 All right. Good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. Hopefully you got a little bit of caffeine and sugar during the break and you're ready to power through the last two sessions of the day. So I'd love to chat with you a little bit today about design thinking. And I'm sure a lot of what I'm going to talk about is going to carry on some of the themes that you've heard earlier today. But hopefully you'll extract something a little bit of new from my perspective, sitting in a role of customer experience. So for those of you who are not familiar with Citrix, that is where I work and what we do is empower mobile work styles. Well, what the heck does that mean? So we essentially realize that work is no longer a place that people aren't going to a job from 9 to 5 anymore. So we provide people with software and tools so they can access the data, the information. They can collaborate with coworkers from any device, any place in the world. So if you're going to do that effectively, a great user experience is really important. So at Citrix, I am responsible for our customer experience team and our scope has continued to expand with time. I've been there for four years and the expansion of our scope is a reflection of the fact that we've gotten more and more buy-in within the organization, which has been a really good thing. At the end of the day, we are looking at our products and services and we want to make sure we're delivering the best experiences across every single touch point a customer has. So when I joined Citrix, and this may resonate with a lot of people, if anybody in the room is from a larger company or an older company, they were 20 years old and better product, next release of product meant more features. More features equal better product. And that model worked even 10 years ago, maybe even 5 years ago, but it certainly does not work today. Even in the enterprise space, CIOs, people in IT departments who are making choices about products and software, they're making choices based on products that are going to be easy to use, that are going to delight their users. So it's not just about a checklist of features and having more features than your competitors have. It's really about the experience and certainly everybody can relate to this as consumers. We choose things that add value to our life. I don't have time to sit down and read a manual. I don't have time to figure out what your product does. You very quickly better demonstrate to me what this new thing is going to do and how it's going to add value. I think we're bombarded with so much today that if you can't quickly help someone understand how your product or service is going to add more value, you're going to be dead in the water. So now more than ever, this is really, really important. And if you look at some of the brands that are doing this well, it's a pretty small list of those that do it really effectively. And some additional ones may come to mind for you. But these companies don't just look at one aspect of what they're delivering their customers. They look at the whole ecosystem. I'm sure a lot of us can relate to the experience of Disney. I mean, they craft that experience from the moment you walk through the door. They want you to smell certain smells in areas. They want you to hear certain sounds. They want you to see Mickey at the right moment in time. I used to work at a company where we actually helped them track the Mickeys that were on the Disney properties because heaven forbid your child run into two Mickey's at the same time. That would be a disaster. But I mean, that's what it's all about. They take the experience so seriously that they look at every single aspect and they want to make sure that you leave feeling like this was the best experience, the best place on earth. And that transitions to their merchandise. It transitions to their .com. It transitions to their retail stores. So the companies that do it well think this way. So this is what we've really been trying to drive within our company and trying to promote this to other companies, that it's not just about the one product or service. Design has the ability to really transform the whole experience. And it means you need to look at every touch point a customer has. In a software company like mine, it's all the way from awareness. Here's the word Citrix at a dinner party. All the way through trying a product, buying it, end users using it to advocates. You want people to go when they hear Citrix or they hear your company say, ah, I love that company. You want them to feel loyal to your brand and know that they always want to use your products because there's a sense of trust, there's a sense of quality, there's a sense of really great experience. So this is, I think, what everybody really wants to try and achieve, looking at all this and really achieving really good success. So I think the foundation of this, you can have all the process you want at the end of the day. You can have the brightest and most talented people. But if you don't make this part of your culture, it's never going to fly. I mean, it really needs to be part of the DNA of your company that people are not just paying lip service to the customer, but they really care about the customer. I was just talking to someone the other day who's overhauling their support site and saying, oh, we're going to do an overhaul of our support site where it's going to be so great. We're going to reduce call volume and we're going to reduce call time. And I said, well, how are you reducing call time? Oh, we're reacting to protecting the website. We're removing links. And I just said, what's the value for the customer? Switch the end goal of wanting to reduce call time to the value for the customer. Is it the value that customers are