 Welcome everyone to this workshop which is empathetically defined and rigorously measured the customer value you deliver by Deepa and Kavita. Just to give you a brief introduction about Deepa, Deepa is a co-founder and CEO of Panzer Design and Kavita is head of research with Panzer Design. So without further delay, over to you Deepa and Kavita. Hi everyone and thank you Vishal. We're thrilled to be with you today and spend 90 odd minutes with you walking you through everything we know about defining and actively measuring customer value. We would love for this to be interactive so please do put in your questions, comments, thoughts, we'll incorporate that throughout the talk. So just as a quick introduction and to give you a little more senses to who we are, Panzer Design is a design strategy and an innovation consulting firm. And we actually help our clients largely on rates, small startups to solve their customer problems. That's really what we're all about. And today we're going to be talking about empathetically defined and rigorously measure the value you deliver to your customers. Vishal already quickly introduced us but my name is Deepa Bhashu and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Panzer Design. If you can go to the next slide Kavi. I have a background in engineering, product management, design and I've worked in the industry for about 25 years. Kavi if you can introduce yourself by going back to the introduction slide please. I also wanted to add that what Deepa won't tell you and possibly missed out on telling you was about was the fact that some of her work has previous work has been published as a Harvard business case study and also as an HBR article and more recently as an organization also we've had some of our design thinking work published as a HBR article. So a lot of our work around behavioral science and building products is what Deepa failed to mention but that's also part of her background. And about me I'm the head of research at Panzer Design and what we do again is of course employee behavioral economics principles but also qualitative research as part qualitative and quantitative. So we bring in mixed methods research to be able to get to better outcomes at the end of the day with the companies that we solved for. As a broad introduction to the mindset or design thinking itself. Kavi the slides have seemed like a little bit out of order. Could you go to thank you. Our approach is really anchored in design thinking. We really believe in starting by understanding the customer's needs and values and mindset. So the first stage is discover where if you see in the illustration there's an eye there's a year there's a word thought bubble but it's also a heart and it's really about observing listening and empathizing with the customer. So the first stage which is discover really involves knowing your customer better than they know themselves. The second stage is what we call insight which is about connecting the dots in interesting ways by completely savoring surprises. What did your customer do that completely surprised you? Looking at that connecting the dots and the facts you have whether through quant or qual as Kavi was talking about earlier and articulating our insights insights that really inspired innovation. Dream is the stage where you flex your muscles to go broad and try multiple ideas by building on each other's ideas as a team and narrowing to one that you believe truly solved the customer problem. And finally disrupt is having the humility to rapidly experiment your ideas before you possibly even write a single line code. Now I did step through it like it was a linear process and really far from the truth. It's a very very iterative process. Sometimes you get dumped in dream and you have to find your way through the other stages. But it's an extremely iterative stage. The first two are ones where you're really falling in love with the problem and the second two are ones where you have fallen in love with the problem. You know what the problem is. You know how customers are going to measure success and then you go about creating a solution that will solve those problems that you're setting out to solve. So as far as trade out services are concerned, we do customer research. We do every type of design there is. But the part that we enjoy the most is when we're able to collaborate with a client and help solve problems together do it with them. What this helps us do is build that level of responsibility and accountability with the employees. We also learn from them the domain and we want to be those consultants that tell them what they already know but consultants that work with them to discover new experiences. So as far as trade out services are concerned, we do customer research, every type of design there is and what we call the culture of innovation. This might look like a brag sheet of clients but really the point I'm trying to make here is maybe there's a little bit of bragging there but the point I'm really trying to make is that design thinking is really agnostic to be to see, be to be enterprise, consumer, you know, finance domain, automotive. It really doesn't matter whether you are a large, a small or rich domain. Design thinking is a means to the end. It's a process that helps you solve big knowledge problems or even small ones and it doesn't matter which domain you're working in. The idea as well is that our global learning experiences shape our perspectives and I think having worked across the globe, we also have a clearer view into understanding cultural context. We look at, you know, the onset and Kathi is going to go into it a little more about how you overcome your own unconscious biases and by giving ourselves a global