Oops. Hey. Good morning, everyone. We are here live at the Agile India Conference Webinar series. This is actually our second webinar, and it's a pleasure to have Jim McCarthy on the second series. Jim actually does not really need an introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction. Jim is kind of the pioneer behind the culture hacking work that he's been doing, very impressive stuff. I think at least in India, not many people are aware of his work. And we thought setting up this webinar and having a kind of a hangout with him to discuss some of the questions that people might potentially have to see what he's up to in terms of culture hacking and what he has to present at the conference which is coming up. So Jim, thanks for joining the call. Well, thanks for having me. This is quite a treat to be with my new friends and my new second home, India. I've always had a lot of passion and interest in India and wanted to spend more time there, so this is a great occasion for me. In fact, I came and I'm begging at your door, as I recall. I mean, I really want to come to India. That's why I'm coming. And your gracious willingness to be my host and to help me spread the ideas I have for people. That's great. I think maybe even more important the energy I have. You may not be familiar with my work, but you'll definitely be familiar with my energy because it lies behind and beneath all of this agile stuff is the energy I've been living and swimming in for many, many years. And it's only now that we've got a kind of a way we can ride and connect with each other and double and triple and quadruple the energy field that's happening in the world of design culture. In fact, your work predates a lot of the XP and the agile movement, and I think you've been doing research on culture hacking for about two decades now. So can you just briefly give us a quick tour or a walkthrough of what got you started and what you're up to these days with your culture hacking or culture design work that you've been doing? Sure, sure. Well, what got me started is what got everybody started, I guess, is trying to write software that actually works. And it's great, trying to do great software. It's a pretty difficult task. And I got pursuing that in 1976, 77, time frame right when the personal computer first came out and started appearing in cities throughout the country and little computer stores. And there were only 1,000 or 2,000 of us at that time programming personal computers. And that's when I checked in on the thing.  This feels so good. This is so cool. That moment when you make that connection with the computer, that's what's been driving me ever since is that sensation, that feeling of at last I found some rational, predictable pal that will help me create a more rational world. So that's how I got started. Like everybody that was a hacker in those days, I just got started because we're sure love of the experience. And then I tried to figure out ways that I would make it pay for myself so I could do it full time like any other drug addiction. You become a drug dealer to keep the drugs flowing. So yeah, I had to start selling computers in order to buy them. And so I became a consultant and a custom programmer for people. And then I gradually found my way into the dawn of the commercial software era and got hooked up with a startup. And we produced the first object-oriented language in Windows called Actor. And I was the manager or the vice president of R&D at this company called Whitewater, which, as they say, was a critical success. It was not perhaps like a huge commercial success, but we did a lot of good things. We were suppliers to Borland of the Object Windows Library and the resource editors that got them started in the application framework and object-oriented technology. So we kind of caught that wave at Whitewater. And that was in the late 80s and early 90s. Well, prior to that time, I spent a decade at Bell Labs just kind of interning around genius people that were worth listening to, the guys that wrote the code. We all live by now and wrote Unix and C and C++. And those people in that world was a tremendous place for me to go hang out and be with and learn from and soak in their great software development environment. But the AT&T culture was a problem. I mean, I got to see that firsthand. As the world's largest company went, we had two million employees when I started and then it went all the way to zero. So that's important. The culture is, it was a vast enterprise, just totally failed to produce software, basically, to produce software. So anyway, so I got on this thing of object-oriented technology and also I got to where I was shipping on time and I found out that that was quite extraordinary. Nobody could ship on time and that was the fundamental problem and 80% of software projects failed altogether. And so I didn't know if I was any good at this or not.  And in that talk, first thing I did was just say, okay, here's my record. I've shipped these products with these people in this time. What is that better than or worse than what you guys are doing? And no one knew, right? I mean, I didn't know what the standard was, what the ideal situation would even be, but it turns out I had a pretty good record. And so I had the right to speak. And so I said, well, here's how I do it. And I started crafting these rules of thumb, many of which would bring familiar to the people here today because those rules of thumb kind of became the backbone.  I ended up getting recruited by Microsoft and ran their C++ group for many key years where we came out with Visual C++ 1.0. We came out with all sorts of amazing things. I mean, it was amazing. It was a team unlike any other team. In fact, the team was so important to the people whose lives were changed by it that we just had our 20th reunion. And people came from all over the world just to be with that team again for just one more hour, one more day because it really did change everything for everybody because that's where we figured out how to ship software on time. That's where we figured out how to make it great on purpose. And when we figured out a lot of important things there and I ended up writing a book called Dynamics of Software Development which was 54 Rules of Thumb. If you wanna see some of that earlier work, this is where Agile came from. It came from this work, you know, and from the work of my predecessors, you know, but I gave people permission to actually just use their head and their heart and figure out the best way to do things.  We're in a similar era now. Anyway, so if you wanna see that, don't look up 21 Rules of Thumb or something like that for shipping great products on time, it was a Microsoft essay that leaked. I wrote it for Neutral Proopses and it leaked, it got out. Everybody liked it. I also gave a talk on this that got pretty famous. In that event, Microsoft, the guy around the sea group, said that you could do it this way, right? And so that gave people permission to just relax and look at software in a different way and look at making it in a different way. In that way, later kind of became, in later iterations and with some additions became the Agile point of view or the extreme programming point of view or whatever. The various cultures, the microcultures that we're living in now. But once we decided to discover, my wife and I worked on that team with me, my wife worked with me, Michelle. And so we kind of felt like we had to figure out, we know how to ship on time. I mean, we went from a team of 200 people that took two years to ship a product that sucked to a much smaller team, 125 people, shipping anything we wanted and any time we wanted. We were shipping first guys to ever ship on subscription. We were the first guys to ever ship on CD-ROM. We were the first guys, in fact, there were no CD-ROMs. There was no optical media associated with computers. And so we were the first guys that took that, had the guys from Asia come in, the guys from Japan primarily, came over and we said we want to get CD-ROMs going as a storage medium for computers and we're going to give them to developers with our product. So, because there were no, we had the bootstrap to CD-ROM at the end of the day. Anyway, those were exciting and interesting times where a lot of innovation was coming and in the cultural activity associated with soccer. That's where we came up with the idea of a daily meeting. That's where we get, in fact, I find that a lot of this lean stuff comes from there too. That was the first, I think it was the first use of the word pivot with, that was one of my rules, pivot or take none. These rules kind of were, that gave a lot of people a lot of permission to experiment things. But what we decided to do was rather than just kind of push these rules, we wanted to figure out how you could design and implement a culture that would always produce greatness, that the culture would produce things. So, we went, Michelle and I started the laboratory where we put teams inside of the lab, give them a week to do something great. That a week to do something great. And then we recorded what they did that was successful and throughout what they did that was unsuccessful. We're one of the very few people, maybe like, I don't know, pretty much the only ones that actually just worked on this experimentally. In these teams, one after another, we call that boot camp where the first guys to use that name after the Marines are among the first, I think Dan, he's a cad, a VB boot camp. Anyway, we had this idea that you would come to this boot camp and you would transform your way of looking at the software and your way of looking at yourself and your way of looking at quality. The minimal bar has got to be greatness. I mean, that's the minimum. So, in that context of that laboratory and then taking that stuff out to various clients and working with them and just noting what worked and then replicating what worked, each team starting where the last team left off and solving the problem and the tension of greatness ended up in a long period of time producing software for your head. It's not surprising, but it should have been. Well, what's surprising? It's not surprising now, when I think about it, that the culture, the way you create a culture is actually with software, with algorithms that yield behavior that is exactly what you want for producing great products. So, we started that lab about 20 years ago and then we're on it still with pretty much the same techniques and assignments except that we have more solutions now. In other words, the old assignment was sort of do something great and good luck. And the new assignment is do something great and here's 150 pages on how others have done it. Jim, if I can- So, in a nutshell, that's what we're gonna do. Yes. Sorry, Jim. If I can interrupt for the benefit of the audience, I think you have a very good definition of what you mean by culture. So, I think you touched upon that, but it would be great if you can just define what you think a culture is and what compromises of a culture. How does it influence? That would help give people a context of what we're talking here. Okay, well, a culture, I forget my exact definition, but it's basically the things we believe together that are true and the values we hold, the principles we live by, the commitments we make and the procedures we follow. It might be a culture primarily, though, how you act.  