How to become a truly customer-centric organization

Transcript

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Karen Dumville: [00:00:00] Welcome to this special episode of Pragmatism In Practice, a podcast from ThoughtWorks where we share stories of practical approaches to becoming a modern digital business. I'm Karen Dumville and I'm here with Sue Anderson, head of product at Trade Me. Hi Sue. How are you?

Sue Anderson: I'm good, Karen. How are you?

Karen: Good, thanks. Thanks for being with us today. As Head of Product at Trade Me, I understand you're focused on consumer product and product practice across the business verticals. [00:00:30] Can you give our listeners some brief context on Trade Me and its customer-centric ethos?

Sue: For sure. Trade Me is New Zealand's largest and most trusted online marketplace and classified website. To give you an idea of the size, every day we have about 650,000 Kiwi visit the website to browse over our 7 million items. There's everything on there from cars to properties. You can look for your latest job or clothing. No matter what you're after, Trade Me is the place to be. Trade Me's been around for about 24 years and since then, we've evolved into this dynamic and diverse platform that connects millions and buyers and sellers across [unintelligible 00:01:06] New Zealand.

When I talk about being customer-led, it's deeply rooted in our purpose and it's actually one of our values. Our value is customer Aroha. I should probably explain Aroha is Te Aka Māori, which is our indigenous language, and it means things like love, and compassion, and that empathy. For us, it's about really winning our customer's hearts and for them to choose us over our competitors. Really for us, [00:01:30] that speed to customer value is super important because we want to stay at the forefront of our consumer preferences when they're [unintelligible 00:01:37] when they need things to come to treatment.

Karen: You mentioned that you love spending time in the uncomfortable problem space, figuring out the right problems to solve. What problems did you uncover at the beginning of your journey in this role?

Sue: I think the first thing is why I really love talking about the problem space is we love solving customer problems and we're always keen to solve it for our customers. We rush to solutions to actually holding back and spending time in that problem space is actually really hard. It was really important for us that we just paused. Really what we were trying to understand is where should we start? Where are we now? For us, it's super important. A third of our team is in product and engineering. We want to make sure that we're investing in the right customer problems and we're being efficient and effective in how we and where we go.

When we looked back in 2022, we were basically looking at where are we, how does it feel? It was like, we got things done, we were moving, but at times, there could be some really big obstacles and challenges and it just didn't feel like we were running in our best. Where else we're going to go? It's actually probably worth us starting with how Trade Me is structured because that probably adds to the complexity and helps explain where we were working or what we were working with. We're structured in four main business units. We call them verticals. We have three classified space verticals.

That's property, motors, and jobs and then we have overall the marketplace, which is where you go to buy your new or secondhand items. Each of those verticals also has a B2B and a B2C element. For motors and marketplace, we've also got a C2C element. There's that direct trading of customers. In addition to that, our teams are all broken up. We've got product and design and engineering and marketing sales and CX. We at times could work quite siloed but also we have to be able to work across each other because our customers aren't just one vertical. Our customers use all of Trade Me.

Over time, when we started looking at where should we go with our practice, we realized that we'd evolved our own ways of doing product in certain ways and so our practice had become a bit fragmented and lacked consistency. One reflection I had is just looking across the teams. We had different ways of doing product roadmaps. When you were trying to get an overall portfolio view, it was quite confusing. Even the teams had to explain things to each other. Then if you're a senior stakeholder, you had to learn four or five different ways of reading roadmaps.

It became quite labor intensive. There was really just simple things like that. We started picking up areas that we could focus on. What did we do to start with? We wanted to, I still want to understand where we were but also we want to understand how that felt for our people because it's actually quite confusing as well if you don't really understand what's going on and how do people feel. In reality, what we'd realized is our product [00:04:30] practice had [inaudible 00:04:31] over time.

Really for us, we wanted to explore about how being more deliberate with our practice could increase our customer value. To approach that, we first wanted to start with where were we? How do our people feel? Where's their strengths and where's the opportunities and where do we go next? That was where we started to talk to Thoughtworks to come and help us understand where actually are we and what does good look like. What does great look like? Because we didn't quite know and we didn't want to mark our own homework and do all those things. We leveraged that product practice maturity framework and we completed this broad but shallow assessment and that really helped us understand where our current state was or our starting position. When you asked about what problems did we uncover, I think the first thing was it's quite hard to do a material assessment on yourselves.

If you're quite brave and take the leaders with you. The good news is we found out we weren't, it wasn't awful. There was nothing like horrendous that we had to focus on but there was some really good opportunity areas of where we could really excel and build into that customer side and so for us, the four that we focused on were learning from customers. We found that we are great at listening to customers and designing for their needs.

When it came to developing our strategy and our plans, at times we referred to customers as users and that's a big group of customers rather than what is that specific segment? What is that focus? By being more precise on who that customer is, it helps our teams to take that thinner slice of value and really get to understand that customer and that problem. In addition, we looked at experimentation. We do a lot of experimentation but we tended to do it in a short timeframe and had a commercial outcome on it.