going to be able to go to your support site and find solutions faster? That's a really good thing. But reducing call volume is not necessarily a good thing. You could do that by burying your phone links, six links down. So you really need to look at how you frame problems. And that's really important. And it's making the customer a core focus point. So it's a journey to do this. It doesn't happen overnight. And different people are in different phases along the journey. If you're a startup, you have the luxury of trying to make this part of your values from day one. And anybody who's a small company, I really encourage you to try and do this and get in early. And then it can grow with your company. If you're in a larger company or a company that's been around for a longer time, it's really a transformation. And this was one of the most interesting things for me when I joined Citrix. I didn't realize just how much of my job was going to be about cultural transformation. So it's been interesting. Three things that I think are very, very important to make design successful with an organization. I think you've got to make it relatable. People have got to understand that when you talk about design, you're not talking about icons, color pixels, and fonts. That may be part of it, but it's much, much, much larger than that. And it's not just about a design team. It's about a mindset and an approach to problem solving. You've got to be credible. So really quickly, you can't just be talking about the value of this. You've got to show and demonstrate how you truly can add value and make a difference. So you've got to be able to do that quickly. And lastly, you need to make the results and the impact visible. That's what's going to allow you to do more and stretch the value within your company and your organization. So I'm going to talk about each of these just a little bit. So relatable. I'm a big believer that every single person in your organization, I don't care who you are, you've got to be thinking about the customer's experience and you've got to understand what we mean by design. And the phrase I always use is that everyone has a customer. Even someone in my HR organization, who's their customer? It's the employee. I want everybody to be thinking about what they're producing. Maybe they're in finance and all they do is produce spreadsheets. It's still going to someone. Who is your customer and how can you serve them more effectively? This is really the mindset you want everybody to start with. So you've got to help people understand. This is a big stretch and a big leap for a lot of people. Maybe, you know, folks in engineering are going to get it immediately, but people in other parts of your business may not really understand what you're talking about. So I think one of the most effective ways to get people to relate is to tell stories that are going to resonate with your audience. And one of the ones for me at Citrix that was really tremendously valuable was Virgin America. So we have a large office here in Santa Clara and a big, big office in Fort Lauderdale. And about three and a half years ago, four years ago, suddenly a direct flight, Hallelujah, came between the two of them. And it was Virgin America. So everybody was jumping on this direct flight and they would say, wow, this is a different experience. This is really cool. And I'd say, well, tell me about it. Why was a different experience? And they'd say, oh, you get on the planes, these purple lights, it's got this touch self-service thing. I can order drinks whenever I want them. The flight attendants are so nice. When you go to the dot-com site, it's so easy to check in. They're booths where you get your boarding pass or white and sleek and have fresh flowers on them. And I said, that's just it. That is customer experience. They're not just looking at the plane, or they're not just looking at the price of their ticket, or they're not just looking at the check-in. They're looking at everything. So people started to get, all right, I get this is something aspirational. Completely different industry, but it's something that helps me understand how I can maybe contribute to this if I'm in marketing or if I'm in support. Another thing that I think is really important is sharing stories. So I do this a lot. I get people to come into Citrix all the time to share their story. And it's amazing the power of asking. If you just ask people, hey, would you mind coming and speaking, would you mind sharing a talk that you did? People will generally do it. And these are the examples of people who just ask to come and speak at Citrix and they were willing to do it. And we've had a wide range of people over the years who come and tell their story. And this is really important because, again, it gives credibility. It's not just your company trying to do this. What are companies from other stories? What are the stories from other companies and how have they really transformed their products or their companies or their revenue given what they've done? So I encourage you to get other people to share their stories within your organization. It's really, really helpful. And it inspires people. It's not just executives that want to hear this story, but it's people on the ground that are doing the work. So doing these kinds of things is really helpful. This is one of the things we did really early on and it still stood the test of time. These are our five design principles at Citrix. And it's not to say that these are the five design principles for everyone, but this is what was meaningful for us. I needed to get everybody to understand why this was important and why we were investing in it. And I didn't want to make this mandatory training that everybody had to go to on day one. So you've got to start