canvas, I believe that we've gotten better and better at really understanding the cultural context and understanding why people do what they do, even if it sounds completely silly that the customer is doing what they are, we have the ability to put our judgment aside and really be thoughtful about deeply thinking into why the customer is doing what they are. Our schedule is like so we're going to spend, you know, I'm already done with the introduction, we're going to focus on empathetically defined and then I'll talk, Kavi will talk us through unconscious biases and then I'll talk to you about rigorously measuring. We'll share a key study with you and then we'll go into actually working on it. As, you know, as experienced professionals, we learn most by doing and we hope that this workshop gives you a chance to do that. Kavi? Yeah. So like people said, what we'll cover today under empathetically defined and rigorously measured are a few things. We want to get into whether how many of you are aware of your unconscious biases, right? And how often have you fallen in love with the solution that that's been built versus really staying with the problem and falling in love with the problem instead? So that's the part that we'll cover today. And under rigorously measured, there'll be two questions that we'll hopefully surface up for you, which is what is the benefit your solution is delivering to your end users. And what is the time really? How quickly are we realizing this value for the customer? So we've right now we're getting into empathetically defined, right? What is empathy or what is it to discover? So time empathy back to discovery. Discovery is really all about understanding customer problems and their underlying unmet needs. It's about truly being curious about what your customers want, what they need, and listening to them and empathizing with them. The way we go about discovering is two ways. It starts with primary research and primary research involves connecting with your customers directly and hearing what they have to say or seeing what they do today. Whereas secondary research, of course, I don't need to explain this in too much detail. You know what that is. That is looking out for trends, looking out for competition who's already doing this, looking for data that kind of backs up some of the challenges that you might have or the topic that you want to research itself. While primary research and secondary research are pretty much the best ways to go about doing, discovering an unmet need or a real problem, it's something that we want you all to be aware of because as an organization that does a lot of qualitative research, here's something that all of us need to keep in mind, right? What does it really to specifically define? First, there are two things. First is the first principles thinking and the reason I'm talking about first principles thinking here is first principles thinking talks about breaking things down to the fundamental truth, right? And then reasoning up from there. It's a very physics way of thinking about the world. So bring everything down to its bare minimum and then see what and how you can reason up from this. So it's about freeing ourselves from every assumption and what does that mean? So often what happens is we run into this habit of just being assuming certain things will work a certain way because we're always very close to the problem, right? As a company, as an industry, when you work in a particular domain or industry, being very close to the problem also clouds our judgment in many ways because assumptions or biases start to creep in. And what happens is we tend to lead with those biases. The first principles thinking kind of forces us to break away from those assumptions or biases. And what really are unconscious, what are these biases that I talk about these unconscious biases are perceptions about customers, perceptions about users that is heavily influenced by what you know and feel, which is being too close to the problem, right? They're often unsupported judgments or opinions. How do you then convert that into conscious understanding? You can convert your unconscious biases to conscious understanding by conducting, like I said, interviews with your customers. And these are not just conversations, but truly understanding the ecosystem in which they function. So it's not just having these questions that you want to answer, but really seeing how they perform, go about performing their daily activities, functions within that ecosystem that they live in. And truly be curious and acquire new and deep knowledge, right? So what is confirmation bias? You know, often a lot of us, even with the best of intention and wanting to understand what the customer wants to say and what truly paints them, confirmation bias tends to creep in. And this is something that can be a very subconscious bias. So it's important to be aware of it. So if you look at the image, it's very clear, you know, there are objective facts and then there's what confirms your belief. And what you see is really your confirmation bias. You already have an assumption and you're only seeing that narrow part of the entire picture. What you can do some ways to avoid the confirmation bias and to truly empathetically define the problem is we ask you to begin live interactions with your customers. What that means is to strike up a conversation, right? It's interesting. So often when you're in a new country and as a tourist, you have this very curious mindset. You're very excited. You're very aware of your surroundings. You want to talk to people. You want to learn new things about your, about the environment that you're in. So we ask you to generally kind of go in with that mindset itself. So