these folks are your funders, founders, teammates and board members. If you work for an enterprise company, these people are your cross-functional partners and executive stakeholders. Okay, so let's get into it. We're going to focus on five personas and you may know them all quite well, but we're going to be focusing specifically on their success metrics. We're going to look at PMs, engineers, marketers, salespeople and the folks in people operations. We're going to talk about who they are and how they each define success. First up, product managers. PMs are responsible for the business and ensuring that the product team delivers on time. Now, they may have elaborate success criteria related to your specific product or service, but they're also going to be focused on these five success metrics that are really common in the industry. First up, we have the gross profit margin. Net sales minus the cost of goods. Next, we have return on investment. This is really the keyword for PMs. They are always looking for ROI. And if you're going to remember one thing, it's that. We're also going to be looking at productivity. They care a lot about how quickly we are creating, building and deploying new products and features. And finally, we're going to be looking at total number of customers and the recurring revenue. Now, if you really want to improve your relationship with your PMs and give them effective designs, you want to make sure that your work reflects business requirements, that your designs are well-defined, cohesive, and easy to use, and ultimately that they're going to drive usage and revenue. Become fluent with the metrics that your PMs are using to define success, and they will definitely appreciate all of the good work that you're doing to help create new product experiences. Okay. Next up, engineers. This is an easy one, right? Because we all work with engineers. Hey, and many of us used to be engineers. So we know that engineers care about users in ROI too. They absolutely do. But mostly they care about building innovative products fast, product uptime, bug resolution time, cycle time, throughput. There's a theme here. Yes, these are all very much time-based activities and measures. Plus, of course, we care about daily active users. These are some of the top success metrics that every engineer cares about. And if you want to build a great relationship with your engineering partner, give them the designs that are easy to build and lightweight and show them that you understand some of the front-end development frameworks that they're using to create your experiences. Second, you want to make sure that your solution is well-defined, includes edge cases, and potentially leverages a design system when possible. And then also make time to identify and process bugs together. It's a great way to build credibility and generate mutual respect. Marketers. Okay. Marketers do so much. Now, they also care about a lot of the same success metrics as PMs. So let's talk a little bit about what makes them unique. Marketers are focused on product promotion more than usage, although they are sometimes responsible for product training. Now, the keyword here is amplified. They want to get the word out, and they amplify traditionally using email. More currently, they're more focused on social media. They also facilitate in-person events, and they do all of this. And then they also measure activity by monitoring traffic on the product's marketing website, which they probably own as well. So if you are creating designs for marketing, you probably already know these metrics, but let's go through them. We have daily web traffic users and new web traffic users. And we also have the incredibly important email open rates. I know many of us are tired of email, and we have far too much in our inboxes, but this is still one of the best ways for marketers to reach potential customers. So when marketers are focusing on social media, they're going to rely on a large number of other metrics, but some of the most important ones are reach. And reach can be organic, it can be viral, or it can be paid. They're also going to be looking closely at audience engagement and influence. And when we say influence, we mean the ability to drive value for your audience and provide a platform for inspiring conversation. Marketers love it when your designs have strong messaging and calls to action. And when you focus on storytelling and have a compelling visual narrative, you also want things to be scannable and aspirational. This is not a time to go into technical details. You want to communicate big ideas and exciting value propositions. Now marketers and sellers have a lot of things in Commons. And whether you work for a startup or an enterprise company, at one time or another, you've probably met a salesperson. Sellers and marketers, like I said, they have a lot in common, but it's helpful to be familiar with a few top success metrics that are very specific to sales. Okay. Let's get into it. There are one of the top ones, and let's go ahead and define this term as well, is qualified leads. A qualified lead is an individual who exhibits all of the characteristics that your team identifies as the ideal individual to sell to. This is going to include demographic role and company size information. Okay. We're also going to be looking at the lead to customer conversion rate. You want these leads to become customers, and you want to do this with the least amount of cost, customer acquisition cost, and effort, because it does take a lot of time to turn leads into customers. But of course, one of the most key success metrics here for sellers