If it didn't hit that commercial outcome, we failed the experiment. Then we were like, no, let's stop that. Let's discontinue that, let's move on. Actually what we have switched to is actually focusing on the learnings and helping increase that confidence of solving the problem for the customer. That helps us be a bit more scrappy in our experimentation and just doing lots more and moving at pace.

Why that's quite important to me is this cross-functional synergy and how do we work? We really found that each team worked really well individually and they were great and they were just driving and getting the results they were looking for. When you change the people in the team, we had to start again and learn how we all collaborate and that really slowed down the pace of the teams.

In addition to that, we are quite product and engineering-centric and we didn't really think about actually, you don't always have to build your way out of the problem and sometimes it's actually marketing and sales or CX that can help you. For us it's been really bringing those teams into more of our product discovery, not just at the delivery. Then just wrapping it all up was how do we communicate that strategy, our strategy in that consistent way so all our teams can get behind it and really we worked on really connecting that customer story and our strategy to drive that enthusiasm through our storytelling.

Karen: Terrific. A lot of learnings there and having gone through that process, why would you say it's valuable to spend that time exploring the challenges rather than rushing into solutions?

Sue: Yes. Basically starting with the maturity assessment this gave us a really good story on how do we get buy-in with our senior leadership, so we were able to set the scene and go, this is where we are today. This is the opportunity and where we can move. It was really important about building that story with them and so we didn't want to go-- By doing that, we could narrow in on key problems that we could see, that we could drive results in a way where we thought was that thinnest [00:08:30] value rather than trying to go really broad.

I'd like to say we apply good product practice to our actual product practice and so we are actually living the talk basically that we were going through. In the approach we took, so by identifying that longer-term vision and that target state, we were able to go, what's the each step should we take to move forwards and so we could then keep getting investment as we went forward. We basically did an assessment. We ran a pilot, we proved out value, we increased the number of teams we worked with. We proved out more value, we continued.

What was really important for us is when we first started, I said, "Hey to my other heads of product, I need a team or two that will give me 20 to 30% of their time, product time to help work on practice." That wasn't very popular because everyone was like, "Hang on a minute, what am I giving up?" Being able to say, tell me where we could help with your team, so is a speed thing or maybe more of a how are they working with marketing?

We could actually focus on that and so in the end, what we proved is by working on practice, we didn't actually use up time just for practice. We improved the actual value of the teams were delivering which was great because by the time it came to that scaling of the project, I had people asking for us to work with their teams. It was just a really good way of getting that buy-in.

Karen: Yes. Just talking about others outside of your own team, how much did you learn from others in other parts of the business or other areas of expertise.

Sue: First of all, it was good to get Thoughtworks in with us because it was good to get that fresh eyes and get that different opinions. What I learned from myself is that it was good to be challenged by the Thoughtworks team because sometimes you think you do things for a real reason and it's those people when they hold up a mirror and ask you why you then pause and go, "Oh yes, you have a good point." That was really helpful in just helping question where we go. From us working with the marketing teams, it's really about bringing them much more close to the customer problem.

It's not just we built a product, can you go and do some marketing and get some people to use it, but it's actually understanding well actually, you might not even need to build anything because through marketing we can actually probably drive that engagement and help you hit those outcomes. That was really important for us to get the teams to broaden and learn that approach. I think the other thing which was important for our teams was embedding coaches with them. They didn't feel at any time that it wasn't anything to be assessed, or you're not good enough, or it was nothing like that.

It was more how do we take the learnings from each of the teams because we had pockets of greatness. There were some really great things going on. We had one team that's done an amazing experimentation, but how can we take their learnings and share them across the business so other teams could learn? By having coaches in there they could actually see that and go, "Hey, you should be sharing this, and fostering that approach and that collaboration."

Karen: That cross-pollination type approach.

Sue: Yes.

Karen: How about working with customer-facing teams, not just product engineering? How did you do that to create customer value?

Sue: I think the first thing I'd say from a product management perspective, it is really about spending time listening and learning from others not just sitting at your own desk [00:12:00] reading. For us, building that relationship with that wider teams and understanding what are customers saying, where's the pain points coming and going through that. We broke out and looked at different teams. We've got our marketing team who are helping us, how are we bringing customers to the site? How are we driving them in? What's the important channels?

How are we helping customers through their journeys and nudging them, and understanding that? We spend a reasonable amount of time working with our sales and our CX teams because they talk to customers every day. They're able to help us really understand, build empathy, and bring those pain points. Really bringing those teams at the beginning to sell the story is the teams in kickoff and discovery really enriches that empathy points. Then what we've done as well is even bring in our trust and safety teams to understand why do you need this information, or how does this help, and what this is?