You know, whatever your motive, whatever your intention, if your behavior is good, that's what we're after is how to capture that. And so, there's a certain amount of things you have to commit to in order to get those kind of results. For example, you have to value ideas that are scary. I mean, if you want ideas to come from, you know, we're trying to make software here which is intellectual property. In order to make intellectual property, you have to have intellectual discourse. You have to have intellects engaged. You have to create an environment where it's totally safe to say your scariest ideas. And you have to have an environment that is quite a bit more civilized than the contemporary environment in corporate settings. It's not very civilized. You have to have an environment that allows for humans to flourish and that requires healthy dealing with emotion and nurturing of shared vision, which is a state that we're always seeking. Shared vision is a state of being, not a set of words. It's a state of being, a state of multi-personal flow where the IQ is aggregate, where the ideas where you're living in an ecology of ideas, that the best ideas are always acted upon, that you have radically democratic team processes, the system that we work with. It's always the team has to have unanimity before actually 100% agreement before they do anything. I don't know if I got to the exact definition of culture there for you, but it's culture is something you can make up. That's the most important thing to get. At this stage of the game, at this stage of our dialogue together, you must understand that culture is something that you can design. You can make a beautiful culture on purpose. Agile, extreme programming, Kaiser and Kanban, all these things, these are kind of proto, they're like, they're not there yet. They're not full blown cultures. They can, in general, they don't even have means of adopting themselves and stuff like that. But they are steps on the road to full blown culture design. And that's when I'm coming to India to talk about. It's not what's happening now, but if you like what's happening now, you're gonna love what's happened next. That feeling of agility and stuff, that could be produced by a culture design that mandates greatness. In fact, it's an argument that must be turned to. That greatness is your goal. And greatness is the goal for mature adults, really. Now the other thing to keep in mind is kind of the Martian culture. So let me get a little historical context. What we're doing today is the climax of at least in the Western parts of the world, the, what's called the Enlightenment, which was something that took place late 1600s, early 1700s, where science was born, where reason became valued, and where freedom became a political idea and where the separation of religion from beliefs, that there are other alternative beliefs as well as religious beliefs, other kinds of beliefs are possible. All that happened in the Enlightenment. And basically, since then, until we discovered software, I mean software is the full fruit of that era of awakening to scientific reality. The full fruit of that is software. And the interesting thing about software is that it creates culture. It creates culture. Like, you can't make great software without a great culture. And so, and that explains the mediocrity of the general software case. But software creates, demands its own culture and it's one of the few times in all of history where greed and good are totally aligned. Like, you can't make a lot of money with mediocre software. So you start to try and create a great team and you find that the only way you do that is by things like freedom, full free expression of emotion, radical commitment to freedom of democracy, democracy in our every action, radical democracy, and the aggregation of the mass of humanity on the team into a single thinking, feeling, believing, envisioning entity. That's what we're trying to create. That's the culture that I know how to inseminate, how to start, catalyze. And that is the fulfillment of the destiny of the scientific revolution. That is Isaac Newton's gold out of mud, right? That's when he hits it. It's in that fulfillment. And that's how science got started, right?  That was it, that was what, you know, well, isn't that really what software is to? Creating the promise is fulfilled in software. In fact, like here I am talking to new friends from India. And you know what? I'm more in the same culture with you than I am in my neighbors who are pre-software people, right? We're in the same culture. It's a culture of software hacking and software development that's global.  Everywhere I go in the world, I find the people that are my fellow citizens in the software nation, right? It's an English speaking, fortunately for a guy like me. It's an English speaking thing. In fact, I was talking to a friend from Japan. He said that their company has spent the last couple of years just moving entirely to English. You know, because of this phenomenon. Now, English isn't any superior, I think, but it seems to be the languages that we're trying to globalize on. And like I say, fortunately for guys like me, I can be understood anywhere in the world if as long as I'm talking to people on the software. Because now it's not just picking up the language, right? It's picking up this new culture. It's very easy to see a post-national, I promised everybody a long review tonight and a little message about it coming. It's a long review. Picture a post-national entity made up of citizens of the software nation, right? That we may also be citizens of other countries and localities, but something that transcends time and space is this cultural pulse that's driving all of us. The people that will come to your conference, I suspect they're coming because of this cultural beckoning, this feeling, this sensation, this idealism that we share toward, no, we're gonna make something good and great. And this is how, this is the people that are gonna do it. This is the people that are called to that work. So, though you may not know my name, that's what I've been working on, brothers and sisters, along with all of you, and you'll recognize the feeling and the hopes. And the destiny that I'm seeing. That's great, Jim. I think you've given a very energetic definition of what energy is and how all of us, being global citizens in some sense, are kind of bonded with each other. Why are this culture that we share of being in the hackery of creating great software that actually changes the world? So that's fantastic. Well, the highest value in my world is effectiveness. And I don't have any trouble selling that value to anyone. Everybody wants their time to matter. Everybody wants their behavior to produce the intended result. That's what effectiveness is. I wanted to do this and I figured out how to do it with the least cost and the most payoff. Effectiveness. If you pursue effectiveness until you are exhausted and spent, you'll end up pursuing virtue and other good things. So this pursuit of effectiveness is universal and that's why we're bothering. That's why people like you trouble to learn English, right? Because you want to get in the language of this programming, the language of effective computer code. Look, the computer and all of the internet is just a premonition for the society we're building. The connected, effective society, right? Like code that doesn't work, it goes away in the computer world, right? There it doesn't get shipped at all. I hope. You know, like we're building, every act of building software we take is an act of tremendous idealism and belief in the rational order of things. That if I count on the internet, if I use the protocols inside the internet, they'll just return the result. That they're robust, that they cannot be taken down and moreover, they cannot really be hidden from others. We do have nations that are fooling around with that idea and stuff but that's all of them collapse. I mean, that won't work. They're gonna have to get too greedy, right? Look, I mean, we're talking serious money to be made in the goodness of software. Apple made a great product while back, the phone, right? The iPhone. Apple made that one product, maybe it's one or two others that are pretty great, the iPod, and they're gonna have greater season control, the music business, stuff like that. All that stuff was like pretty big. Two or three great things, maybe. And with two or three great things, a few months ago, a few quarters back, they had more cash on hand than the United States government. More cash than the guys that can print it. They had more money than the United States government. One company, one or two great problems. So, you know, that should tell the tale of whether it pays or not to have great design and great teams and great software. And I use the word software a little bit loosely.  