strike up a conversation. Don't be afraid to ask questions. In general, people really like talking about themselves. So you will see that even in instances where we've gone out to do research around personal finance management, which is a very sensitive topic. You would think that people wouldn't want to talk about it. And we went prepared into that conversation with tools to be able to do that. However, as simple as kind of building that familiarity with them and then diving into the question, really people didn't have any trouble at all. But to do that, you also need to be curious. Show that you're interested in them. Ask them open-ended questions. Show them that you're truly listening at the end of the day. And how do you do that? Paraphrase what they're saying, which means they know you're listening. They know what your understanding is also in line with what they're saying. But also saver surprises. If there's something surprising that comes up in the conversation, dwell on that a little bit. Ask follow-up questions. And finally, observe. Because, like we said earlier, as much as people have the best intentions, and they'll always talk in the form of intention. But we ask you to back that up by observing actual behaviour, which really then translates to you having to be in their environment to be able to do that. Here's an interesting way of going about it. This is really bringing this back from something that we call the empathy map. The empathy map is a very straightforward matrix. And in the four quadrants, it's almost like a template that you can use when you go out to talk to your customers. Understand what they're saying. This is from the customer perspective. You're listening to what they have to say. But not just that. You're backing that up with observing what they do. And constantly during your conversations and trying to understand your customers, what you also want to do is infer from what you're hearing and seeing. So constantly think about what they are thinking and what they are feeling at the end of the day. What is that emotion that they're connecting with the pain that they have with the activity that they're doing. Because that really helps you then define the problem in the best way possible and make it as actionable at the end of the day. In how you want to solve it. We've covered this. So when we talk about stepping out of your comfort zone and being curious, go to their environment. Because the value you derive from observing them in their environment is very different from just having a bunch of questions that you want to answer. And make sure you're listening. Make sure you're observing for reactions, for behavior. Another example of what and just to kind of summarize what confirmation bias would be. Here's typically what a conversation would look like. You have a great idea and I'm sure a lot of you will resonate with this because at some point in our lives we've done this. We have a great idea and we think it's fabulous. We head to the customer to gather feedback. You ask your customer, have you ever considered doing Action X through App Y and the customer because he's aware that you are looking for a validation of some sort. You're putting him in a tough spot when you ask him, would you do this? And the customer only to be nice would respond saying yes, I would absolutely love to. So what are you getting at the end of the day validation? But that's not true test of behavior. You think you hit the jackpot, you go back your evidence, you think you've got the validation and then you go about implementing that particular feature in a product or a service. But ultimately what happens is the product of the service starts to fail. It's not really a great market fit. And that happens often. A great way to avoid this is of course to always look for actual behavior and finally define your problem based on observed behavior and qualitative inputs from conversations. We've seen that experiments have shown people provide tests or questions that are designed to yield yes or yes. If their favorite hypothesis was true, people usually ignore alternative hypotheses that are likely to give the same results, right? Because the tendency is to confirm what you believe. An example here as you see is if you were to search is New York better than San Francisco because that is a leading question on Google. All you will get are sites listing the reasons why New York is better. And if you were to do it the other way around you will only see something that confirms that SF is better because that is essentially what you're trying to confirm. So yeah, I mean to summarize what we were talking about earlier. This is what confirmation bias is about and what you can truly do to avoid any of that is to go with an open mindset, go with a curious mindset, be observe what customers do and take that into consideration when building out your solution and defining your problem. Thanks, Kavi. So, Chandan, you have a question to say if tourists, for example, have a confirmation bias, how do you overcome it or to use Venkat's term, Jemba, what happens if you sort of have Jemba and the confirmation bias. So as Kavi was talking about, even if you have a confirmation bias, but you're truly looking at not only what they say, but what they do. And Kavi, if you can go back to slide 14, please. You know, what they say and what they do is observed behavior. You're actually seeing it or you're hearing them say. But what you incite is on the right-hand side which you believe they think and what you believe they feel. So when you are truly building empathy going through this and asking yourself the question, that's how you overcome the confirmation bias. So you don't, but the example that Kavi was talking