 So today's topic is about, this is a new topic, desirability, not talked about widely. I was really grappling with this subject I wanted to learn more about what is this desirability and how do we enhance it. And then arrived at this concept, arrived at five considerations that could help us win digital initiatives. Most organizations are investing heavily on digital initiatives. And I believe this session will help us kind of consolidate our thoughts understand what it is. And at least in some of you it triggers the movement to pursue this and develop it further I will be very happy about. So we have a very crisp agenda, begin with setting the context for about two or three minutes then we will get into five considerations one after the other and I'll be interleaving interesting case studies in between so we get to see case studies very early in the session and discuss those and also conclude with some other thoughts on how we can take things further. Regarding questions and answers feel free to put questions on the chat window. Our anchor will help me with the questions prompt me. If there are some immediate questions to be taken I would be happy to get interrupted and answer those questions. If some questions can wait till the end we can do that at the end of so with that note. A quick check, I wanted to just validate if all of you are able to hear me very clearly. Please confirm, just put a yes on the chat window. Okay, thank you Rob. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Brian. Excellent, very good. Let's let's take this forward. So desirability it emanates with customer obsession right how much are we obsessed with customer so read this right. COVID really challenged us and the boom was the way we had the advancements and computing and networking that saved many jobs that helped us continue services to many of our customers. However, we have come to an understanding that organization must be fanatical about experiences because even as of now in many, many geographies many countries people are constrained or people are scared to go out and interact and have the real shopping experience or any other experience for that matter. They are depending on the digital right so which means that among the end users, they are becoming more and more tech savvy and also their expectations are increasing they are using more and more cool products. They are no longer being serviced by the front end operator they themselves are becoming digital users. So in order to win such customers it requires mastery of human design thinking so we need to think through what they really want right and also create company user interfaces interaction design. Equally focus on functional and non functional requirements. In other words, it's not a typical agile way of working where we take the backlog we process and deliver sprint on sprint and measure velocity and take products into production. We need to think start thinking from that angle as well. And that is what is going to drive business differentiation and results and those who do it are going to be in the business and win customers. And with that note, let us now move forward right what do you put what do you see in this picture right picture can speak 1000 words. And this is an interesting picture people are sitting together they're engrossed, not necessarily as individuals. You can see a couple of them kind of together right they're passing some kind of feedback or they're showing some kind of curiosity. And probably there is some kind of element of desirability in what they're doing with their systems or applications. So I would like to put forward the introductory of the definition right that the same ability is what health users bond continuously with the product or surveys and exiled in what they perceive to be what the experience they rejoice they really feel happy about they feel happy about doing it and talking about the influencing their peers to try it out. That is what is desirable right is it is. It is nothing mathematical. And there is very little science behind it so far, even though companies have experimented it even though they have even as as early as 1970s or 80s Microsoft conducted studies on how to measure or how to infer the usability and some of their products. So these things happen in some of the product companies with it's still an intuitive new kind of a field where people are researching and trying to figure out how to enhance it. So it's about bonding continuously it's about people feeling that it's what an experience worth going through. It differentiates itself and it's not about usability right it is usability is the starting point it's you can say it's about best in class usability which ensures two things right effectiveness efficiency resulting in satisfaction. And when it happens it also enhances the power of this desire ability ready it is it provides foundation it enhances the power of desirability. And when desirability comes into play it delivers meaningful enjoyable memorable experience. This is what is required in now in many of the digital initiatives and digital products that companies are launching and working on. Without that products are going to suffer products are going to have delayed adoption or failure or need for complete uplift. So let me stop here and share an experience with you. A couple of years ago, one of the large customer came to us and wanted to build a platform for virtual health right virtual health platform which typically means that they want to serve members by providing a virtual health app. Not a new idea right it's it's an idea which was tried and tested. This customer came to us after two or three failed attempts. And in every attempt it was a question of usability rigor, timely completion the ability to solve the customer's problem directly and succeed in the project. That's when we took and completed the project very well it is continuing and we have more than 3 million users and opportunity for new channels of revenue. This is an example of how things can turn around right when you focus on desirability here is another example right a communication provider they had a large base of employees close to 7000 employees across different states and wanted to really automate or digitalized services through a portal it was not working well even though the portal had strong engineering background right very very robust architecture, state of the art design design patterns and reusable components and so on. We went and we figured out, we did a study to say that a there are some gaps are in human centric design right is not it is not looking at what really the customer wants how