#169 - User Experience Design: The Key to Creating a Sustainable Business Moat - Satyam Kantamneni

[00:01:04] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hey, Satyam! Welcome to the Tech Lead Journal podcast. So thank you so much for your time here. Looking forward for our conversation.

Satyam Kantamneni: Likewise, Henry. I really appreciate being here.

[00:01:13] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Satyam, I always love to ask my guests to first maybe share more about yourself. If you can mention any highlights or turning points that we can learn from, that will be great.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely! So I’ll introduce myself. I live in Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been here for now close to 20 years. Worked with a lot of different firms, inside the firm as well as supporting a lot of the firms through my consulting services. Personally, I have a background in engineering, design, and business. So obviously that is what my passion is also, is the intersection of all three: technology, design, and engineering. That’s basically, uh, what I’m working on these days, and that’s been a fun area. So overall that’s my introduction on a high level. Anytime, love to talk about, you know, how design can drive insane business value.

[00:02:35] State of UX and Design

Henry Suryawirawan: So you have been in the design and user experience kind of a background for quite some time, right? So I think you also wrote a book called User Experience Design. So first of all, maybe, since you’re in the Silicon Valley, right? Can you share with us the state of, you know, user experience and design in this part of the ecosystem, right? Is it like becoming one of the top most priority for many of the startups? Tell us more about the state of the design.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely. I think to understand the state of anything, you need to understand the history of something, right? And if you really look at where the history has been, it was predominantly web, which is like informational. And from web, it went to mobile. From mobile, it went to cloud-based, meaty systems that people interact and do their job on. And now, obviously, the advent of AI, it’s kind of becoming even smarter. But each of these stages, as technology has evolved, technology has become more and more pervasive. So everything around you or around us is technology now. And there’s so many choices for each of that technology.

So if a product is not easy to use, people will throw it and move on. And right now, for everything, you have like 10 options for email there. We have got 20 options for a CRM tool. We have got 30 options for picking up and reading a book. There’s just so many ways that you can do that. If the experience is not thought through from a user’s perspective, and it’s not easy to do, if it’s not desirable, it’s not useful - people will just move on. And which is why it becomes very, very, very important how today’s state is that if you don’t build a product that’s easy to use, you basically are screwed as a business.

So the state of the business is many organizations understand it and they are actually evolving and adjusting to it. But it’s unfortunate that many businesses are still not doing. And they’re just getting caught unaware and losing a lot of the market share. I have seen companies that I looked up to that no more exist now, like 15 years back later. I’ve seen companies that just came from nowhere and today are like doing really well, and they’re just thinking about what problems do we solve for the user and so on, so forth. So, to answer your question, as technology has become more and more pervasive, experience has become more and more important. And what I see as a state of how the place is right now is if companies don’t think of the experience, then users don’t think of the company.

[00:04:51] The Gap for Being User Centered

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I think it’s very interesting when you said organization understands it, but still many are not doing it. This is also probably my experience, right? Because I’m sure everyone understands about the importance of user experience, user design, lovely UIs, and things like that. But still, many, many companies, like you said, right, in practice they don’t invest a lot in it or maybe they don’t know how to invest. So in the first place, why do you think this is the case? Is there something like lack of skillset or still lack of understanding? So maybe in your experience, what could be the reason?

Satyam Kantamneni: Like anything in life, you have to be very deliberate about things. You have to really spend the time thinking about how am I going to institutionalize this in my organization? And being user centered is very similar. For being user centered, you need the right people, the right mindset, the right processes, and the right environment. And any one of them, if you don’t have, you can mitigate it, right? I’ve seen organizations which have all the smartest user experience people that you can get, that money can get, you have good process, but you don’t have a good environment where they actually kind of able to kind of drive that. And then again, you get to a mediocre output.

On the flip side, you may have a great environment, a great team, but a bad process. Again, you’ll end up at the same place. So those are the basic challenges of becoming user-centered as a system. A good user-centered organization has the right people, has the right processes around their people, have the right mindsets in the organization, and has the right environment. And what do I mean by environment? It’s a very broad word. Like many organizations are scared of experimenting. Scared of trying to see like, what if we did this this way? If somebody has an idea in an organization that, hey, what if we tried it this way? It should happen already. It should be done.

The cost of experimentation today is literally close to zero, because you can build anything today with the stack that’s available in the tech world. And literally, overnight. I mean, if you want to create a mobile device app, people can really get motivated and do that over a weekend. Any mobile app, I mean. So if people are not able to experiment fast enough, that environment will never move forward. And that’s kind of what I’d say, that’s one example of an environment. The same way you need to have a good process where you get user data in. You need to be able to synthesize that data. You need to be presenting that data. You need the right people presenting it, and then talking about it, and curating it in an organization.

So there’s all these nuances that go into it, but the basic sense is still very much I want to be user centered. And yes, I need to talk to users. Yes, I need to understand the users, and I need to then operationalize that. That absolutely is the basic sense. I always compare this to being fit. Everyone agrees that being fit is a culmination of a few things. But then if some people join the gym and say, I’m not getting fit. Some people say I’m sleeping a lot, I’m not getting fit. But fit is actually a multivariate thing. And every person, what fit means is different. It could be sleep. It could be a genetics. It could be your diet. It could be the exercise you are doing. There’s so many things that have to be done. And that’s when you get fit. And it’s different for every person, but the fact is it has to be a deliberate process.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So I think what you call out mindset, process, people, and environment, you formulize that as a business value by design, right? So thanks for sharing that. We’ll cover a lot more about the mindset and things like that. But I think what you’re saying just now about environment, right? I can actually understand your thought process, right? Many organizations actually don’t experiment a lot. Somehow they are trapped into this mindset of, yeah, just build something, you know, a technology solution that solves problems by some features and just roll it out as if like that’s the only version that they roll out. So I think that’s a very interesting insights that you just gave.