These all these devices, these little phones, those are basically software, right?  That's why we like them. We like the software. We like the fact that they change along with us, that they grow to understand our needs, that they're all fed. But the thing is, it's really hard to make that team that makes great software. It's really hard to create an innovative idea. Everybody says they want to be an innovator, right? I mean, yeah, really? Let's see that. Because the first thing that happened to innovators is people try to kill them. They throw rocks at them. They don't want change. They don't want, you know? Steve Jobs, when he did the Mac, he had the threat and the pay for the greatest ad in television history, which was the big brother ad where they threw the, people probably don't remember, but there's a big ad when the Mac was done. And it was so controversial in Apple that he was even the CEO down there or whatever. He couldn't get it done and he had the threat and to pay for it personally. Right, that's what innovators get. They get hung on responsibility and everything else. So if you're innovating and everybody's going, oh, great, great, great, you aren't innovating enough because they should be upset because you're breaking thrown over all the rules they know and love and everything. And if you're not suffering the pains of innovation, then what you're doing is just a tweak. Jim, can we take a quick question from the participant? There is Will, who is actually, I know Will, he's from California. He's watching this live and he has a question which is kind of apt at this moment. If you don't mind, I'll just pop that in here. Go for it. So Will basically is asking what in your estimate is the degree of adoption in the enterprise culture today? The way you define culture, where to what degree is the way you envision culture or the era of magnificence actually adopted today in the enterprises? Does, I'm not sure I understand what you said. I missed a couple words. So something about, can the kind of culture describing relate, how does it relate to enterprises? Bigger enterprises, is that the implication or the question you think? The way you envision the culture to be in a company, currently you want it to be at X, but I believe that it is at X delta, which is less than X. So what is the degree of adoption in your research and what would be an estimate and when we would actually hit the point X? What is the degree of adoption that's possible or what is the degree of adoption today? What's the degree of adoption today, I believe? The degree of adoption today is pretty damn low. I would say, I mean, you know, like there's a lot of things you have to overcome to live right. And one of them, you know, but on the other hand, you know, the entire world is pursuing this idea of startups and startup energy and startup cultures and startups and Duane startups and you know, there's all this hu-ha about startups and many, many parts of the world are looking to that as the solution to most of their ills that they'll start new enterprises that will be great. And really what they're saying is that, I mean, I know everybody in Silicon Valley or Seattle where I would, you know, they're all pursuing this idea of four people in a garage, boy, that's when it's good. Well, what they're really talking about is like four people who love each other. So when you love each other, you can be said to be in a righteous culture, you know, because it's only when you love each other that you can tickle each other into great achievement, right? If your parents loved you and expected great things from you, you're likely to be trying to get great things regardless of what Abel says. Most of us did not have that good fortune and so we have to love each other. We have to get a coach that loves us and someone that just goes, when you go, but what about this crazy idea of not go for it, go for it, do it, fail, succeed, win, be, you know. That's what parents are supposed to say to babies, you know. So, but in corporations, big corporations, all the best I can say is they seem to be turning to the problem. They seem to be looking at culture as a strategic thing. I've noticed that the last 20 years, maybe 10 years, especially they've all pitched about their culture. So that's something, right? They're starting to complain about it, but I never have seen anybody go, oh, well, I know how to design a culture. That's what I'm saying. I do know how to design a culture. I don't have enough experience at it. I have more experience than anybody I know, but, you know, it's very early and when I'm talking about innovators getting rocks thrown at them, I feel in that crowd, you know, luckily and unluckily, you know, because you have to change everything to get a great culture, really.  To try and do, you know, some agile pair programming without living in an ecology of ideas where feelings are promoted. The act of feeling is promoted. That's stupid, right? You have to do some things that make those things flourish and those things that you have to do, those are great and those are gonna make a hero out of you. They're gonna make you grow up and there's nothing stopping any team in any company from adopting a great culture. Nothing, right? Like the beauty of the system is that for all its flaws, once you adopt a great culture, you're the most powerful thing in the company. So you're kind of hard to fire. The other thing is that immunity or that results, if you have a great big software hit and you did it in a radical way, you're not gonna get fired. Results confer immunity, right? So you can be a revolutionary as long as you're paying your way in most companies.  Like to hire someone who's job was to talk to the team about the team and their life together and their personal need to express and reach. You know, that was just crazy in those days. That was the kind of innovation that got rocks thrown in it. And it got right, it took Microsoft four or five years to catch up to what I was up to and what we were up to in our group. And then they got scared. Nonetheless, you know, they tried to promote it as a culture for sale for many years and that's what was going on. Microsoft, Microsoft Solutions Framework, they called it. But it was just these ideas. And then it became Agile. I mean, the Agile guy did a great job of finding a way to bundle this energy. However, you have to be very explicit about what you're doing. You're not adopting Agile, you're designing culture. Right, so you gotta have the seeds of a culture to build on a kernel and that's our product. We give it away. I mean, it's called the core protocols and that will catalyze the development culture if it properly. But, you know, in terms of a step to moving, you can move in that direction and then you can make apps on top of that. It's like an operating system software but it's just software from your head. You know, I said earlier that the road we're on is the software creates culture and this is the beginning of that kind. This is one instance of that. And if you got a particular corporation and you want to talk about how to, we call it booting, how to boot that corporation. Well, you start with booting yourself and then you boot, you know, a couple of three people make a team and live great. And watch what happens, you know. Things don't have to happen. You don't have to get too evangelical. You don't have to get too much of you ought to do this, you know, like that's kind of a weak claim. You ought to do this. You ought to do what I do.  Or you ought to do per program. You ought to do, you know, any particular idea. It's not really about that. It's like I do this and get these results. That's all. That's all you have to do. And I'm happy to talk to anybody, anywhere in the world that wants to try this personally. That's why I'm trying it personally. The problem is not the other guys on the team. The problem is not the company you're working in. The problem, my friends, is you and me. And what we're doing is culture design, okay? Next conference or two conferences now, I want you to have a culture design conference. I don't want you to be so big at it as one little thing early on in the revolution. Don't get married to that brand. Let's become designers of great culture and learn how to do that. We don't have much of a clue really. I say, I know how to do it. It's the only reason I can say that is I know more than anyone else, I think. At least I know more than anyone I've met out of design and culture. But man, there's a lot we haven't learned. And I know I'm conducting an event there with you guys so that we could spend a day with people who are serious about this kind of work. So come to that event if you're serious about becoming a great architect of human life, a great culture designer, because that's what we're working on. And yes, there's all kind of processes we could do and all kind of things. But really, what would yield a great culture if done repeatedly, repeatedly? That our goal is always better to repeatedly get a team to a state of service, any team anywhere if they just do these things. And through the power of software ideas, that's possible. But that's just the beginning. I love the way you have set up the special event that you have, which is the one day workshop on culture design. The interesting thing I find is that you need to apply and you need to qualify to be present at that event because it goes back to what you were saying. I mean, you need to get a group of really like-minded people, high energy people in the room and then magic happens. I'm not trying to sell a course to someone. I'm trying to offer a relationship to people who want to pursue this particular dream. And if you're not willing to tell me who you are before we can say, yes, let's be friends, then I'm not willing to be friends with you. I mean, that's what we're offering, right? It's fair to offer a friendship, connection, love and success and creating a new field that humanity is just starving for, just dying for. And the energy that's attracting people all over the world in these little houses, that's the big energy. The energy of human need that we could solve, that we can solve and