they want to really engage with the system right that element is missing. It is not sufficient if we have bright architects and designers who can build a solid foundation for a backbone for the system that is equally important. And in addition they need to pay attention to how to attract right how to engage end users towards the system so we went did human centric design. Because in the erstwhile system, the experience was not consistent. So different components different subsystems used to have different kind of user interfaces behave differently and different kind of exception management and error messaging. We brought in consistency along with innovative and intuitive experience for end users. So that resulted in more than 80% user adoption that's what our customer wanted. And also this continues to serve more than 7000 employees so this is an example of how there are applications there are systems suffering. Due to lack of desirability right ability to reach out to the customer and engage them continuously so that they an actively engaged customer becomes an indirect marketing person who can talk about it and influence additional users to use and adopt. Instead of user who either directly or indirectly shares a negative experience with others, thereby influencing others not to use your systems actively right so that's what matters. So this is one interesting experience we wanted to share and also at the end of every such case studies I put a PDF link you can go through at a later stage which has all the details and feel free to reach out to me right and any questions. So, in essence right fanatical devotion right there's what we call it use end user or customer obsession so she was to desirability leads to tangible outcomes. It is not. No it's not a cosmetic calls it is not a fancy thing it's not a fad. It has tangible outcomes, for example, increase in terms of customer retention increase in terms of revenue growth, these are proven by industry reports or articles. I have shared couple of them and put note one is from Mackenzie and other is from forest where they claim that, according to their experience in the study, fanatical devotion to customer experience and desirability results in tangible outcomes. In other words, teams that are involved typically cross functional teams agile teams engineering teams or teams that follow agile and DevOps principles. They need to see this thought in their mind and see sprint after sprint release after release, how are we faring in terms of the ability to engage with the customer right the or the features or the stories we are delivering. Really getting that kind of rave reviews and great comments right great observations from end users and what can we do about it. Because they are the ones who can make the difference they are the ones who can ask such questions and trigger business analysts product owner or product manager to bring the perspective in place to move in that direction. And obviously, digital is creating new business opportunities it's not just about modernizing existing systems about new business models new business opportunities. At the same time, it is presenting a lot of challenges and risks to it executive right there are a lot of questions in their mind. So here are some questions. These are really top of mind questions right. Hey, what makes digital products go viral, why do some products go viral and why do some products don't. And what are the critical success factors how can we make digital business right. And finally, if you are transforming existing systems monolithic systems that are resulting in certain revenue and certain customer stickiness in the current business model and if we modernize are we going to. Retime that are we going to exceed that how is it going to be possible right how can we make it happen. And what do we need to so these are the top questions in people's mind. And in a way, the topic of today's session addresses these questions and a very solid example which all of us can relate right why do we see Android and iPhones. Android phones and iPhones as most desirable phones right. There's so many phones that came into industry vanished and here are the reasons right one key reason is the richness of feature and how frequently these features became available to end users. And hook them together right communications different ways of communications you can have voice video. You can have other means right asynchronous, for example, what staff or telegram and so on and then enter the entire thing you can watch short videos long videos as per your likes or distance it can be about. Politics it can be about education anything else and information services you have news dictionary disorders etc. And utilities you have calculator clock and so on a high density camera and access to payment solutions you can access your bank account you can have payment solutions in place you can book tickets you can book hotel rooms. And with intuitive intuitive interface right people can quickly adopt and learn how things work and very slick packaging upgrades of new versions all happening in a timely manner. You go to bed one day wake up the next day you find that an upgrade has automatically happened and there are some cool features cool icons you're happy about it. And interestingly, a study was done it's found that customers are using their devices quarter of their waking time. This is on the average right and you may even know that some of the busy users how frequently they're using their devices. It is because these devices become the most desirable devices the way they engage they help a device help helping a human being connect with other human beings with purpose. With their distant friends relatives with their banks their retail stores and so on and get tangible outcomes at regular intervals. And yes definitely there will be some cons also right some disadvantage also but overall this technology these devices have made a stark difference and the stand out as great examples. Now this this is the statement right whether your organization creates and delivers new products and applications or modernizes existing ones one thing is clear right. It is you have to deliver an outstanding digital experience and enhancing desirability is essential so you cannot escape it it is going it is a must, you cannot ignore it. The more the attention you pay to this, the more the rewards right more the success is going to you are going to see more success in the engagements you execute. So any quick questions so far we can quickly get into any questions. Yeah I don't see at the moment. No problem, no problem, no problem. Let's let's move