about, you don't just go here, you know, are you likely to use this feature or functionality. You give an experiment. You run an experiment to see what they do, what they prefer in real behavior. And that's how you're able to overcome these confirmation biases. And there's another question from Venkat. You also heard about functional fixness as another pitfall. How do you guard yourself against that? Yeah. And I think it's more a statement that whenever you get yourself there, it's good to be asking those open-ended questions. Absolutely, Venkat. Plus one on that. Great. So let's, you know, we've introduced you to the idea of empathetically define and now we want to move towards how do you then rigorously measure. What we'll talk about here is how do you measure a benefit? Now, the customer benefit is really the reason your customer chooses you, basically your solution over competitive solutions. And how quickly do you allow your customers to realize that value itself? Now, in my experience of defining these values, they're really three-fold. It either helps the benefits are about time, money, or frequency. Usually it's about saving time. When it's about money, it's either about saving money or making more money. And the third one around frequency is that it increases the frequency of something good happening and reduces the frequency of something bad happening. So really the value can be simply broken up into these three dimensions of time, money, and frequency. So if you wanted to get a closer look, though, here is a larger value pyramid. Next slide, please. And Kavya, you might need to go on presentation mode because it's a little hard to see. Sure, I'll do that. The reason I did that was because it's stuck, which is why I moved into here. Thank you. So here is I'm forgetting what the attribution is. I think this is BCG is my apologies, but I'm sure you'll be able to look at the elements of value and see this is from BCG, one of the large consulting firms, where they talk about the functional elements like I spoke about with time, money, or frequency of good, bad. Then they talk about emotional life changing and then ultimately self-transcendence which is the huge social impact. So if you look at the functional ones, and I know that's really small for you to see, but there are in the dimensions of time, money, and frequency. And even emotional is around the frequency, increasing the chance of something good happening. So you all should certainly take a look at the elements of value and see which ones might be related to what you need. Now Venkat, it's not exactly Maslow's hierarchy, I think more generally yes, but I guess what I'm trying to say here is you want to look at that benefit to really understand how are you delivering that value through your solutions and hence how will you measure it. And it's actually not simple to measure so I'll go into a little bit and give you examples of how to measure it as well. I'm looking at a few questions here. Very interesting metrics to measure value. Would I be making the right conclusion if I say these are very B2C specific? So no Narayan, the value whether it's enterprise or B2C it is really the same we worked with both enterprise as well as consumer companies or even B2B companies and it's just really similar. It's simply those three dimensions. There might be some or a few products perhaps that it doesn't cover but in my experience so far it's usually time, money and frequency. Those are the three elements. Value permit is awesome thank you Chandan we believe so too. The other aspect if you move to slide 20 please really what you want to do is look at what is the gain creator? This is a really simple representation of the product market fit by a really good consulting firm and they talk about ultimately you want to understand the customer pain and gain which is on the right hand side and for each of the pains you want to provide pain relievers for each of the gains you want to create features and functionality that amplify that gain. So they talk about it as what is it that is a gain creator and what is it that you're creating that are pain relievers and we find that even though there's the dimension of value of just time, money and frequency if you look at the pain relievers it's reducing the frequency of something bad happening and if you look at gain creators it's increasing the chance of frequency of something good happening so whether you look at it in those three dimensions that we talked about of time, money and value or in the product market fit you're basically going after the key functionality that helps increase gain or reduce pain for customers so your customer value is not people are able to get to this functionality in three clicks your customer value is not that the registration was simple your customer value is way beyond it it's the reason that your customers choose you to get into this over competition so I'd like to get into a few examples in the next slide please but before we do that I want to do an activity so I'm going to give you a scenario Kavi and I have been talking for about 20 minutes straight and we think it's good for us to get some audience participation in so clear tax engineers this thing is not necessarily a clear tax example but think of it as any tax software now what clear tax does or any tax software does is they help you calculate what you owe to the government at the end of the year or what the government owes you because you've been one of the few people that have paid ahead of maybe even paid more and you need a refund there's a behaviour globally where people actually pay ahead and expect to refund and that's almost their savings they plan for that so it's a way that they're hiding money away