 who was called Deliver Impact with Empathy, but I've actually changed the name to make it a little bit more accurate. I've worked on a theory and I think actually the purpose or the intent of what I wanna share with you today is that our goal should actually be to deliver impact because of empathy and so that's what I wanna talk about with you today. And I'm gonna actually stay behind the podium for two reasons. One, I have this terrible cold that my children were generous enough to share with me. So I'm gonna probably reference my notes more than I would like and two, the clicker doesn't work so I'm gonna be clicking for my Mac. So 16 years ago, the Agile Manifesto was written out of a desire or a need for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes. I like to think that at the heart of that movement was a desire to deliver more impact, better customer value, actual customer value. How's it going? How have we done? Well, if it's any indication, in the last 12 months, I've been seeing things like this pop across my LinkedIn feed. Now, missing from those pictures, I'll accept the middle one is the customer. And the middle one actually only has the customer depicted in one or two small places. How can we actually deliver better customer impact if we're not even including the customer in what I would call pretty heavyweight processes that we're developing? Don't get me wrong, it's an easy and tempting trap to fall into, right? We wanna identify a delivery process that we think is going to help us deliver on time, then we architect all of the steps that we think will help us get there and then we tell teams what they need to do to follow all of those steps. As I mentioned, I work at Target and we've been on our Agile journey for about four or five years. And there were definitely parts of the organization as we were on that journey where we mistook Agile methodology as just a replacement for project management methodology in several areas. Currently, I work across our data science, business intelligence, and engineering team of about 800 people. And about eight months ago, I realized something that was a little bit hard to say out loud and is pretty strongly worded. Delivery without empathy is basically useless. And I chose the word empathy because I wanted to convey to people the need for us to get inside of the worlds in the shoes and the experiences of our users to understand and share their pain in a very real way before we started answering questions and providing solutions. But what was interesting as I started to share this idea and theory and socialize it with teams and people, was that people didn't actually know what empathy was. And they either asked what it was, didn't say anything at all, or confused it with sympathy, which is quite different from empathy. I really like what Breine Brown has to say about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Brown is a researcher who digs deep on some stuff you might consider a little bit emotional, but because she uses data to back up what she says, I think she's pretty respectable. So I wanna share this short video with you from her. So what is empathy and why is it very different than sympathy? Empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth, staying out of judgment, not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do. Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, hey, I'm down. I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone. Sympathy is, ooh, it's bad, uh-huh. Uh, no, you wanna sandwich? Um, empathy is a choice and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin. What Brown basically says is that the difference between empathy and sympathy, which aligns to what Webster says, is that it's okay, we're done with the video. The difference between empathy and sympathy is that empathy is actually sharing in the feelings and the pain of another person, not just understanding it. And sympathy is kind of stepping back and being like, hey, what's up, wanna sandwich? And so in the last year, as we kind of explored this concept of empathy, we started to study different products, products that were successful and products that were failures. And as we did this research, I came across this product, this little gem, which was kind of stuck with me, partly because it's somewhat comical, but also because it actually led me to an analogy that was pretty powerful and pretty simple that related to a separate product. And so I wanna take you on this journey with me. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, gasoline-powered automobiles were just coming on the scene in the United States. Well, from where we sit today, it's pretty hard to imagine life without cars. But at the time, the shift was pretty disruptive and a huge change for everybody then, especially the historic mode of transportation, horses, which were still largely present on the scene at the time. So in the normal course of travel, when these cars and horses would have to pass each other on the streets, the result was this panic-inducing event that led to freaked out horses that actually endangered lives. So in 1899, Uriah Smith came up with a solution for it. Our friend, Horsey Horseless, designed a car that looks like a horse, but is actually a car. His thinking fooled the horses into thinking the cars were also horses, but were actually cars. Therefore, the horses wouldn't get freaked out and everybody's lives would be saved. Needless to say, his idea didn't work. In fact, in all the research I did, despite the fact that he filed a patent, I couldn't find any evidence anywhere that Horsey Horseless was ever actually manufactured. And to add insult to injury, Time Magazine actually rated Horsey Horseless as number one of the 50 worst cars of all time, due in part to the fact that the wooden horse head was also intended to serve as storage for the gasoline, literally adding fuel