on right so this kind of establishes the context that is this is what decidability is and this is why it is important. We already looked at our case right now it's more about what are those five considerations can we look at it. So under each five consideration you're going to see for how to serve for actions you can take solidly and follow through in your projects. The first one is empathy and experimentation right is not just about executing what comes into your backlog it's about empathy and experimentation is about understanding what the customer wants understanding the big picture. Even practicing human centric design, even product owners or product managers going and staying with the customer observing the customer to understand their day to day problems and empathizing and performing design thinking workshops, design sprints and so on, and also pilots to gather insights on UX and usability. It is not an afterthought so it's worth running design sprints is what to run pilots to experiment right what kind of user experience really excites the user or engages with the user versus what kind of user experience is withdrawing the user from the product. It is more than usability right usability is sufficient criteria okay it is usable people can accept it is more more about how much you can accept or tolerate then how much you can engage and attract right. So that is the difference and also continuous experiment is not just running sprint after sprint are we doing continuous experiments to enhance decidability right or are we moving in that direction. Or are we focusing more most of our time in internal struggles of wireframes getting changed design getting changed and all the software core engineering related issues those are important are those taking most of our time are we really forgetting about this important phenomena that is what empathy and experimentation. Important consideration which is which I don't think it happens in all modern projects where you're adopting agile and that was because once you get into the core of things it's all about execution. More features technical user stories performance scalability and so on so I would try your attention to pay more and a focus on this area. And we will look at one more before we jump into a case study this is about being fast frequent and predictive it's not important if you're fast. It's not adequate if you're fast is not adequate if you're frequent you have to be predictable that's important. And it's about being hyper agile DevOps and bringing the engineering rigor so that you you move beyond ceremonies and bring outcomes right move beyond ceremonies implement engineering practices and bring in outcomes and also use tools effectively for to increase productivity because this is about moving fast right tools are going to help you move faster implementation of tools cannot be an afterthought right if you're if a project agile project or a program is going to think about tools and after tools after three months or six months it's moving in the wrong direction is who to set the platforms right at the beginning and extensible and flexible architecture right having an architecture which is extensible and flexible is going to reduce rework it is going to reduce the bandwidth we spent in technical discussions and other project management related discussions it will help give us some bandwidth to think about user experience and desirability and finally reusable patterns and components how do we design our systems in such a way that we really have it's not a it's not a lift service we take it beyond it and really demonstrate that we have patterns and components implemented in our systems right. So here let me present you an example of a case study. So this is about a large telecom customer right law they were they had legacy application in place and they were running stores across the country and they used to get new customers they used to get payment from existing customers and what they found was they their fraud detection was a post fact right fraud detection in payments right customer comes and pay some money and later after a day or so when batch processes run you find that so many transactions of fraudulent or potentially fraudulent with that what you do is you have to call you have to have a customer service department which calls the bank or which calls the customer to figure out what happened. And some of them turned out to be real fraudulent cases which you have to write off right you have to follow through some legal procedures. And when with digital happening the question was a how can we create an application which is really scalable, which is cloud native micro services based. And also can we bring in real time detection of fraud so that the store manager can get a clear sr know on whether a transaction has to be passed or failed right. So we brought this into this is about this is about another way of creating this irritability that is understanding the customers problem and giving a solution as early as we can right being fast and predictable fast frequent and predictable right is not enough if we understand the customers problem right is not enough if people provide a solution right we have to be fast frequent and predictive so that is the case. So we we built a cloud native application it integrates with external credit agency and other services. Typically these credit agency systems are heritage systems with slow response time and all that. We created this real time fraud assessment system which things are which sends a message to these credit agencies and gets a message back to really validate whether a customer is worthy and the transaction is good to be considered as valid. A scalable architecture micro services based implementation. The deployed agile coaching to bring their sense of being fast frequent and predictable in our teams and CI Siri continuous integration and continuous deployment. So now this system we have seen tangible financial outcomes and also you can scale up to 70,000 transactions per week. These are like really enrolling a customer receiving payment and so on it's not like frequent. Flight ticket booking or for our banking transaction so the volume is, it is a big volume for this industry and also 99.9% availability, which really relieved the store managers from their frustration they started liking it and that really added quality of work life to them. So this is an example of how we build systems that help in enhancing the say ability from the angle of solving problems being fast frequently predictable. Again I have given this PDF link which will have a detailed story. In the case study