will solve, it's just a matter. It's kind of all over about the shouting because we're living at the climatic age of the age of reason and how fortunate we are that we can even be having this conversation and that I can be virtually everywhere right now. I mean, that's part of the miracles that we're creating even before we're really very good at it. Cool. One thing you briefly mentioned at the beginning of your talk was this notion of trying to experiment and trying to try out things and be willing to create the safe environment in which it was okay to fail and learn. And I kind of heard a similar thing from another person, Dave Snowden, who's been very influential in the way I think about the world around me. So Dave Snowden has this term that he uses called safe fail experimentation, which basically is about you need to actively create these environments in which it is okay to fail and these are safe fail experiments which means it's safe to fail. The primary reason being we wanna learn and move on, we wanna learn and improve from there. And I think you also seem to touch upon similar thoughts. So what's your take on safe fail experimentation? Well, it's just kind of fine when people come up to me, like we have these set of protocols that are personal protocols that you use to kind of accomplish basic civilized behavior, basic civilized behavior. And everybody's got an idea to make them better. And that's a part of our kind of runaway democracies. Like, oh, everybody's better, you know? Like this stuff that we're working on is like come out of blood, sweat, and tears. It isn't ideas we have, you know what I mean? This is practices that work among hundreds if not thousands of people experimenting with it. People that are earnestly trying to get a team to a state of incredible flow and then make a great product, all within a week. And they may or may not even know each other when they began. They may hate each other when they begin, right? So there's lots of things here we have to overcome. But when it works again and again and again and we prevented all the downsides, you know? Like, that's the result of experimentation. I mean, we're living in a scientific era. I'm not, you know, there's a lot of new age values and stuff that are emerging at the same time. But I'm not sure that they amount to great practices, you know? So you want to practice till something works and then you want to absorb and try and learn everything that works, then, you know, start creating your own stuff, right? I mean, we have to establish like, no, this far, we're this far, you know? And then we've got to know people agreeing that we're that far, that we have a bit of a conspiracy of virtue. Like, here's how far we are. This will give us these good results. And here's what we all need to do and the community begins to form what's missing, what can go on top. So we've got what we think is a good candidate for a common platform, no more nor less. But you have to do things. Like, you have to have a mechanism for making decisions with many people. And that mechanism is based on anonymity, which is both the most efficient and definitely the most effective.   So you get everybody agreed and you act. Now, the other thing is like, right now it's virtually illegal to have a feeling of work. The only feeling you can have is unhappy. And most of us aren't happy much of the time, really, as a percentage. So, sad is not allowed. Like, it's illegal to cry at work. It's illegal to be afraid that work. And it's illegal to be mad at work. And so that's pretty much huge percentage of human consciousness and human life devoted to those four, three primitives. So, you know, any system that doesn't have a way of dealing with those feelings is just not worth talking about. So, you know, we have a few things that address those feelings. Not the other, yeah, yeah, but criticism, right? That's the only one. You gotta make your ideas improved. You gotta live in an ecology of ideas. So if you're dealing properly with feelings and stuff and get ideas stated, that's a start. But then, you gotta improve on it by common working on the same idea.  So, any system that doesn't allow for the equalest improvement of ideas for the management of human emotion and for the development of a decisive, efficient decisiveness among a group. It isn't really worth considering. And that's some of the results of experience, you know? That's what we saw in our work, was that great teams shared those characteristics. And let's see, what else? Other fundamentals that you have to have. Conflict resolution, you know, when you start fighting, you gotta have at least a couple of tools that help you just get through that. 90% of conflict is just listening, can be resolved by listening.  Just by listening. Yeah, so let's see, what else? You gotta have an intention, you gotta form an intention. And so, when you behave a goof, you gotta have error correction, any consistent as error handling, right? So, this is just like that problem. The design of a culture must have robust error handling, and general error handling. So, you check people's intention. What is your intention? That's an intention check. What behavior are you looking for with as a result of your being? Or what, or what? That's a right everybody has in the course of the year. And you gotta have freedom of spatial engagement. Like, no one has to be anywhere, at any time. It's up to them where they are, right? So, there has to be quite a bit of freedom and trust that people that need to be, and that they're the best judges of what's most important. Then you have to know, you have to have some sort of system for facilitating the continuous and deep group awareness of what the members of the group want. Like, what you want, right? We have a commitment that's like, you gotta know and disclose what you feel, what you think, and what you want. That's all, you don't have to disclose anything else. In fact, it's better if you don't. But, if you will tell us what you want in the minute, in the week, in the life, in the product, whatever, what you want is very important to all of us, because it's only by the aggregate state of wants that are known can we be successful, because success is fulfilling wants. So, those are just some of the primitive things that have, I say primitive, I mean small, right? Those are low level, fundamental things that must be provided for in any culture. And, most of the culture stuff that's happening is sort of proto-culture and pre-culture. It's all kind of branded, money-making. It's trying to cash in a little early, it seems to me. But, you know, we got to fund as you go, I understand it. But, the big fruit is like more general living solutions. I get complaints out of people that are in my teams that go like this, so I'm really freaking out because I love the people at my job and I'm loved by them more effectively than I am by the people at my home. That's what you want.  The solution, of course, is you invite the people from home to come to work. And then that's a whole other bunch of solutions which I almost can't even get into now, but if you come spend a day with me, we'll talk about it because the solution to most work problems are the people that we exclude from work including our own children. I mean, I've seen it happen in the tests, you know. I've seen it happen in the boot camp where the kids come and solve all the problems, where the spouse comes and solves all the problems.  You have to be an innovator. I mean, if you're not wanting to be courageous, I don't know what I can do for you. I can help you be courageous. But you can't skip it. Courage is doing, to me, courage is wise choices while feeling fear. The fear you're always gonna have but are you gonna choose wisely while you're afraid? That's the question. So that's what courage is. It's a history and a track of it, of choosing correctly, of choosing wisely, considering everything even though you're afraid. So if you live in an environment that's healthy like this and a culture that's healthy like this, boom, you start to grow. And when you start to grow, doing software is not so hard. You can grow into it. You can do less, do it better. I mean, all sorts of things happen. All sorts of things happen when we gain proof. It was the proof of that. But until then, everything's gonna hang up. So Jim, if I can summarize, sorry, go ahead. No, can you go ahead? Yeah, I was about to say if I can summarize, I think I read one of your blogs or one of your writings, I think, where you talk about what are the five features of a great culture. And I think I would just like to summarize them real quick because you touched on a little bit.  Yeah, I'll go ahead. So the first feature I think is to be, can be counted upon. So you can be counted upon. Other people can count upon you. Which basically is extend personal freedom in all things. Then the second thing you talk about is the emotional, creativity, safety that people can have in this environment. The whole radical democracy that you talked about, where everyone has opinions and are free to express them. The other thing you talked about is the nobility of purpose, having nobility in the purpose that you're trying to do, believing that everyone is in pursuit of greatness. And then experience the ever greater effectiveness even in both personal and group interactions. So I think those were kind of briefly the five things, the five features of a great culture that I think you touched upon. Is that fair summary? It's not too bad, like it's well said by you. And I know that those are ideas I stated as key. I think it'll stick out, it'll last for a while, looking at those five things because those are areas we're really challenged on. I mean, the thing is we have to commit to living better. Hello, does anybody still hear me?  