 Welcome to Agile India 2017. I'm here with Joy Montello FitzHarris and you're with Target and this is your second year at the Agile India conference. Yes. Welcome. Thanks. So you just had a did a talk here at the conference with your experiences at Target specifically around connecting our development teams and giving them a sense of empathy for for the users. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah really what we've learned as a part of our Agile transformation is how important it is for us to actually be getting inside of the shoes and the worlds to understand better and really share in the context of our users to experience the pain and the needs firsthand so that we're delivering solutions that are really effective and valuable and impactful. And you have a data background and so you've really been able to use both data and empathy in doing that. How does Target do some collect some of their data in in that way? Yeah so I have a background in business intelligence and I've actually been doing quite a bit of studying on measurement. I started asking the question last year actually how can we measure impact. So it led to kind of this interesting research or a lot of studying on you know kind of proxies for measuring impact which is very difficult to do and I love data in that it gives us kind of this non-emotional non-biased way to understand what's happening. And so one of the things that we've started to do or have challenged our teams to do is to actually start by getting quantifiable measures on what's happening across their products and their tools as a starting point to then understand where to dig deeper and talking to their users and starting to understand more about their worlds and their context in terms of prioritizing features etc. And you mentioned proxies and lots of times even in agile we often almost encourage the use of proxies but I think from your work and research you found how potentially damaging proxies can be when it comes to feedback and understanding the users. Yeah so it's actually really surprising and I think we all have kind of learned this right as we've been on our own agile transformation journeys that product owners really aren't kind of the magic solution for lots of different reasons but last fall a few co-workers and I had the chance to sit down with Apple on their Cupertino headquarters and during part of our time there we met with their enterprise design services team at their design lab and they took us through the three-day journey that they kind of take companies on as those companies develop enterprise applications. And one of the things that the team shared was that on the first day those teams do no design they only talk to users and the team further said that they insist that those companies bring in actual users that Apple doesn't allow them to bring in proxies so product owners or even managers anymore in place of users and when I asked them why they said that companies that bring in actual users are 50% more effective in the applications they design and the way that they've measured that is actually by return trips to the design lab and so companies that have brought in actual users when they come back to the design lab they're actually able to work on a second iteration or additional features to the original application they built versus those that brought in a proxy or a manager for the actual user have to spend time redoing what they delivered the first time to make it meaningful or valuable and so I found that really valuable and really insightful and so we've been trying to figure out how to apply more of that in the work that we do at Target so where do teams and companies get started how can they get started to incorporate some of these concepts in their workflow yeah that's a great question so the first thing I would say is if you have a thought on something that might be helpful start by asking somebody and exploring kind of testing out your hypothesis right and don't just ask really get into the world and work alongside of them we had a really great team that has recently delivered a tool at our organization and as a part of that launching experience that team actually went to stores and worked alongside of the people that would be using the tool in the store so there's some really great pictures of people on that team actually scanning projects at the or scanning products at the register and figuring out how those handheld devices and the reports on those devices we're gonna work in the store and so that's the first thing I would say is spend time in the world of your users second thing I would say is if you're going to build a product build your instrumentation in with that product while you're building it and so don't measure after that fact figure out what your value measures are up front so about you know your usage metrics kind of what your attention and value metrics will be and what those quantification measures should look like and then know when your red flags are so when when those health metrics drop below a certain number know what action you're gonna take to dig in and understand why those numbers are dropping down to understand more about the world right and then use those numbers as a as an entry point to then start asking more meaningful questions with users exactly yeah thank you so much it was great to see you again at the conference and please enjoy the rest of Agile India 2017 thank you