template go through it. Now the third one right third one is about very very important third one is very important is about inclusion relationships retrospective analysts. This is about understanding success critical stakeholders is about moving beyond your. Scrum roles are safe roles and identifying success critical stakeholders and involving them and bringing them into your program or project. Inclusive sprint and release retrospectives meaning involving success critical stakeholders in those retrospectives and also cross functional teams with SMEs from business. Where you plant them in your soft project in such a way that they become your role models as they kind of they become your influencers in increasing adoption. Commitment reliability and predictability and ensuring commitment reliability and predictability so you become a credible team people know that you walk the talk. And you're going to show success in the project right so in one of our engagements it was a large engagement it was for a very unique customer. One of the top five consulting firms in the world we wanted to we were given the responsibility of creating and deploying their audit system as a product. So these are audit conducted by very experienced auditors throughout the world and they involve in audits of companies which are either local to a country or their global global organization so these audits happen for multiple weeks and multiple locations then evidences report all that created final findings and assessment or audit reports is present. So it's a long time consuming process. The goal was to product price. The goal was to product price in such a way that all auditors start using the product. And also we wanted to have a mobile interface so that even auditor is traveling can go through the audit plan days plan or weeks plan or months plan and look at what's going on and do some offline activities do some online activities. It was a tall order right we figured out we work with the customer figured out and one best thing that happened was some some of the practicing auditors are practicing SMEs from their groups. We identified them and brought them into this program brought them as part of cross functional teams so they played the role of business analyst. They work with the product owner in grooming prioritizing the backlog grooming user stories they underwent product management training program product ownership lessons and then even before a sprint review they would tell whether a user story is going to be accepted or not. And when we went where there was a plan to do a large demo right before a significant release. In front of all these auditors, these were the SMEs who stood to demonstrate the product so they the auditors is seeing these SMEs front ending and showing them the product that they have developed it's like no they were they were directly influencing and the adoption rate skyrocketed. And it became a successful product. So this is about inclusion relationship that perspectives themselves sometimes when products are developed within an IT team and then taken to business it becomes real at all order to get the product. Accepted it it fails to go viral it undergoes a lot of rework and all that happens so that is a real life case study and this is one more right. Leading insurers digital journey which this is a this is an example of how we operate. Our engagement started with a small project and it's scaled to a large scale transformation journey. Multiple surveys lines of business lines moved also far from the lower most level of pricing models to an outcome based approach. We created synergy between IT and business focus on consulting and execution strong relationships. So the point I'm making is these are equally important elements when you're when you're developing a product when you're working on a transmitting initiatives to make your product desirable because what you're going to do is through these through these. I mean, inclusion relationship retrospectives and results, you're going to get science on how you're moving how we are progress right you don't get signals just by looking at your sprint and velocity, you get multiple valuable signals and you have an opportunity to course correct and make your product viral. And this program resulted in 20% total cost of ownership reduction across it landscape with more than 55 million savings I just 55 million dollars saving just significant saving for large insurance company. And this would not have happened with these elements inclusion relationship retrospective and results. The next one is attention to internal and external quality so sometimes we start focusing more on external quality which is about user experience and are there any defects black box defects is every feature working well or not it's very important to focus on internal quality as well it's about your architecture or design your code, follow KPI driven architecture design quality approach which is very important right you. You don't feel qualitatively better about your architecture design you also look at those design or architecture specific metrics. For example coupling cohesion and so on focus on non functional requirements. Do not allow that to be a reactive step or a separate stage later in every sprint you can bring those elements and proactively test and make sure that you're within the boundaries right and continuous the continuous testing continuous learning continuous builds and wherever you can do continuous practice that. Mainly in order to improve external and internal quality it's is also about continuous demo continuous involvement of end users. Usability experiments and so on feedback loops and perpetual learning so learning can happen daily that's what extreme programming says right extreme programming talks about daily retrospective is a daily reflection of how things are happening in a team. Feedback loop feedback loops and perpetual learning can happen daily day in and day out it need not wait for a retrospective because I know how challenging retrospectives are when we work on a tight project. This is how we create a culture right around building internal external quality and also put a solid foundation for perpetual learning so let me support it with the case right we. Wanted to redefine the mobile banking customer experience because mobiles were becoming popular smart phones and other competitors coming into mobile banking space. This customer had a mobile banking app and platform but it was little outdated slow and it was not getting year on year increase in number of customers were adopting so we wanted to create a personalized digital banking experience. So