As we design solutions we're actually taking into consideration [00:13:00] all those different aspects. How do we bring them together? I think we have how we invite them to be part of our team. In our product and engineering groups, we have a group of a product manager a PO, our lead software engineer, and a designer. We call them a diamond, like most other teams you might hear might call them a trio or a quad. The idea is that this is a group who lead that value stream or the squad and where that's going.

The team actually decided to call themselves a diamond, and reflection that they can grow and bring in marketing and sales at times in that a diamond's multifaceted. I think that's it's quite cute, but I think it's a really good reflection of how the teams have evolved and realized they need to bring those wider teams with them on that journey. A couple of examples of how we brought that to life is with our onboarding journey. We're looking at revising our full signup journey that we have at Trade Me.

We're still working through building that out at the moment, but actually, we're able to work with our marketing team and our lifecycle emails are starting to roll out. We're already being able to send emails and understand how customers react and driving towards that. Can that lifecycle comms drive that conversion or that engagement alone, or actually do you have to do some parts through the journey? We're going to start learning already even before we've done some build. I think that's a quite [00:14:30] cool way to show how teams can work together to complete the goal.

Then from a B2B side in our motors dealers, we used to approach launches. We would package up a number of features and launch it as a big bang on a certain day as an MVP. It was a bit stressful for the squad because it's quite a lot of work to get through. Our customer support team had to be ready to handle it all, and then at times where we just go, "Yes that's good. All right, let's move on to the next thing, so it was a bit nerve-racking, but what we did was we actually worked with the sales team, got their buy-in, and worked with the team then to break that big feature release into smaller features. What we got to is by thin-slicing that value, they would release that sooner, experiment and learn, and even bring in dealers and engage them and run pilots with our customers. I think overall, by bringing in our customer-facing teams closer, we're able to make those faster decisions and be super outcome-focused rather than just feature-focused, so it builds that full picture.

Karen: Great. Get more value to market sooner.

Sue: Yes, totally.

Karen: From an internal point of view, has Trade Me found value in creating an environment where their employees can develop their own product craft?

Sue: Simply put, yes. We didn't really invest in it as much before we started this. Then what we realized is, actually it's infectious and our teams were curious and they wanted to learn and grow and do better for themselves and improve their own practices. There's a couple of pieces of work that emerged from this. We've established a community of practice, and so that's where we brought together our agile practice leads and our product practice lead, and also a wider team who are interested in driving this work forward. They're helping facilitate, how do we share the learnings broader and roll out on where's the next steps. In addition to that, internally we have a 10% dedicated learning time. Each Trade Me staff member can say, "Where am I going to focus?"

This is a great opportunity to go, "Well, actually, let's help evolve your practice and see where you want to go." We've built out a toolkit online so you can go if you want to figure out how to do value-slicing or some discovery or experimentation to really help teams. What we've seen is actually, even yesterday I was sharing those with some of our marketing team because they were like, "Oh yes, we could really use this for our practices." It's great to see that you can solve similar problems just by using the same toolkits. That was a real win for me. Then finally from a product manager's perspective, we have two parts. We have a skills and capabilities matrix that we work with each of our product managers, identifying their own opportunity and growth areas to invest in. Then we all come together as a product group, as a guild. We'll bring in external speakers or even just work together on a lean coffee to help solve our problems. One thing they're definitely working through at the moment is what is the future of roadmaps and how should they look. You can bring the bigger group in to help you solve that.

Karen: Sounds like a lot of great initiatives there for employees. A lot of incentives. Trade Me has always been very customer-focused. How would you say this has helped transform the business?

Sue: I think for me the biggest impact is seeing our teams really come together to focus on solving those big customer problems. By focusing on the strategy and helping our teams understand what it means for customers and embodying that empathy. We are really starting to see that motivation of driving for value and releasing as much as we can, as soon as we can, and really learning for customers. Another thing for us that’s been quite good is, our experiments are starting to get scrappy and we're gaining confidence in our learning. Previously our experimentation would be quite polished, but actually, it's okay. It's scrappy, we're trying to learn and move on. For me, that pace is a really good example of where we're going. We're not chasing that perfection. Really overall, investing in our framework and helping our teams’ mindset, change their mindset and then investing in our practices. We're bringing this greater consistency in how we do product at Trade Me, and really building that foundation, that puts our customer at the heart of what we do. It's really important to keep fostering that and developing it because it's a practice, not perfect at the end of the day. We keep listening to each other and learning and evolving.

Karen: That's terrific. Thank you. That's all we have time for today, Sue. It's been really interesting talking to you, and it sounds like you've certainly learned a lot and evolved the product practice at Trade Me. 

Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Pragmatism in Practice. If you'd like to listen to similar podcasts, please visit us at thoughtworks.com/podcasts, or if you enjoyed the show, help spread the word by rating us on your preferred podcast platform.

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