lightweight. You've got to start with things that people will get and understand. For us, things like make it simple. It was really important because we'd been developing this horrific IT backend software with a million nodes on a tree. And one of the key things that we needed to do was really simplify and getting people to understand that when we say simple, simple doesn't mean simplistic. You can have a very powerful tool and application, but you deliver it to the user in a very simple way. Whether it's an end user or an IT admin, everybody across the board wants a really great compelling experience. For us, craftsmanship, delight were also really important. Unique value was important as well because a company that's been around for a long time, went into a mode of just adding features one at a time. And suddenly there's no innovation. And it can just take four guys in a garage to suddenly speed past you with a much better idea. So you need to have this constant focus on innovation. Yes, you're going to have these core products that you need to keep the lights on. Even if you're a startup, you've got your core thing, but you always need to be thinking about the next idea. So innovation is critical no matter what size company you are. And then understanding your customer. And we put a huge emphasis on this one. For us, it's complicated in that we've got a CIO who may come to our briefing center and we need to appeal to them. We've got an IT admin who may be deploying our products. We need to create a great experience for them. We've got end users who are using our products day in and day out. We need to create a great experience for them as well. So you really need to think about who your customer is, who you're targeting. And sometimes there are a variety of people that you need to create a great experience for. So we spend a lot of time beating the streets with our customers. And this is still one of my favorite things to do. And it's amazing the power and the aha moments you get just spending time with people. We spend time with our current customers. We spend time with people who are prospects. I want to see people who are using our products. I want to see people who are not using our products at all. I mean, that's where you see those gaps and you go aha, there's a need that we could possibly fulfill. So I highly encourage this. And I'll always take an engineer or someone as a part of our organization. And there are many people who just don't get exposure to customers. And the light bulb moments that people have and the empathy they get when they see people using your products is really powerful. So we incorporate customers as much as we can into everything we do. We also collaborate externally with a ton of people. You know, in every part of the world there are tons of academic institutions doing awesome, fantastic work. If you can hook into that and find out what they're doing, whether they're offering classes or seminars or collaborations, we sponsor classes. I'm a big believer in trying a whole variety of things and seeing what sticks and what resonates. And for us working with the Stanford D School has been awesome. We've worked a lot with California College of the Arts as well. And it's great because you get this outside perspective and different points of view. And I think that's really important and constantly challenging your thinking. And we've now, I mean, we're advancing four years later, but since 2011, we started investing a lot in building some of our own in-house training. You know, once we had to get people to understand the basics of, all right, design is important. I get these principles. You know, I want to learn more. We started to create some classes that could help people really understand how, now that I get an embody, what is the process behind this or how do I start to do this now? So we do a lot of workshops, classes, et cetera to help kickstart people and get them going. So next thing I would highlight is credible because if all I've done for four years at Citrix is talk about how great design is and I don't have anything to show for it, you know, and my job is not going to last very long. So you need to have multiple things going in parallel and to make design credible and to show that you can have an impact is really important. I'm a big believer in, you know, immediately if you're starting an organization or you're joining one, you know, try and find some low-hanging fruit. Try and find some quick wins that you can get to demonstrate to your organization. You know, this is what I had to deal with when I joined Citrix. So the bar was pretty darn low, which was good for me because I had nowhere to go but up. You know, we had these horrific consoles that, you know, just were the 20 years old, literally, and they looked at. So, you know, we invested in a design organization and a lot of it was even, some of our initial work was, we had done all these acquisitions, very acquisition-driven company, and no one had even created a common brand and a common identity. So that was some low-hanging fruit we could quickly do. And if you fast-forward to where we are today, you know, we're really, you know, trying to create cutting-edge experiences for our customers. You know, like everybody, we're talking mobile first. We're talking about creating these compelling experiences on every device. And people want to have a very seamless experience. So being able to get in front of customers and show your products is a really wonderful thing and to be proud to show the latest work that you're doing. So to be able to show concepts and ideas is key to getting credibility for design. But in order to get to that, I mean, there are a lot of things that you have to do. And I think the people are the most important part. And a lot has happened. You