We are here. Go ahead, Jim. Oh, okay. Okay, am I back? Okay, yeah. So, you know, we have to learn to live better. We have to be better to ourselves, better to our kids, better to our fellow workers. We've got to be more effective. Alan, do you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, because my video, it doesn't look good. Am I still on video? Yes, yes. It's looking weird here, but that's okay. It's always looking weird here from my point of view. That's life with me. Yeah, okay, so, something's weird. We can hear you and we can hear you and see you, Jim. Okay, you can hear me and see me and then that's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right, so like if you want great soccer where you have to become a greater person, you can't cheat, you can't get great software out of mediocre people. You can't get great software out of a crummy team. You can't, it's never going to happen.  The bug count is a constant and it comes from the defects and the relationships among the people. If you want to reduce the bug count, for example, as an example of quality, must have the QA people work on the relationships of the people and the quality of their interactions. That's where bugs come from, you know, and that's also where greatness comes from. If you get into a shared vision state, you don't let mediocrity creep in. You just look at each other and you totally know that no, that's a bad idea because you're in this state of shared vision with someone else. It's like a glance between two lovers is the greatest of all data compression schemes. You just glance and you see and you know what you're just more of one. So, you know, like you're going to have to do some block and tackle work, you're going to have to get in touch with your feelings, share them with other people, this is difficult for men. By the way, you're going to have to let the women enter, God's sake. You know, like this discrimination against women must end and it must end now. It's ridiculous. There are greatest resources and assets that we're marginalizing and it does break my heart. When I go to these various parts of the world and I see all the guys are stepping into this lively, beautiful, rich culture, but they're marginalizing their own women like we do in the West and don't. It's just really bad. It's really bad. Michelle and I really won't even take on a team if it doesn't have enough women anymore because they just don't work. They won't lift off properly. And that's true of every ethnicity as well. The more ethnicity you have, the happier you'll be. And that's why I say goodness and greed coalesce. We don't have to do stuff because someone says it would be good if we did it differently. We do it because we're greedy for effectiveness. Enjoy, we want joy. If you want joy, let the women come in and take care of things. For God's sake, it's a mess. Really, I can't overstate that because that is our great sin right now. We have to create women that are, we have to create women that are interested in science. We have to create them opportunities. We have to be inventive. We have to invite them and welcome them. And you can't get it by saying you can't cry at work. You have to be men that are attracted to women. Not exclusively. So I just noticed we have about three minutes left and there was one question here which I think is pretty good to kind of at least summarize the discussion and give pointers to people, post this webinar in terms of where they can go to learn more stuff. So one of the questions is all of this has been very interesting. And for those of us who cannot attend the Agile India workshop, are there pointers that you can give where we can learn more about code protocols, more about software for your head? Those are the topics that you mentioned. And what kind of pointers you would give people to go from here after this webinar? Yeah, well, let's see. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to get into it. And it's kind of like when I was trying to get into the computer revolution, when there are only a few of us, you have to just want to, number one, and then dig around. We probably don't make it as easy as we ought to be. But one good thing to do is join us on Facebook. We have a pretty active Facebook group where people are experimenting with and living with these protocols in that group. Because it's hard to go boot a team, but you might be able to just boot yourself and then join us there and practice your new way of being using the protocols in a group. In that group, let's see. If you go to Facebook, I think it's Facebook, Welcome to the Booted. Let me just try it real quickly. Facebook, yeah, you can go to Facebook. There's a page where it says how to join the Booted. And it's Facebook, Welcome to the Booted. You can also just go directly to the group, the Booted. It's called the Booted. And that's Facebook.com slash groups slash the Booted. Or I can give you our group number as well. But if you're at all interested in this stuff, you've got to get with the people that are doing it and get right next to them and enjoy being with them and challenge yourself and challenge them. There's another group too where we discuss it. Like we have one group called the Booted where we try to practice it. We have another group where we discuss it called Facebook.com groups, MediCorps, MediCorps, M-E-T-A-C-O-R-E. Also, we have 100 podcasts from showing our good podcasters. And everybody seems to really enjoy those podcasts. So we're re-upping our commitment to that. That's at McCarthyShow.com. There's a website called liveingreatness.com. And that's where the protocols are kind of kept and disseminated. So you can always go there to a single protocol by knowing how to formulation for typing the URL. But we'd like to know you. I mean, we're at that level right now. And so if you're at all thinking about going to Agilindia, definitely go and definitely take the extra time to spend with us. You can get it free to our thing or you get a scholarship. If you need one, we'd prefer to be financially supported just because everything costs money. But our code and all of our stuff is free. And it's licensed in a way that will spread freedom because it uses the new license to win on its way into every situation. All right. Thanks a lot, Jim. What I'll do is after this podcast, after this webinar is over, the links that you mentioned, I'll add them to the page where this webinar was hosted. So anyone else coming along can actually get access to the links you mentioned. So people would be able to access that. I'm afraid we are running out of time. It's already about an hour since we started. I think it was just illuminating.  The energy is very vibrant. And I can feel the passion you have for this topic. And it would be, I'm just counting the days to see you in Bangalore for the conference. Well, great. I sure hope to make some new friends. That's why I'm coming. All right, great. Anyone else? Thanks a lot for attending. All you attendees who attended, thank you so much. And the people from the conference, thanks a lot. And this is going to be great. So don't miss it for heaven's sake.  Don't miss this opportunity. Thank you, Jim. OK, bye-bye. Bye. All right, thanks, Jim. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you all. Bye.


Hey everybody, I'm Lance Quakey and today I want to go through a really common mistake in deadlifting and squatting specifically and it's just, it's something that I see not necessarily in everyone but it's really common in people who really like to lift weights. I remember I saw a guy at a weightlifting course we were working on this with and he had this reversed spinal curve.  If I'm super flat, super proud, super military posture you might call it, that's generally worse for you than a slight amount, it's always worse for you, than a slight amount of slouch and sometimes it's arguably worse for you than a lot of slouch. Okay, so what we're going to talk about is what this mistake is and I want to talk through how we want to fix it. It's specifically in our big lifts like our squats and our deadlifts. So the problem here is I've reversed the normal curve of the spine so I talked about the normal rounding of the upper back but we also have a normal arch in the lower back and in the neck and what happens is we flatten out that upper back, that thoracic spine because we're trying to stick the chest out, keep the chest really proud but since everything is connected, if I just kept that I would fall forward because it would push my weight forward. So what happens is the low back has to push backward and the neck has to flatten out as well, the neck pushes backward and so I get this like super, super straight spine. Now that can be okay, it stacks the spinal joints pretty well so if I'm doing something super heavy it's advantageous, we'll say, it's advantageous to support all the load but the reason it becomes a problem is because when I do that I steal my mobility from my other joints. So if I flatten my spine, my spine doesn't rotate a whole lot and I need my spine to rotate a lot to move my hips and move my shoulders and not overload my elbows and my wrists and whatever your problem may be. Okay so the other thing to look at when doing squats and deadlifts with this super high chest up kind of activity is to get, since I lose my mobility, to get all the way down there.  And what you've heard is you have to squat below parallel otherwise you're not really squatting. So maybe you're me 10 years ago and you're super macho and you're like okay well I need to squat deep and I need to stick my chest out a lot and now my back hurts or now my something else hurts. So this is super, super common. With a super proud chest comes extra mobility at the low back. So with my squats I stick my chest out and my whole body is arched until about here. This is not low enough, this is not where I'm stopping my squat so I keep going down and I get this extra motion from my low back and I can feel it right there, hopefully you can see it on the camera. My low back pushes that way, my upper back is still pushing this way. So that's the issue. Now to fix it I've just got to take the reversal of the spinal curve out of it or I've at least got to chill it out a little bit. So at that point what I just showed you that's not just a flat spine that's a reversed spine so everything is going the wrong way.  