from themselves so a lot of people actually focus on either the refund or look at how you can pay minimum right so within legal constraints you're looking at one how do I maximise my refund or two how do I reduce the money that I owe to the government so these tax solutions are simple software that help you answer questions so you can help determine the answers to both the questions that I mentioned so a really smart group of engineers brought in a lot of efficiency so you'll see the number on top in this case it's 6,563 that is the amount of money for example that you owe the government a really smart group of engineers brought in a lot of efficiency and really set up the refund calculation how do you think customers reacted and love to see your responses in the chat session so again it's tax software that big number in the middle is the amount of refund or the amount you owe the government the engineers got together and really set up that number calculation instead of making it slow how do you think customers reacted so we see a couple of people saying pleasantly surprised intrigued maybe depends on what type of persona they are mixed reaction they will try to they'll drill down why they have to pay tax at all if they're looking to save time they will like it interested okay let's hear a few more responses before I tell you a full story depends on other factors how's the usability is it secure Pradeep let me try another app Pradeep it's having experience to do taxes once let alone twice Gokul is talking about the amount of money yeah so what I'd like you to do is think about yourselves right let's simplify this think about yourselves let's say that's at that number is actually the money you owe the government versus refund and the calculation happened really quickly put yourselves in those shoes because we're all people hopefully that pay taxes so put yourself in those shoes and tell me what your reaction would be not about the amount but just this the speed with which that number is calculated Priya says she would recalculate Sonia says she would validate okay we'll amaze and plan better Pradeep says doubt the calculation yeah Narayan taxes are just simply painful no matter how you think about it alright thank you guys for your responses you know taxes it's one thing that nobody likes to do and yet I used to be a part of Intuit and I'm so happy to say that we actually brought the light and joy because we gave people the confidence at Intuit to TurboTax that they were getting the maximum refund or they were paying the minimum amount of money and the speeding up of calculation like some of you said would actually cause you to worry would make you feel like oh my god they're not doing everything they possibly can to give me the best benefit so this is where where is the confirmation bias in the answer I don't know that's Chandan I have to think about that one it's a good question I don't have a pat answer but you know actually I do Chandan so the engineers of course thought the more efficient it can be the more it'll save customers time and so there was a confirmation bias right you ask people hey would you want to do your taxes fast and of course everyone would say yes but the more important benefit was to increase the chance of getting every last deduction so that they have to pay the least amount of money or get the maximum amount of refund whichever the case might be and so the confirmation bias of speed let's do it quickly just really see in thanks Chandan for that question and instead what was important and a bigger value to customers was to maximize the refund right and so the fast calculation actually caused a lot of doubt like Pradeep said or like Sonia said or Priya said that people wanted to recalculate it to just make sure that it took care of every last deduction that they had so this is one where the value of attack software definitely wanted to be fast but the main customer benefit was confidence that you are getting every last deduction that the software is actually working super hard to try to give you every last deduction that you can more recently we were creating a financial management software for early jobbers as well as migrant labor and we were trying to help them save money we tried to speed through the registration process but the customers actually said that they wanted it to take time it needed to be painful because they felt then that they were in safe hands because people really cared about their information and were modeling the application so that it worked just right for them so it's really important while save time is something everybody would want to do it's important to sort of balance that value then with others we might find more important next slide please Kavi okay we are having that problem again every time I put it on presentation mode it no issues so let me a few of you even in the chat asked for additional examples Kavi actually stay on the tax example itself for a second please if you think about Google, the Google search could you please type in the chat what do you think the customer benefit is why do we use Google search breadth of search for information write information at time instant suggestion because we don't like to search and use reliability quick answer for everything crowdsourcing answers access to information appropriate results aggregation wonderful so I'm actually going to share something that we heard Larry and Sergey talk about in a really really old video where they were talking about these custom benefits and Kavi you can go to this slide the main job is to find answers like many of you talked about the result the customer benefit was of course relevancy of the search results if you got you know completely irrelevant