to a potential fire. But what is interesting is that the designer of this product, Uriah Smith, actually filed five separate patents at least in his lifetime. One for our friend, Horsey Horseless, but another, and perhaps the most significant, was for improvements to artificial limbs, which he filed in 1863, after 20 years of personal experience of wearing an artificial leg after losing his own leg at the age of 12. The improvements Smith made to the leg were things like making the knee fully extendable, allowing the ankle to relax when not in use, making the leg lighter and more durable. All changes that actually intended to make the wearer of the artificial limb experience something that was more comfortable and actually more affordable over the course of the life of the artificial limb. And what I found really powerful about this story was that Smith was able to deliver something of value to the market because of how he started. You see, Smith actually literally started in the shoes of the user. And because he understood the pain and the needs and the gaps of the current offerings firsthand, he was able to deliver a meaningful and effective solution to the market based on his actual experience. And what I found in my research was that successful businesses and products started and continued the same way with an in the shoes focus on the user. Let's look at a few examples. There's Apple in the iPod. Before the iPod came on the scene in 2001, all of the portable music players and the market at the time were in the words of Steve Jobs, crap. They forced users to choose between two things. Have something that is physically sized the way you'd like to or something that can hold the amount of music that you would like. Neither option says you would like to choose between. And so the iPod, which was born out of a focus on usability and user experience has actually since then transformed the way that we can listen to and share music on the go. Drybar, Drybar is a salon that's currently in the United States. And all it does is wash, dry and style their customer's hair. Drybar started with Alli Webb, who's the woman in the middle. Alli Webb was a stylist, then a publicist and then a stay-at-home mom. When she was ready to return to the workforce, she identified a hypothesis about what women might be willing to pay for. She tested out her experiment or her hypothesis and then she identified two people that she thought might be willing to go in on this venture with her after she was able to prove out that it was potentially profitable. You'll notice they're both bald, by the way. Her husband and her brother. Drybar today has 70 locations in the US. They have their own product line and they're expanding internationally. If you want to know what empathy is, it's two bald men making a hair salon successful. And finally, Richard Branson. Branson has started and or founded 400 different companies. They range from all kinds of things. A magazine, to an airline, to a record label, to a record business and even a bridal business. I recently listened to an interview with Branson and the interviewer asked Branson how he was able to scale across the number of businesses and differences that he has. And Branson actually said it's easy. Anybody could do it. A business is just an idea that's going to make people's lives better. You see, Branson is insistent that businesses are meant to help people and he's dead focused on helping individuals. That's empathy. He starts with what people need and then goes from there. In each of these examples, I think these people all exemplify a couple of key qualities that Brown talked about in her video that you weren't able to hear. One, the ability to take the perspective of the user as exemplified by the two bald co-founders in Drybar who are able to take the perspective of their hairy headed partners in crime at all of their customers at the Drybar locations. And the ability to stay out of judgment as in the case of Branson. You never hear Branson take credit for his business success by saying that he knew what customers should have and tried to convince them that he had a better idea. In fact, Branson is very, very insistent that no matter how wonderful your idea is, if your customers don't find it meaningful, it's basically worthless. We were at a conference last year and somebody said that those with an IT mindset exist to serve the perceived needs of the business. But those with a product mindset exist to serve the needs of actual users. This is the difference that empathy brings us. It allows us to cross from just perceived needs of humans into understanding the pain in the worlds in the context of actual humans and then delivering solutions and answers that are actually meaningful as a result. To do this at Target, we have a number of tools and techniques we apply that are probably things that you all do or have already heard of. We watch people in their actual work environments. We go work alongside of them sometimes in our stores. We do customer interviews. We do story mapping. But in the last three to six months, we've made a pretty significant shift in our organization. We've started measuring customer outcomes and we've started measuring for customer value and happiness. You see what we've learned is that businesses that are successful and products that are successful are successful because they stay relevant. And they're able to do this not just because they're nimble enough to respond to their customers changing needs and wants, but because they have quantitative tools and feedback loops and mechanisms in place to understand what's still effective and what isn't. And when they see that something isn't effective, they take the next step to ask why. They start to explore what isn't working and why it's not working. They start to understand and experience the world and what's changing to understand what features need to go