It's really easy to see this if you look at someone's posture if they do this and you notice it during your lifts you'll probably notice hypertrophy or muscle gain in those low back erector spinae muscles. When they move you you send this hypertrophy stimulus so it's a it's a good like I can look at you and I can know how you lift just by looking at you and not watching you lift it's kind of cool. So the fix is slight slouch and then from there I'm not going to let myself slouch more I'm not going to let my back arch because that's going to be your tendency I'm not going to let my back arch as I come down I'm just going to hold this position okay so something like this right now it's easier said than done right if I put a bunch of weight on the bar it's going to be hard again I'm going to go hind the brain I'm not going to think about what I'm doing and I'm just going to do it the way that I'm used to doing it okay so you have to you have to gradually progress yourself up into this it's just like any other skill you have to learn it okay so do it stepwise try it with a ridiculously light weight and make sure you're really good at it make sure you can get 10 reps in a row without pausing and then put 10 pounds on each side of the bar and try it again or 25 if it's like a deadlift you know start with 135 go to 185 it's going to take a lot of practice and you're going to have this tendency to go back into it so you got to you got to play against that a little bit but this is it's not that it's a low hanging fruit but it's going it's it's going to be difficult to fix this pattern but it's going to give you a whole lot right if I if I can keep my spine in the right position that is tremendous for making more gains and and plus you're you're not just going to stop overloading your low back but you're going to start loading the muscles that should be loaded like your glutes and your hamstrings and your quads and stuff it just real quick recap don't stick your chest out too much get just a slight little slouch right it's not like I'm crunching down just a slight little slouch another way to think about it is just kill some of the tension you don't need to be so vigilant before the exercise is even happening you want to only use what tension is required to get the thing done right I don't want to be super super tight even for my warm-up sets because it's unnecessary I don't need to restrict my motion that much if it's just 135 okay so slight slouch don't move the spine from there okay you got to stick the butt out you got to keep driving through the heels uh you got to you know you got to let yourself bend over if it's a deadlift and you got to load the hamstrings but you got to maintain that on the way up as well so use all your other cues that I know you've practiced and just try it out see what it feels like to to not have your spinal curve reversed


Thank you so much everybody for being here and I hope you had some good coffee and I hope you're enjoying the conference. So today I'm here to talk about the business of UX and try and maybe talk through some of my experiences running, happening and dealing with a lot of business folks and talking about business day in and day out so let's maybe go through it and get into business and see what happens. Yeah, just to quickly introduce myself, I'm Rohan, I'm the founder of Happening Design, we're a global UX design studio. If you've seen my face around a couple of times at the conference that's also because I'm one of the co-chairs at UX India, I've been a co-chair for a while and it's an interesting time to be here, never done a keynote as a co-chair of UX India so this is definitely a first for me and I'm pretty excited about it. We are happening and if you've been here the last two days a lot of people have approached me and asked me what's happening so I've been trying to kind of talk to everybody about what we do and so on so it's a great opportunity for me to maybe just say it once and for all so yeah we are a global UX design studio and we create digital products and experiences for companies who are doing some very exciting stuff and yeah Happening is who we are so a bunch of things that we do basically to add more value to our clients in terms of UX design, research, brand design, front-end development and so on, quickly a little bit more talking about the impact we have a presence across the world largely in India and in North America and we've worked with some very exciting clients across a bunch of industries yeah some of the industries we've worked with and some of the clients largely across banking and financial insurance and retail and whatnot I won't bore you more with happening but let's talk about the business of UX that's why I'm here so today's talk today's my keynote is all about just giving some exposure into understanding the business side of things and understand the impact investing in UX brings especially if there are any business folks around here or UX designers who are getting into leadership positions this might be pretty useful for you so for the first and the most obvious question why should designers care about business goals and outcomes so as designers we already have a lot on our plate we talk to users we hear out their problems their pain points their needs we deal with developers we deal with marketers and we deal with what not and I'm now adding really one more thing on to your plate which is to deal with business folks as well but honestly I think this will be helpful this will help you improve your process and this will help you create some more impact first thing why you should be doing this is to be more business efficient if you're wondering most businesses out there the only thing that they care about would be to be more efficient that's why we keep hearing about layoffs and hiring and investments and what not so be business efficient the second thing is to drive business success so when I say business success there are a lot of business goals that the entire company aligns to and for each company success would mean a completely different thing so it helps to understand what is successful for your company and what does success mean for your company and it's not always about generating more revenue or more sales or engagement or whatever right there are companies that do some very interesting stuff where their goals will be completely different versus a company in the same industry which might have goals that are completely different basically right the third thing is to show some tangible evidence as UX designers I think we have a great superpower which is to visualize things envision things put things together in a very sort of a beautiful way and create experiences that really excite a lot of people so showing that and showing the process behind that is very important and lastly this something that I see many designers not doing but in our industry being a design studio in the consulting space it becomes extremely important for us especially when there are long-term engagements and bigger projects it's very very critical to show how your designs have made a positive impact on the company or on the business or the team that you're working with like I said could be anything but needs to be measured and needs to be shown to the respective people one thing before we kind of get talking too much in the business terms I would like to point out that good design is good business and this has been proven multiple times is not something new and you must have seen this code probably a dozen times so when I speak from the business side it doesn't mean that I'm asking you to get too much into the business side of things but keep in mind that we are all designers and we want to do good design but that also means that it's going to be good for the business so how do you do this right the first thing is obviously allow about alignment as designers your team or you might have a certain set of goals right that you would like to do with your designs you have particular process that you follow whenever you do research there are a set of things that you would like to achieve similarly when you create some wire frames there are certain things that you would like to achieve so it's important to embrace business goals and this there is there's a disconnect here because not many people get involved in this process where you don't understand or you don't get to see what the business goals are of a company so it's important to reach out and try and get yourself aligned to align to the direction where the company is headed a second thing is integrating them into your design process so don't keep your stakeholders in the dark involve them in the process talk to them about what you would like to do and how we would achieve it and how it is good for business the third thing which not many would like but it is to treat your stakeholders like you do your users so if you're one of those designers who doesn't do user research then this is bad news for you but if you are somebody who treats your users well and listens to them listens to what they have to say and empathizes with them it's extremely important to treat your stakeholders also in a similar way the last point is business back decision design decisions so obviously we have all heard of what design decisions are but when I say business back design decisions it is essentially I'm trying to say include your stakeholders in the process and have some business thinking behind the design decision that you take so if you're changing something that would affect a bunch of things in your flow it is important to measure or it is important to consider what is the impact that the business is going to have because of it and this is usually a back and forth discussion it never happens in at once but it's important to do that couple of things I would like to talk about which is very important as we go the metrics that you should actually care about and there's plenty if you just Google or I see so many people talking about AI so if you use AI you're gonna get a list of probably thousand metrics and you could probably create a thousand more but I would just like to touch upon this as we kind of go forward why do business stakeholders not value UX this is something I've been asked a lot and this is something that I