is going to be the total new number of customers that they have managed to create. When we're looking at effective designs and design making for sellers, sellers love it when designs have a very clear value proposition. Also, when they combine metrics and emotion, any salesperson will tell you that selling can be a very, very emotional experience, both for the seller and for the buyer. Then finally, if you are fortunate enough to be working on tools that can help sellers reduce the time and effort of acquiring new customers, they are going to love you and be overjoyed. Okay. Finally, people operations. You may wonder why I'm including this one. PeopleOps is an umbrella term that also includes human resources and recruiting. And so these folks are in charge of hiring, growing, and retaining the team. In early stages, startups may not have a dedicated PeopleOps team, but once any company gets to a certain size, there will be a group of people dedicated to these three metrics. So the three metrics are employee satisfaction, your employee retention rate, and of course, being committed to collecting employee feedback and taking that feedback and making changes to processes so that your team is happier and healthier. If you are helping people operations, they will love it when your designs have educational value. They'll also love it when they inspire delight, unify the team, and improve morale. If you have a chance to help design swag, do it. It will be fun and it'll be a great opportunity to give back to your team and bring everybody together. So speaking of being together, you can think of all of these personas like different instruments playing music together. PMs define the product criteria, UX designs the right thing, engineering builds fast and well, marketing amplifies the value, sales identifies and sells to customers, and PeopleOps empowers and retains the team. Healthy teams are productive and drive customer success. Now, how do we define customer success? What are the success criteria that are going to apply to customers? Okay, there are five key metrics that we look to to understand the state of our customers. And these are ones you may have heard and you may be very familiar with. The first one is called the net promoter score. It's often an acronym MPS. And this is going to be the answer to it. How likely is it that you would recommend essentially this product or service to your friends or colleagues? And we calculate this by subtracting the percentage of individuals who voted zero to six on a scale of one to 10, about that 10 point scale. We subtract the number of the percentage of zero to six from the percentage of individuals who voted nine to 10. So that's really key. The net promoter score is going to be one of the most important scores that we look at here. Let's also look at a few others. Customer retention rate, customer churn rate, average customer lifetime, and then the customer, average customer lifetime metric actually feeds into the customer lifetime value. These are success metrics that everybody is going to be concerned about, but primarily executive stakeholders, PMS, salespeople, as well as marketers. And now you in UX. So let's take an example here. If you're selling to a B2B customer, who exactly is the user here? Who's the customer? Let's take a look at this. So for an example, we have a cloud-based developer tools as a product or service here that's being sold. So the user of this product or service is going to be the developers. Those are the users. And it's going to be mandatory for them to use this tool. The customers here are the buyers. And this could likely be the chief technology officer of a company or the chief information officer. This person cares about specific, so the user cares about specific features and ease of use. The buyer is more focused on ROI for the company, and they are going to rarely, if ever, use the tool. They care more about productivity gains that were promised to them by the seller. So let's say that this company sells products and has a customer support help desk. So the company cares about its employees, but its success is determined by its customers. Both the developer and who's the user and the buyer care about bringing values to consumers. Customer satisfaction is the highest goal because it often correlates to revenue. Now here's an example of how products and services are sold to companies who in turn are trying to provide great products and experiences to their customers. So this is a photo from Salesforce's annual conference, which is called Dreamforce. And back in 2018, I led the UX team that was responsible for this, the Customer 360 Data Manager. We wanted to empower companies to integrate customer data from different technology stacks into a unified customer profile. Now Salesforce regularly acquires new companies and so data integration between their own products is a constant priority. So this value proposition resonates with customers and employees alike. This is the landing screen of the product demo that was presented by the company's co-founder at Dreamforce on a big stage in front of many thousands of people. This is a marketing experience that was designed to amplify the product value and appeal to the CTO buyer by combining metrics and emotion in a strong visual narrative. This is more than just a dashboard. It's an intelligent, beautiful command center. Now let's look at how this is different from the product that we were building for the users. This is the view of the Data Manager application. This was not something that was shown on the big stage, but this was definitely something that was shown to