away and what features need to be added, what product needs to be built and what product is no longer relevant. To do this with our teams, which we've gold by the way, we have 140 teams in our data science, B.I. and engineering organization. All of those teams have been gold. They have customer value and happiness metrics in place by the end of the fiscal year. And this is a hard, hard muscle to develop, but we're working really hard to do it because it's so important. So we start with Dave McClure's pirate metrics, but we've made some changes. This funnel, if you haven't seen it before, is really powerful and effective. I think it was initially built for startups or for applications. Jeff Patton talks about it if you're familiar with Patton. He uses it as well. We've made some changes to make it more relevant for our business intelligence and data science teams. And this is how we talk about it with those teams as they look to measure. So on the beginning and in the way this funnel works is on the left hand side is sort of when your tool or your usage is starting and as you move further to the right, the idea is that your tool or usage is actually maturing. If you're looking at an application, you actually want to get to the point where you're making money from it, right? Now, when your usage is inside of the organization, your business is probably never going to pay you for the business intelligence tool or data science engine that you're providing them. But if you're doing it right, your business should be more profitable and that's where we want to get. And so what we've started to do is to ask people to start measuring usage on the left hand side of their tools, reports or answers, anything that they're providing. Then as they slide along right they start, we've asked them to start looking at things like depth of engagement and session time. Again, that's something that varies based on the tool and where the tool is at in its maturity. Session time should either be long or very short depending how users should be using it and how they should be interacting with it. And then retention. This is another metric that's a little bit tricky, right? And so one of the things we look at right now are asking teams to start thinking about is how many users do you have coming back for a second time, a third time? And what does that usage look like on a repeat basis and what should it be looking like if your tool or your product or whatever it is is providing value? And then referral. I wanna talk a little bit about this. A lot of people talk about net promoter score as being really effective. And I dug in on this a little bit. So there's lots of good reasons to use net promoter score. Net promoter score is a question that sounds like this on a scale of one to 10. How likely would you be to tell a friend to use this product? But what's interesting is that it's not actually a great way to talk about the likelihood of a business to succeed. Because if I use something and I think it's really crappy, I might still say, well, it wasn't good for me, but it might be good for Chris or Sean, right? And so I might rate that a seven out of 10, even though for me, I would probably give it a two. And so what I actually suggest teams do is measure for customer happiness instead. And a customer happiness metric sounds more like this. On a scale of one to 10 or one to three, how likely would you be to make the same decision again if you had to make that decision again? Now I've changed the paradigm of that question to be how useful was it for you in your context? And I'm actually getting really direct responses to something that will actually indicate how successful my business is or how successful my product is. So that's what we're actually asking teams to do. One team, and there's all this really interesting research out there and I think we would all attest to this, right? Like people have survey fatigue, so don't send a million surveys out to your users. One of the ways teams have started to collect data for customer happiness is when they do their regular demos, they survey for customer happiness at the end of their demo. And they've created a really quick tool we use Smart Cheetah Time and there's a great survey application in there. And so people open their laptops, they have a three-question survey while they're all sitting in the room after watching the demo. They fill out those quick questions and they've got their feedback right there once a month or once every two weeks. However, often they demo. So it's a really great way to do that quickly. There's other lots of really great ways you can have a pop-up on the screen, all kinds of things. Yeah? Yeah, that's a great question. That's always an issue around surveys, right? And so that's something I actually talked to teams about. And so what I love to see, we talk a lot about, have you guys ever seen the quadrant of metrics? Speed, value, quality and happiness? Another company came up with it and I sort of stolen it and made some adjustments as I talked to teams. Something that's really important with measurement is that you're always measuring on a balanced way because if you measure, whatever you measure, you're gonna change the behavior of your organization, right? And so if you measure, for example, only for speed, quality often goes down. If you're not watching both of those things simultaneously. And so with happiness, when you're just getting quantitative data like that, right, just opinion, you often get people who are really angry that are willing to respond. The same respondents over and over, you often don't know what the sample is that's responding. So we have a very lean operations team and we wanna understand how to be more effective with our organization. We have to send out these surveys to 800 people and we don't know what part of the organization we're sitting in. So it makes that method really