have seen in the process myself when we talk to clients when we talk to prospects or when we speak with stakeholders in a particular company as well firstly there's no buy-in from the executives so that immediately is a big sort of a stepping stone in your entire process if you don't have a buy-in you're going to spend the entire time just fighting fighting fighting and trying to just bring everybody together and this buy-in doesn't happen magically there is a way to do things and I will talk about it as well but it is important to highlight what you bring on to the table and there will be people who don't understand what you bring on to the table but that effort is needed second is misalignment of goals it's happened to me a lot when somebody talks to me about a problem that they're facing with their business or their product I immediately have a thousand ideas I immediately know that these are the 10 things that I need to do to get to a point where I need to get to which would be success for me but to my client that is not success or to my customer that is not success high revenue like I said earlier might not be success for everybody right so it's important to understand the goals and their thinking the third thing is low stakeholder involvement in the process and this is something that we all do we do all the research we create something that's beautiful usable blah blah blah and we just go and present it to people that will not work that is not how our process is designed as well we need more involvement from the stakeholders and that's usually expensive when you get more and more people involved but decide at least 10 minutes of their time for a small thing might really help and might really help you align with where they are headed poor communication I think we are good at communication I believe at least as designers but if you're not able to communicate that is definitely a step back for you so find ways to be more communicative through your decks or presentations prototypes sketches whatever it may be you don't know how or what to measure these are two completely different problems you can measure something but it could be a wrong metric for you and in many cases it's a trial and error but nevertheless it is important to know what you want to measure how you want to do it let me now talk a small problem from the stakeholder side in a lot of cases when they invest in a big design team or when they invest in putting together a design team to do a specific thing they expect instant results so it's important to manage expectations it's important to be upfront about what you're going to deliver and how you're going to do it lastly stakeholders are clueless and unwilling to experiment this is again an educational process that you need to take them through but this is something as designers unfortunately the process is still not known to many business folks or many operational folks or many finance folks so it's important to talk about what you're doing however ridiculous that might be question so how do you make your business stakeholders happy plenty of ways but let me talk about the design aspect of making your stakeholders happy it is basically this is my believe that bringing together user satisfaction with business success will most likely make your stakeholders happy and this is something that I've observed in a lot of the projects that I have done and my studio has done the next point and the most important point is showing the return of investment and if you just Google this or if you try and read up more about this this is probably one of the first things that you will see the return of investment UX design is hundred dollars for every one dollar invested I think that is a very big lie I don't I don't know what's the methodology behind this or how they got to that or if it's still valid but I definitely don't think that's true and there could be multiple ways to show ROI it's not necessarily through dollars it's not necessarily through time it could be in terms of many things right it could be one little enhancement I've seen has solved a huge problem for customers right and that could result in quite a few things could be lesser time higher engagement whatever whatever a second thing illustrate saving so the reason I talk about this is it's important to show what you're investing in and why you're investing in it and this happens a lot with developers I suppose a good example would be when you have something really crazy that you would like to develop because you think your users would find it delightful and user-friendly and whatnot but that could be very expensive to develop so it is important to show your success in just taking the right calls and in just prioritizing what you need to do first and then what you need to do next a third thing link UX enhancements to revenue market share customer lifetime value increases and whatever else you would like to so many cases we find usability flaws we do a lot of testing we do we do a lot of user research and we decide that okay these are a few things that I would like to do to improve my user experience but what I'm proposing here is to link this these enhancements or link these whatever small or big they might be to something that would help the business grow or that would help the business step forward in a particular direction fourth thing highlight reduction so there are not only results from your metrics in a positive sort of a view you could also talk about different aspects that really helped your user experience in terms of getting a better net promoter score or talking about customer acquisition and whatever else but it is important to talk about the entire aspect of what you would like to highlight when you when you execute something or when you build something then you have predictive analytics so analytics is something that it's a tool that we all have access to but I don't think we leverage it enough and we have a little bit of a skill to analyze data a little bit of a skill to understand what you are showing and what has happened in the past is going to help you basically take bit better design decisions and basically help you understand what the business problem is and it is a possibility that your business stakeholders themselves are not doing this but just by doing this small little thing is going to help you a lot the reason I put this which is a well-known fact and most of you must have seen this but the reason I put this is to basically reassure you that at the end of the day if you design something that makes your user experience better it is going to help your business it is going to help you it's going to help your business stakeholders but the way you do it and the process in which that you do is not just design driven but also very should be very business focused and should be you should be in a position to understand what's happening on the business side and then take a decision so how do you align your UX goals with your business goals and you could have your own process and if you see at a high level this is sort of your design thinking process where you analyze then you have a definition phase then you have a collaboration phase you have prioritization phase and so on and so forth but this is something that I've put together based on my experience it could be different for you but this something that's worked for me so first is understanding business objectives so step one I see 80% of the people fail because why should any business team involve you in their objectives or in their goal setting or in their vision right so there is a high chance that they're going to say this something that's probably not needed for you just focus on getting this feature done or this requirement done but the secret here to understanding business objectives is to demonstrate ROI is to demonstrate your impact is to show something tangible that's the only way they're going to start taking you seriously that's the only way you will get access to a lot of this business information which many designers today might not have in your own company second is to define clear and measurable goals so setting clear goals is easy but how do you set up a goal which is clear and measurable and we spoke about this measure the right thing and know how to measure it and continue to measure it for a long time there are very few metrics that would probably give you immediate results most of them take a long time to give you the impact that you need to give then collaborate with them have a shared goal motivate them to be a part of the process motivate them that this goal is going to get you to where you are and I have been in cases where I've been able to influence my business stakeholders to include some of my goals as a part of their goal setting framework because there is a direct impact to their ultimate goal which is usually ring to sales engagement or revenue then you have prioritization and developing a shared vision which I think we all know about then aligning your UX and business KPI so this is important whenever you design something you have a KPI for it but will this KPI help the business get future funding or get more freedom for you right so this this could be important in that sense and seven is basically demonstrating whatever you've done so far and eight which is something that we all love to do and which we do every day is continuous validation and reputation so my thinking where business and UX come together it's all about innovation growth and competitiveness so let me quickly touch upon it and see if that adds value to it so first thing is innovation and if you've been a part of any large companies you would have seen huge teams that are completely focused on innovation and here are a couple of things that you could do to improve your user experience and be innovative in the same process for the betterment of your business one is by solving real-time problems and rapidly prototyping them I think rapid prototyping is a lost art these days although you have these great amazing tools that really help make things quicker for you back in the day when we were just catching and doing paper prototypes it was a huge hassle