Oya Vikram context based answers absolutely if the relevancy of the search was not accurate then people no matter how fast it was wouldn't really use search none of us would the second one was to find answers quickly right so that was also important to find answers quickly but it was only second to getting relevant search results so now how do you measure something like that the measurement was for relevancy of search they really looked at they measured the time between the page display and the click the faster you click it meant the search was more relevant so what they actually measured was that page display to click how quick that was that was an indicator of relevancy and if you think about it that is just such a fabulous metric and such a creative way to measure the relevancy now of course the find answers quickly is a lot easier to measure it's really time to display results right but the relevancy one is a real clever metric to look at time from page display to the first click the faster you click the more relevant the search was so this is Google you guys and these customer benefits still are valuable these measures are actively measured till today let's go to a different example and in the interest of time I'm just going to go ahead and answer these for you all so with eBay it's a double-sided network on one end there's a consumer and on the other end there's a seller what is the job the consumer is employing eBay to do it's purchase things that they might need and from a seller perspective they want to sell things that they don't need and eBay basically connects the two the customer benefit for the consumer is find stuff I'm looking for you know you go to eBay when you're looking for sort of strange or very specific things or things that are not just mass production so the ratio of search to purchase is a really good metric to see if I found what I was looking for find authentic products the metric was really seller authenticity and the rating that they gave on the seller side find buyers for my products so again percentage of inventory sold I put down like 20 things that are really unique how many things do they actually sell from a customer benefit the seller wants to make sure that they don't get ripped off there's a number of genuine buyers on the site that are buying, completing transactions paying for things is a metric that they're looking at so again you see that the metric creation is in fact an art and really really important to think through it works whether you've got you know a platform where it's used by just consumers or it's a platform like eBay and let's go through one more example next slide please with Amazon so I'm sure all of us are consumers of Amazon what are the customer benefits and I realize that the font is really small here you guys my apologies we just can't seem to get out of the presentation mode but Kavi is going to give that a try the job is I bought it on Amazon and from a seller's perspective they want to sell more items so that they can make more money the benefit is that they have the product when they need it the delivery speed is a metric the best price constantly Amazon is doing price comparison to make sure that their platform has the best price reliability and it's the percentage of delivery promises kept so you do know that Amazon actively measures these three things and they've stood the test of time over the 15 years or whatever Amazon has been found we care about getting it when we need it so speed is important price is important and getting it when they said they would deliver it is really important you may have heard that Amazon is already predicting what you're going to buy before you even buy it and that's because they want to make sure that the reliability is there on the seller side they want to increase customer reach so that's an easy metric number of customers reached increase sales they want to look at the number of orders fulfilled as well as the percentage of returns as you know these platforms are doing a lot to help reduce the returns the amount of shipping and handling and the time that's wasted with people looking at things that they didn't understand to be a certain type before they actually touched or saw it is really high so percentage of returns is another metric that they're looking at so you'll see here that whether it's Google, EB or Amazon and these very successful companies the same customer value stood the test of time if you're an active Google user who isn't you'll see now that they are not just giving you a link to the answer but help you get the answer so for example if you're boarding a flight and that's in your Gmail and you search that flight number right away it gives you the status of the flight because you're not looking to go click on a relevant link you're simply looking to find answers so this is something that over a period of time these companies have focused on and have really been on it how do we know what value is the right value to look at consumer might tell you something so this is really not about asking the customer do you value time over money it's about what Kavita said earlier about really seeing what they're doing hear what they're saying or listen to what they're saying but also then connect with their belief system and their emotion that's when you will be able to identify the right value and besides when you can't do that or you haven't done that well the way to do it is to rapidly experiment and you'll find out very very quickly hopefully that answers your question next slide please I have the opportunity of working as I mentioned earlier with Intuit and one of the fabulous financial applications that they created was called Mint and what Mint discovered and Chandan this may