that it works on both Android and iOS, both on Apple phones and iPads. Very thorough focus on internal external quality in terms of scalability security speed availability and also user experience agile lifecycle with DevOps practices and innovation we brought in a lot of innovation. In terms of security in terms of we brought in machine language to promote facial recognition and so on and so forth. All these are illustrated in this period you can go through it later. So this is an example of how you bring that kind of an experience to make a product viral. So the proof is 3.5 million active users and no traffic doubled within a year from 30 to 65% not only that. It is it got an industry award among top three well known mobile in an industry wide study it became it got a position among the top three which is a very noteworthy recognition. And this shows you know what kind of steps and approach or considerations can help us move our digital products in that direction. So with that note, the fifth one right this is the fifth and final one is about the attitude of elegance, tenacity and courage and attitude of elegance is always about not doing the best thing doing the elegant things. And the courage to embrace modern technologies. All that and then tenacity is about how strong you are right and there is a difference between tenacity and courage courage is how courageous you are in a specific situation. Tenacity is when you are going through testing times how strong you are how are going to hold your feet together and stand and face the situation. Definitely, the elements are one is product centricity, which brings a lot of elegance to the way you build, even even when we build digital applications, build it as a product, make it configurable make it scalable. Make sure that it can be swiftly expanded to new geographies and see if there is a potential for new business models and autonomy and fail fast fail early culture, which is about the courage courage to fail fast and learn and fail early. Very important rewards and recognition and result oriented come what may do not let your focus go away from appreciating team members and focusing on end results and also create a community based network which really changes your hierarchical based systems and the delays you face it creates more socials, high touch environments which enhances the sense of belonging to all engineers in your project that helps bring the right elements into the product you're building. So if you don't have these, will we have any negative impact? Definitely, if you don't have product centricity, if you don't have fail fast fail early, if you don't have result orientation rewards recognition or community based network, even imagine what kind of negative impacts or consequences we may have. So this is a very important consideration. And now with that note, let us see one more case. This is a mobile channel for customer engagement. It sparked 150% growth in use, right? It kind of really hooked the customers. We aligned with the business KPAs which one of the business KPAs was to increase growth in use by 1.5X and created continuous improvement as part of the whole thing and aligned with those business KPAs agile and cross functional teams. This app, the rating rose from 4.5, rose to 4.5 from 3.3 in Google Play Store and 4.5 from 3.3 in Apple Store as well. So this is a significant, I should say, recognition of the way people adopted it, this story is illustrated in the PDF given here. So this shows us that it is important. When we design something, we have to mean product centricity. We have to design it as a product. It's not just something which is going to stay with a limited set of users. And also giving autonomy to the team and allow them to fail fast, allow them to fail early and learn quickly and create communities based network that can focus on results that flattens the hierarchy and you have like-minded people and leaders from home. The team members can learn from that marks real difference. And here you go. If you look at a full view of those five things to enhance desirability, empathy and experimentation being fast, frequent and predictable, inclusion, relationships, retrospectives and results, attention to internal external quality and attitude of elegance, tenacity and courage. And all these are explained in this PDF, which is a white paper about 10 or 12 pages. It's available in public for download and read. And even in this paper, you'll have a greater detail of those case studies. Please go through. And finally, I want to register some important thoughts. One is, when I was researching on this topic, I found that several projects failed. And we keep hearing about failed projects from time and again. We see in articles and there are repositories of case studies of such failed projects. And one thing they have in common, at least some of the recently failed projects, recent two or three years, is the absence of focus on this desirability. I know a large healthcare project failed. We know about it. Huge investment went in and the absence of focus on desirability. Maybe customers of certain age group, they did not like it. They did not want to do it. There are several steps involved in doing the very basic things. These were missed and it became a failure. So it is again and again hitting as yes, this is an important topic, frequently talked about, but it has to be paid attention to. Who can pay attention to it? It is this community, the community that practices agile devops and modern engineering. And it is an opportunity to course correct even if your project is in a flight mode and deliver right products to begin with. There's no, it's not too late. You start a new project, take a fresh look and consider these five considerations which will help you. And more than that, to begin with is all about how do we bring this mindset? How do we nurture the right talent, culture and mindset? How do we bring that in our teams? And second is how do we balance this? We need to enable the workforce and we need to have enough hands-on experiment. It's not hands-on experiment, it's not just about implementing a technical use case or a business use case. How do we register this when we enable our teams? How do we make them understand this important aspect? And also how do we promote continuous learning and operational improvements, ongoing improvements for tangible business outcomes? So these are collectively certain steps one can consider looking to as we move forward and start triggering some initiatives. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions even at the later stage. Thank you for being attentive.