know, when I first entered this field, it was about a user experience organization and the user experience group did all of the design. It's a different place now. It doesn't work like that anymore. In order for you to be really effective with design, it's not just about a design team. Yes, you may have people who live in Photoshop or who do front-end work, but it's very much a collaboration. And to me, hiring people with that collaborative mindset who want to get in a room and, you know, a designer and an engineer and a product manager want to get in a room and just hash out some ideas and play around with things is what's really critical. So hiring the right kind of talent with the right mindset that gets the value of delivering a great experience is just going to set you on the right path from day one. And experimenting is critical. I mean, this is what we've tried to make a core part of our philosophy. And this was very foreign in my company when I first joined. People were not, they were used to starting with the solution already in mind and to suddenly say, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to go broad. We're going to explore a variety of ideas. It was really different for people and quite awkward for a lot of people as well. But this is critical. I mean, you've got to experiment. You've got to try things. And to do it through rapid prototypes and storytelling is the critical way to do it. You know, we spend extensive amount of time these days on whiteboards and post-its before we get to writing a single line of code. And this has been a transformation that I have to say people have really enjoyed because you can all, and this is what inspires the collaboration as well. I mean, you can all get around a whiteboard and sketch simultaneously. If one person's writing code and another person's in Photoshop, that's not very collaborative. So getting back to these low-tech formats is absolutely critical. And we spend tons of time doing this and allowing people to think of crazy blue sky ideas. We want people to do that. We want people to start out in the place where we know lots of the ideas are going to go in the trash. That's okay. It'll ultimately ensure we get to the right idea at the end of the day. And this is part of the philosophy. It's just, you keep going. You keep going until you get it right. And this is hard for people. People get really caught up in dates and they get panicked. And we say, trust the process a lot. Just come along with us for the ride. It'll be okay. And once you get teams through this a few times, they have a real appreciation for the value and the fun in doing this and getting customers to really help push you to make your product better. It's, again, one of those big mind shifts to realize that customer input is a very valuable thing. And don't explain it away. Don't make excuses for it. Don't try and say, oh, the customer is stupid. It's your responsibility. That feedback is golden. And use it to help improve your products. And if you're going to experiment, this means you've got to learn to embrace failure. And this is one of my favorite quotes. If you look at the area of sports, Michael Jordan is one of the most brilliant people who's played basketball. And failure is part of the game. And if you don't fail and if you don't experiment, you're never going to get better. You will never be the best. So I can't emphasize how important this is to your culture. And if you don't do this, you're not going to get to that place of credibility. But it's a leap of faith. And you've got to be willing to dive in and go. So the last piece is visible. And you get people understanding what design is. You get a lot of buzz. People go, this is important. I'm on board. You start to get some results. But you've got to make sure that the business and the organization continues to understand that this is really important. It's a very interesting phenomenon. But I've seen some organizations get really good, solid design. And they're a very good place in terms of culture. And then they start to neglect it because they think it comes for free somehow. And when they start to build these new teams or require them, they don't get the right people on those teams. And then suddenly you see this company that had this really great experience. It starts to decline and things get more complex. So constantly bringing visibility to the design work that's going on and the customer experience challenges is critical. So I'm a huge believer in environment, in the environment that you work in. And when I talk about visibility, it's about getting people out of these kinds of environments, which make me crazy. Cubicles and boardroom tables. I would love it if I never had to sit in a boardroom ever, ever again. I think they're constrained. There are certain times and places where, yeah, you need a quiet moment, but when it comes to collaborating and creating, these spaces are horrific. I want people to be out in the open. I want them to be seen. I want people to see people collaborating and gathering around tables. And that's when you have that aha moment. And it's not just getting the people out of those kinds of spaces to different kinds of environments. It's also putting your work on the walls. If you visit any of our design spaces, every piece of the wall is plastered with stuff. And that's where you get people to go, oh, hey, you know, I didn't realize this project was going on. Or boy, this looks like it relates to something else I'm doing. And it shows the collaboration. You'll see people standing up around these boards. And to me, that's really what drives this culture of experimenting and iterating. And people see it happening real time. It's not just this magic thing that people talk about. So it's been amazing to me to