help answer your question as well with an example what Mint found was that you know you can use Mint it's a global product you can go put in your transactions and it gives you a sense of where your money is going the biggest question that most customers had was where is my money going and where is my network they had a pie chart that you'll see small images of it they have a pie chart and people spent a lot of time on that pie chart because that answered the question of where the money is going it basically split up the money that they've spent into categories so the team actually actively measured time to pie so basically we can bring customers even new customers to that pie chart so we can actively help them be engaged with the product and answer their question where is my money going so the team would very aggressively defend that if somebody added an extra question so that they could customize the app just right they would make sure that the time to get that value would not be compromised and that's something that the entire mid team actively measured the time to pie chart so one there is identifying the value two then there's measuring it and then three there's the time to that value how many apps do you download and then you don't use and you just quickly uninstall because they simply didn't give you your value in the time that you wanted it to be seen the one thing to be wary off is what I call vanity metrics these are things that make you feel good the number one vanity metric in my biggest pet peeve and anyone who sort of talked to me about their mobile app has heard a mouthful from me is number of downloads that is a vanity metric it's a metric that makes you feel good just because somebody downloaded your app it doesn't mean you're providing value look at DAU, look at MAU whatever it is that yeah think of active users look at daily active monthly active, weekly active whatever makes sense to your app and focus on that now I'm not saying downloading is a number of downloads is not important you want to make sure that there's the right awareness it's probably a good metric for your marketing team it's also probably a good metric to see how many people really care about solving a particular problem but it's not a good metric for value growth comes from your customers using your product download is simply an indicator of interest and hence these vanity metrics are something that you have to be super super careful about and thanks Vikram I love the I love that terminology vanity metrics too not something I coined but something I heavily borrowed you know as product managers if there are any product managers listening today we always talk about you know three-click access to this feature or functionality and then you look at how many clicks it takes to get to that feature or functionality oh my god that is so not important that's not value at all yes you want people to be able to access it right much like I'm saying downloads is important but the value trumps all of the other vanity metrics that you might be measuring it's really important to look at that benefit for the value and then actively measure it I need to ask what's the value from the per session what are the key takeaways all right I'm not sure something's being funny or insulting me but I'll figure it out in a second okay so let's get to the example we want you to work on a particular exercise and see sort of the metrics in use so I'm going to just set it up for you Kavi so you know we've all been a part of redecoration if you're if you're a young it's your parents redecorating your house maybe redecorating your room if you're older you've built a house so you've rented a new place and redecoration whether unwillingly or willingly you've done at some part at some point of time in your life so we've made up this company Cropped Co hopefully it doesn't exist is looking to cater to the needs of consumers wanting to design or redesign their homes now there's a whole host of people that you need to really go through large redesigns you know you have the design itself you know the actual specs architects or interior designers may help you or perhaps consumers step into that role then there are the workers the contractors that actually do the job these are carpenters, blacksmiths polishers, painters and so on and so forth and then there are short sellers the retailers or wholesalers that you buy the material from or your workers buy the material from so we've just simplified it there are people that design there are the workers and then there are the sellers so let's say Cropped Co a made up company is looking to build technology or a marketplace that connects this ecosystem together so that you have a sense of building empathy we'll just talk you through what are some of the challenges on this two-sided network for consumers like you or I we're crippled by choice there's so many designs and so many of us go on Pinterest and we've pinned a bunch of things but we have complete lack of knowledge we don't know when they say first quality teak versus second quality teak man does that even make a difference or should we just go with MDF or whatever else kind of work they might have and it's difficult finding people that they can trust to give them the right answers and so often as consumers for somebody I know redesigned their house let me see if they can recommend their contractor or interior designer or their carpenters and usually you go out to word of mouth on the workers side there's huge issues that they have as a consumer you say hey I'll give you 10% advance or 20% advance but they still have to buy all of the material and they buy that on credit and the longer they wait the more interest sort of racks up so credit to purchase