developers in smaller working sessions. This is the low-code tool that empowers admins and developers to map customer profiles to a canonical object model to then be able to have that data be shareable across multiple technology stacks. This product demo, as I said, was shown to users who then become evangelists for Salesforce, but these people don't make the purchasing decisions. They may influence, but they aren't the ones who are actually writing the check. So finally, this is the support agent use case that conveys the value proposition of having a unified customer profile. This is an example of that profile in action, whereas the Data Manager application showed how we're going to basically associate these records with the canonical object model. This is the view that service agents have when they are talking to customers on the phone, and this empowers the agent to provide the highest quality support to the customer who's like calling or texting them in real time. And this value prop helps to persuade that CEO or CTO that Salesforce understands their business model. So now that we've talked about the complexity of selling to different types of customers, let's go ahead and move on to navigating business complexity. I'd like to share a few insights from way back in 2013 when I worked on Facebook's saved feature. So users wanted to be able to save things like articles, photos, and places, like restaurants. And I was a designer on the platform team, and we were responsible for entities like movies, books, and music. But we were asked to collaborate across the entire team to propose a solution for saving that satisfied different stakeholders. So the platform PM was interested in collecting as many signals as possible in order to create the best user profile. He wanted to add a big, big omni button to posts with choices to market entity in three ways. In this case, you could save the album, add it to your profile, or rate the album. Now, the News Feed PM had a different point of view. He believed that this extra cognitive load could potentially impact other actions, specifically sharing, and that saving, it's kind of a dead end. So the platform PM wanted saving to be powerful and easily discoverable. He was trying to make saving valuable to the business. The News Feed PM thought saving should be frictionless and lightweight. And you know what? They were both making excellent points. So what did we do? Well, we asked the users. We tested two different treatments with 12 users, and everyone liked saving. Everyone appreciated the value that it brought. And every single one preferred the one-click option. Now, I was able to take these findings back to my team, and this effectively demonstrated that users wanted a simple way to save. As compelling as that omni button was, the preference was really to have it be frictionless and super lightweight. So we ultimately took this a step further and placed saved into the secondary action menu on the post where you report feedback. And this way, we keep it completely distinct from the preferred action of sharing. So the insight here is that sometimes you will work with multiple stakeholders, and they will have different equally valid points of view. And while UX is the voice of the user, it's important that we also understand the hierarchy of business requirements governing a feature and use UX methodology to help facilitate conversations at the highest level. Sometimes the feature you're working on should actually be less discoverable in order to be in harmony with the higher level business requirements. So now that we have dug into navigating stakeholders and the many faces of customer success, let's pivot and focus on the familiar. Let's talk about user success. My current team designs for internal users. Those are Google's ad sellers. So this is an internal tool. So when we talk about success metrics, we're actually going to be combining some of the success metrics we described for ad sellers, as well as those that are used by people operations. Our sales tools ecosystem covers everything from lead generation to account management to marketing automation. And our success metrics include customer satisfaction, resolution of top user issues, and productivity between measure in headcount savings. We care deeply about our customer satisfaction. And so we rigorously track and resolve top user issues. They even have an acronym. We call them TUIs. And while we have ways to capture in-app sentiments by using a five score point of scale, we also rely heavily on our primary method of measurement, which is a quarterly survey, where we synthesize user feedback and analyze activity log files to generate a clear picture of user sentiment and behavior across a subset of top sales roles. We also measure productivity. Every feature is instrumented and mapped to a critical user journey. And we constantly monitor activity to understand where users drop off of a predefined workflow. When we launch new features, we compare productivity metrics before and after the launch to understand how these improvements drive efficiency. We measure our success in headcount savings. And that's actually money that then the sales organization can reinvest back into the business. So these days, my primary success criteria are to make Google employees happy, productive, and save money. So I hope that this overview of people and success metrics can help you design the right thing more easily by anticipating and understanding how your clients and partners define success. And with that, I want to thank all of you so much for your time. And I hope you enjoy the rest of UX India. See you soon.