see the transformation that environment really can have in a company. We spend a lot of effort to telling stories, helping people understand the value of the things that we're doing from a design perspective. And let's be honest, everybody loves to be highlighted. So if you're calling out a fantastic engineer or an awesome design person, a really great PM in the work they did or a team, it goes a long way. So anytime we can share those stories of the good things that are going on in the company, we do that. We do this fantastic fun thing every quarter or two called Design Heroes. And these are the people who are really going above and beyond for our customers. And, you know, it's amazing how far, you know, giving someone a free iPad and giving them a little bit of PR will go. Suddenly people go, wow, what a build-it. I want to do whatever build-it. He suddenly got a cape and an iPad on his desk. So these things have been really, really helpful. And it shows that we care and we're committed to this. And the people that are exhibiting and the teams that are exhibiting the right behavior, we want to reward them and call them out. And we try to have fun with it. You know, around Citrix, our slogan is Design Matters to Me, and you'll see Design Matters to Me stuff all over the place. And by doing that, I mean it may sound small and trivial, but again, it sets the tone of the culture. It becomes a language that people are used to seeing and that they become familiar with. And it's what helps it become viral. It means that more and more people suddenly there's always a little bit of buzz around what the product teams are doing and people want to engage more in design. They'll see those, you know, cool things on the wall and they want to know who's doing those or who can I talk to. I saw that workshop behind that glass wall. How do I do one of those for my group? So the more visible and open and transparent you can make your work the better off you're going to be. And that just pays absolutely huge dividends. You want people talking about what you're doing. So part of my job, I'm the person who does have to go into the awful boardroom and I think my responsibility is to make sure that the people at the top understand the work that we're doing, the value that we're adding to customers, how we're transforming the products, that they're getting to see the latest prototypes and demos, that they understand and they're encouraging this culture of experimentation and prototyping and they're okay with failures that are going on. You always at the end of the day learn from these things. So you need to make sure that the people at the top have visibility into what's going on and for me it means translating into whatever language resonates with them. So whatever language resonates at your company, you know, a lot of companies it's a traditional ROI. If you've got to convert what you're doing into that then go with that. In my case our company is very, very visual. They want to see things. So I need to make sure that I'm bringing that work to the table. You know, too often people assume that other people will just know through osmosis and they don't. So you need to make the time and energy to understand that people see the value that this new way of thinking and this new process and approach is bringing to the organization. So just a little kind of recap on where Citrix is and we'll have a little time for Q&A at the end here but love to get a sense of where everyone is in terms of their evolution. You know, it was a unique situation where I joined and it was about transforming a company that was 20 years old and we've made a lot of progress over the last four years. I mean, where we want to get next year is that every single experience that we deliver is really what we feel world-class. That's just not like climbing a top of a mountain and reaching it. It means you need to constantly reinvent yourself and as soon as you get there, you're behind. It's a constant struggle to be better and look at everything you're doing and seeing how you can evolve and innovate. So we've made a lot of traction and made a lot of really good process changes as well as cultural changes over the few years which have benefited us and I think anyone who uses our products day in and day out has seen a huge transition which is really, really rewarding. And we're also very lucky in that we're not just working on the products themselves. We've been able to engage across the organization so just to sample, we're doing a ton of work with facilities on workplace, reinvention, we're overhauling education that our customers take. Certainly product experience is core. We're doing a lot of things internally for our new hire. So a big thing I would leave you with is to not just put yourself in a box. If you see an opportunity where you can drive a change that's going to impact customer experience to go for it and do for it, do it. We never wait to be told to do anything. If we see an opportunity that's going to have a compelling and important impact on the company, we dig in and do it. I'm a big believer in asking for forgiveness rather than permission and I think it's paid dividends for us. And lastly, this is kind of where I'd leave you. As I look at our journey, I feel like we're healthy and we're strong and we've planted roots in terms of transforming the company and really having a focus on design and the customer. But this still takes a lot of care and feeding and we want to grow stronger and become better, but it's certainly not something that just happens magically and it means you constantly need to reinvest in this and as an organization always looking at how we can become better and stronger. So with that, I would like to say thank you and hopefully we've got a few minutes for questions.