but even with Figma and sketch and whatever else it's still I feel we are not tapping into that great tool to show the quick value and to show something that's real I don't think there are so many professions that can immediately convert an idea into something tangible and show it immediately to their stakeholders the second thing is explore extraterrestrial plans and this the reason I say this is because when you get into a team there is immediately a boundary drawn around you you are just in that boundary focused on one particular flow focused on one particular product focused on one particular platform and whatever else but it is important to sometimes step out of that it could be if you're working in some place for a long time that could be a comfort zone but get out of it look look around see what others are doing see how the industry is functioning see how your domain works and look at things that are completely out of your picture and see whether that could add value to your business the third thing is solving some of the significant problems your business faces so our user research process generally revolves around customer needs and customer pain points but it's important to also understand some of the problems the businesses faces and these problems generally do impact the UX teams and the design teams so before it impacts us it's important to understand what they are and maybe look at how you can add value there and how you can solve them lastly we're talking about AI today the whole day and yesterday and we're going to be talking about AI tomorrow and probably going to be talking about AI next year so there is a very clear pattern here where the user preferences and behaviors are completely changing just like how we say Google it I've heard people say look it up on chat GPT or whatever the other AI tools are so preferences are changing so if you're going to go to your business stakeholders for some funding or for you know convincing them about a particular thing and if you're still behind you have clearly not understood where the business is headed or if clearly not understood what are the issues the business are failing for a facing and this could be something that defines how well you do things and this could be something that clearly defines your user experience the second thing I would like to talk about the one was innovation which I just spoke about the second thing I would like to talk about is competitive advantage this comes in handy in almost all use cases whenever you create something new and to many UX designers when you speak about competition it's just about doing some simple analysis it's about doing some comparisons and it's about finding gaps or finding things that are missing between what you have versus what they have or looking at what you might have in the future and what they have right now that these are generally some comparisons that we made but building a competitive advantage is not easy and there are companies that have done this that have become huge success stories you know billion dollar businesses just because of one competitive advantage how you could do this according to me could be in these couple of ways one is to prioritize user satisfaction and delight so we have stages right we focus on needs first we focus on wants first and then we talk about delight if we have the time or if somebody permits us to think about it it's important to factor in delight in everything that you do and look at how you can give that additional bit of trust to your designs to make it have some edge over your competition so my point here is don't just look at solving the basic needs however small or big your project is or the problem is look at giving some delight to your users the second thing is to build recall and to have a sort of a unified expression of your brand so we all talk about design systems a lot right and I've seen products that have extensive design systems which is such a headache just to understand what the hell it is and how it functions but I've seen very few use cases where I've seen these huge design systems talk about values of their brand talk about the process that their brand was built through and talk about how they want to build recalls right and so on and so forth so it's important to understand those aspects and if you don't have sort of a great branding in place I think it's important to establish some facts before you go ahead and design something and that is definitely going to help you build a competitive edge third thing this is something that the reason I put this in is in many of our processes these days it starts with inspiration which is a great thing and they have been many great people who have stolen ideas and become huge successes but to all my teams I encourage them not to do that first I try and give them the time to experiment and fail just because I want to encourage fresher ideas I want to encourage crazy ideas I want to encourage failed ideas basically so I don't want people to build something similar to the next guy that is something that we always try lastly I spoke about AI previously it's very important to leverage that if you're talking about AI and you still don't understand what it is it's high time for you to at least understand some basics and understand how AI functions these days so what does good design lead to for the business at the end of the day and this is a proven fact again good design leads to higher sales higher engagement and higher customer retention but all this is possible only if you show it only if you show your business stakeholders only if you convince them that this has gotten you some positive impact for your company and this has helped you succeed so let me talk about some quick examples from my experience how we've done how we help some of our come from of our clients grow and how we were able to get some good business value out of some of the decisions that we've taken in the design process so this is a 5g platform which provides 5g connectivity for large-scale enterprises and there's a physical hardware aspect to it and there's also a software aspect to it what you're seeing is the software side of things so what we have done in this process which really helped this particular company have a competitive advantage and which really helped the business position this product in a certain way that they ensure success so one is we understood what 4 5g is we understood the domain we understood the metrics we understood how the system works and we on we also looked at other industry 4.0 technologies and we understood the entire realm of telecom and connectivity so that helped us align very closely with the business stakeholders the moment we started speaking their language they knew we were the right people to talk to the second thing 5g is still relatively a new field we are just getting 5g connectivity on our phones that are to the modern ones so it was important for this particular product to be future ready so we took in many factors while we designed this product to be future ready I don't want to get into the details I don't think we have enough time but it's important to understand where the industry is headed or where the company is going in the future and try to consider some of those use cases in your designs as well the third thing value added design and UX so when we spoke to when we spoke to them when we spoke to the leadership we spoke to them about not just design and wireframes and UI and all those things we spoke to them about how their product could be engineered in a better way which would ultimately give them a better experience to their end customer so it was not just UX but was also a lot of other things that we were able to add value in just because we understood what they were doing and where they are headed the fourth thing is a shared product vision we immediately got aligned to what their existing vision was for the company when they founded it and we continued to build on it so that was something that was very successful and lastly we worked very closely with their marketing team to help them project this experience as a great selling point so even today after a couple of years this is still one of the best user experience provided in in that industry there's one more use case so I planned is a will and trust platform only for the US market right now unfortunately but it helps you create wills and trust in a couple of steps right that's the entire product the first thing that we did with them was to conduct a bunch of workshops to establish a strategy and define it in a very very clear way and when you do this you obviously have a product roadmap you have a backlog and whatnot but what we also did was build a UX roadmap because we knew this is a very fast-growing industry there are a lot of competitors so when you're not the first you try to be the best right so we had a very clear road UX roadmap where we envisioned what the future state of our of the user experience is going to be and we really crafted it in a way that how many of our features you add or whatever you do to your product you will still have a great user experience and lastly we convinced them to invest in good branding and we showed them the real value so when they went to investors or they went to sell this to enterprises as a service right they were clearly able to appreciate the fact that this product although is new has a great trust factor to it which enabled them to buy quickly and buy easily just two things I would like I wanted to show today to establish some some facts based on the experience that I've had and to demonstrate a couple of the points that I've covered before in real time lastly looking ahead again I would like to highlight the fact that business of UX it's not just about helping your business grow or listening to the business or understanding their objectives and goals but it is about creating good design and good user experience at the end of the day so don't miss out on that or don't get too tangled up in this web of being business-friendly and forgetting what you do as a UX designer so that's it for me thank you and have a great day three tomorrow thank you