ineffective. And so I know you asked about net promoter score. I'm actually not really a fan of net promoter score and so I never advise people to use it for the reasons I just listed. And I actually get a little bit nervous about customer happiness. I think it's better to talk about customer happiness in an actual conversation. Where I direct teams to spend their time first is on value and that's actually, I think on the very far right hand in revenue. And value you can get to, value doesn't always need to be equated to dollars. But one of the things we're experimenting with right now is trying to correlate the decision that somebody makes that comes out of a tool or out of a report to a change in like an actual quality of decision. So running a regression analysis for people who use a tool to the quality of the decision and impact what's happening in our stores. And again, we're just starting to experiment with this. So putting clusters of things together to say, okay, these are the users using the tool, these are the users aren't. If we put clusters of things together and then run these regressions, what can we see happening as a result of people making their decision using this tool versus not using this tool? And there's lots of nuances like it starts to get very difficult to do that. But there's other measures of value, right? Value isn't just about an increase in profit or a decrease in costs. There's other things like what does the user have to do next? When they leave your tool, do they have to go somewhere else to find a second answer? And I, again, I'm coming from a business intelligence perspective, so this may or may not be relevant for you. But that's something else to watch. And if you have tools that are internal, you have the freedom to build some of the stuff in to see kind of your user behavior afterwards that allows you to get into some of those things. Yeah, customer happiness. Yeah, and here's an example. So there's a car, I can't remember the name of what it does, but they do a survey basically against all the car brands in the US to say, hey, for customer happiness, how did car brands perform in all the car brands of the US? And I think there's like 50 car brands. And Tesla is actually number one. And what they say, this, I wish I could remember the name of it, the question they ask is, if you had to buy a car all over again, how likely would you be to make the same decision? And owners of Tesla's always say they would buy the same exact car again or same exact brand again. And the reason it's really effective is it shows that Tesla understands what their users want or need, right? And so our goal as in the product design or data tool design or whatever it is that we're doing is to understand what our users want or need. I actually read a story, I don't know maybe over the weekend about McDonald's, actually getting out of the health food business and getting back into the hamburger business because they've seen actually a huge drop in profits trying to chase an industry that they just don't understand. And like being a health food eater, I would complete, I also like hamburgers, but being a health food eater, I would agree, like I don't go to McDonald's to get a salad, they sort of suck, right? Like I'm gonna go to McDonald's to get something else. And so I think it speaks to the power of understanding our users in a real way, like for McDonald's, why do you go to McDonald's to get a fast meal? You probably aren't super nutrition conscious, right? You're going to McDonald's for a whole different reason. Maybe you've had a crappy day at work. I can look at seasons in my life when I spent more times in the McDonald's drive-thru than others, right? So what kinds of questions are there? Are there other questions? Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more in our, hopefully if I have time tomorrow in my session, but we actually have a team that built out a dashboard for our buyers at Target, which is a huge part of our organization. And one of the things that they did is they took, they have to actually take a whole bunch of tools and they're putting them in one of our dashboards and they sit with their buyer kind of pilot group and they build it out and they say, hey, tell me how you interacted with this in the last couple of weeks, what questions did you ask, what was useful, what wasn't? And then the buyers say things like, this is too overwhelming, there's too many, this was their initial session, there's too many features in here, like these are the only things I want. And this initial session, the developers who wrote the tool were like, really? Wow, and so they went back and made changes and they developed this iterative approach now where every two to four weeks they get back together with the developers, they get that feedback and then they make changes. Sometimes on the fly in the room with them and sometimes they go back and make changes depending how real they are. And again, like this is really new for us, actually measuring value, especially as we get all the way down to the right where we're trying to correlate it to actual quality of business decision. This is a new way for us to think, but it's really important. But some of these other things, like if you talk about return users, that's something we've started talking about with our products especially. If you have people that come into your product only once or twice and they don't come back again, it's a red flag and you need to start asking people why. What sucks about it? Is the algorithm that you have driving your search results, for example, not providing something that's relevant? Start doing some research and asking people why and then prioritizing your features differently. Prioritize your work based on your feedback about what's going to drive usability and value for your customers. Does that answer the question? What perspective are you