material is really a problem there if you're looking at an online solution or technology that connects consumers and buyers where does that credit come from second people sort of the sellers or the workers sorry the workers are reluctant to buy material that they can't physically verify they don't actively buy things online because they're worried they can't physically verify the authenticity of the product and finally whenever they do a construction they anticipate that they're going to need 50 screws but what they actually need is maybe 30 screws so what do they do with the remaining inventory what if the screws they bought could quality as they start screwing it in it starts to rip apart they need the ability to return so if you were a technology solution and you're trying to pull together consumers who want to redesign their spaces with the workers and you're trying to build a platform that connects the two what would you put in as you know customer benefits that you would measure in the interest of time Kavi I'm thinking do we split right now or do we what would you recommend how much time do we have 15 minutes I think and Vishal can you confirm that we have 30 minutes so what we could do is we can break out into two teams Vishal because there's about 53 people it would be very hard to do it and I hope you are able to complete your activity Kavitha yes I think most people manage to map out the customer benefits does anybody want to share we have a few more minutes five to seven minutes does anybody want to talk about any challenges that came up yeah in our conversation at least I felt that at least I started with certain intuition by observing other I also had to re-thought about my thought I also course corrected myself about the customer benefits what did you learn Chandan what was your before how were you doing it before and how did you have to course correct in my mind in India business everything is it's all about cost but it is not the case it was my first impression from my colleagues they also bring into a new dimension which also could be a customer value so then I realized yeah that could be also we need to look into so even Deepa also explained that apparently at surface level we always think like that but when you grow deeper then some other dimension comes out which also need to be looked into in our proposition so that is something wow moment yeah and while that still translates into business but really it's about solving a need for the end user which means higher uptake resulting in better business I felt value in a conversation and debating and then think different because confirmation bias which is actually taken over my thoughts but while conversation with my fellow colleagues they also influence my thinking then I could able to course correct my thinking which helped that is great and that's it's thank you for sharing it's I know it's not easy to share also but it's I'm sure it's insightful for others when they hear from you I think for me it was a good refresher to think about and articulate customer benefit because what happens is over a period of time we are so engrossed in understanding what the business wants what do we want to achieve what is our goal that even when we want to think from the customer's perspective we kind of think we have the authority to understand what they need so maybe we're talking about customer benefit but we think what benefit should we give them and when we think like that it's it's like so if we look at this example I should think like a designer if I'm writing that down because currently I did not have like end users to interview so even if I have to write on my own I really have to think like a designer and not being like an IT professional okay what can a designer really need so having that distinction in the mind is very important to have that awareness which these kind of exercises kind of polish you through maybe which gets rusted over a period of time when you think about business too much thank you Priya I think really is about putting yourself in the customer's shoes and to be able to do that it's also connecting with your customer right so you really know what what the pain is just to paraphrase what Priya just said I think one is to consciously remain in the problem space and not jump into the solution space right while you're exploring where you're trying to go and then so it's again re-emphasizing outcomes over an output right what really matters you want to measure that rather than any other metric so one is identification of the opportunity which is the capability of your system for the end user and then of course the metric when you come to the metric not look at the metric from an inward view maybe from a view that means something to business like an outcome thank you thank you for saying what you said Benkert and something that we constantly talk about is it's one thing to have the inside out view and that's usually a very narrow perspective typically but also to get compliment that with the out view so really learn about what customers are thinking about you but also understanding those evolving me constantly because the customers need to see and over to remain open to changes also and adapt yes I think there is one more comment from Sonia also got me thinking about customer loyalty that would happen if we are able to deliver emotional value to our customers thanks Sonia thanks everyone and yes it's about unlearning what you have learned and that goes back to our confirmation bias thank you everybody we had a great time interacting with all of you and thank you for being such wonderful participants and for engaging and interacting with us it's always nice when we get responses this was really fun for us too