on? What makes feeding for the customers happy? But how do you think the process is going to, the why is off, you know. Yeah. Why a particular customer wants, has to be off the table for a long time. So, I mean that is about the empathy kind of answer to the picture, right? So yeah, that's a great question. And so, and that's one of the things I wanted to call out. So these really do just provide numbers. When your numbers are low, that's how you know where to spend your time to ask why. Because at the end of the day, we don't have the time we would want to spend with everybody. We have to prioritize who we're gonna ask and what features we're gonna ask about. Otherwise, like our product owners are largely visionary. That's why they're product owners, right? But, and because they're great at being visionary, they're thinking about the next great feature to build. But what they have to start understanding is what features aren't providing the value they would expect. And so when they've got numbers, they can start digging into those features and having the conversations. And so, I think it's a great call out. And it's something like, you can't just have the data. You have to be having conversations. You have to have a group of actual users that you're circling back and talking to. Yeah, so here's what's interesting. And you're doing that in person, you're collecting the feedback. And is that like you're going to their desks or how are you collecting the feedback? Yeah. So, I don't know you. I'm pretty direct, right? But if I asked you like, hey, do I look fat in this outfit? Are you going to tell me the truth? Right? Probably not. My husband also won't, by the way, because he's a smart man. And so like what I'm getting to there is that your users probably aren't going to tell you the things that are hard to articulate unless they feel incredibly comfortable or unless they're like me where I'm just going to tell you like, yeah, you look fat, you should go change. And so what things like a survey do if you can do it effectively and if you have people that are willing to do it, it allows them an anonymous voice to say things that they're afraid to say out loud. What things like quantifying usage by looking at some of these number allows you to do is have data that backs up what's actually happening inside of the tool that people might not be actually telling you. So hard truths, right? If you have a shirt in the example that I just gave you, if I have a shirt that I think looks amazing on me, but it just doesn't sell, I need to start asking why. Maybe because it looks fat, makes everybody look fat. Yeah. Yeah. The four of a line words sympathy. I think that the video was showing an example of a lack of sympathy because sympathy is really the genuine feeling of compassion and sorrow for someone else's suffering. So I like the different, we can talk about different things, connections. And I agree with that, but I kind of think that's really a redefinition towards it. That's a good call out. And I think like where I'm really trying to go is that it's not enough just to feel bad for people, it requires us to actually get inside of their worlds. Right? Yeah. Yeah. A process which often is out of the question. Yeah. Yeah. Balance being, getting out of more things than I was creating. Yeah. So that this, I think we all need to use it as well as... Yeah. So I think it's a great question actually. Steve Jobs talks about this a little bit in his, the biography that Walter Isaacson talked about a little bit. Henry Ford is credited with a quote that he actually never said, which is that if he asked people what they would want, they actually would say faster horses. He never said it, but I think it's a great quote. And Steve Jobs also says it in his biography, which is a terrible. And because I'm so like data driven, I had to find out if he actually said it, which there's no evidence that he did. But I think the difference for us there is understanding what's the actual need versus what's the solution the user would point to. So how can we dig deeper to understand the need or the pain the user has instead of asking the user for the solution? I used to work in business intelligence and with business intelligence teams really closely. And what I would say to the team is you need to start thinking about what the next question the business user is going to have after they have the answer to this one. Because that's really where the operations team needs to go next. But they're not able to think of it because they're so heavily invested in operations. And so where that goes with solutions, right? If Henry Ford's false example, the question is what would help you get to work faster? People would say faster horses. As a development team, our job is to take what the users are saying as the solution and kind of break that apart into what they're saying the problem is. Is that making sense at all? I'm not seeing that it makes a ton of sense. So I think it comes down to how are we approaching customers as we're starting to understand. I think it comes down to seeking to understand their world from a way that we're able to understand their problem. And then we have the ability to bring innovation and technical solutions to the table once we understand the problem, right? And so if we can see problems in the world today, I think that we can start thinking about solutions and we can start to see what's the trajectory. If this problem continues this way, what's the trajectory of what that's gonna look like in a year, in two years, or in three years? How can I innovate to provide solutions that will provide not just for this problem today but in two years, three years, et cetera? And then we can continue to iterate on so we can design a skinny experiment, test that out, see if it's true and continue on. Is that helpful? Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Thank you.