Satyam Kantamneni: To your point that you just shared, right, I say good design is like playing a video game. You had to fail a few times before you win once. And you can’t just build a feature and say it’ll work. You’ll build a feature. Your user will interact with it. Some will reject it. You optimize on it, then you build on it, then you build on it. That’s how you get to perfection. And it’s not like, hey, I got the requirements. I engineered it. I built a feature. And then suddenly it’s working well. Never happens. It only happens well in like someone’s fantasy book.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. And that’s why it’s imperative to be more Agile, more nimble, right? And do a lot of experiments. And I think what you mentioned in the book also is very insightful, right? So the key word design itself, right? It has to be deliberately designed. It’s not something that just one time you can just come up with like the grand design and you’re done, right?

[00:09:09] Experience Value Chain

Henry Suryawirawan: So in your book you also mentioned three aspects of user experience value chain. Maybe if you can elaborate a little bit more about these UI, UX, and XT, that will be great.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely. So again, one of the question I often get asked by a lot of the leaders that I work with is, what is the value I would get for being user-centered? And immediately people’s reaction to the word design is, oh yeah, it needs to look good. It needs to be desirable. It needs to look sexy. All the words that go with high visceral products. But then when you start studying it, and as a student of businesses, as we start studying it, there’s three levels of that value chain.

And so I wrote that in the book as a experience value chain. If you wanna build great experiences, you can build a screen, which is a UI level experience. You can build a product, which is a product level experience, what I call PX. And then you can build an organization with an experience centric perspective, which is called XT, which is you’re thinking about the whole ecosystem that kind of goes around it. You are not only thinking about the experience in terms of how my product works, you’re also thinking of the experience in terms of if someone called customer service, if someone would call professional services. Everything has to be thought through. It’s a cohesive experience.

You are in Singapore. And then so Singapore Airlines, I’ll give that example. An airline experience is not the website. Airline experience is the cabin crew. The airline experience is the food you eat. The airline experience is how the particular desk is designed. The airline experiences is how your baggage is kind of given to you in the end. All of those are experiences. And ecosystem wise, everything has to be thought through. Any airline cannot say, oh, the baggage got broken because somebody else handled it. That’s not great experience. You have to think about every facet of the experience. And that’s why you see some airlines doing better. They will actually think of the experience from the time you get out of your door, there’s a limousine waiting for you to the point that you get to the airport.

So when you think of that, that’s experience transformation. That’s a transformed organization. Then you can obviously build a product. Then you can build a UI. Many people just get stuck in the UI and say this is experience. Awesome, great. And then they immediately within a year realized that the competitors have caught up to them, and they’re caught unaware. Organizations that are experientially transformed, it’s very hard to compete with them. Very hard to compete with them.

Obviously, our research says that only 5% of the organizations have ever gotten to that level and when they have the difference is insane. And I often ask this in many of the topics that I talk about. I say why do you think that Apple is 10 times more valuable than Samsung, even though Samsung makes everything that Apple makes and more? And the secret is only in the ecosystem. Apple owns an ecosystem. It’s not that they have the best product on the market, but they own the ecosystem, where literally it’s very hard to get out of the ecosystem.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! Yeah, I think that’s really, really insightful as well. Apple versus Samsung, right? So funny enough, when you mentioned about airline case, I actually have a personal bad user experience with an airline, which I won’t name, right. So it’s just like I couldn’t log into the website. Every time I tried to log in, it just kicked me out. I tried to call the customer service, they asked me to wait like five to 10 business working days. And even until today, it’s been like, I don’t know, like more than half a year, it hasn’t been resolved. So I am kind of like giving up. So I think that kind of ecosystem experience that you mentioned, right, it is actually very, very important. It’s not just the technological solution, right? And it doesn’t mean ‘looks good’ means like a great user experience, right? It’s something more around it.

[00:12:30] Moving Beyond Just UI

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned like user interface, right? I think many companies if we talk about design, yeah, they start thinking UI. It has to look sexy. But it’s never enough. So how do you think companies can start moving beyond just UI?

Satyam Kantamneni: See, I think the simple secret to that is follow your user. So most times, a UI is a table stakes. You need to build good UI. If you don’t, then don’t be even playing that game, right? So like if you’re playing on a soccer team, you need to be able to kind of kick the goal. And if you’re not able to kick the goal, don’t even play the game. UI is that. UI is table stakes. But then how do you think about the product? How do you think about the experience, the journey of the user in your product? Where do you know the pain points are? Understanding the pain points, that’s kind of when you build an awesome product.

I work with organizations where the same organization is building three or four different products for the same user, because they’re four different use cases. I work with organizations that have acquired a lot of companies, and they don’t think about what is the seamless experience, and then that user is getting product one for one use case, one product two for use case two. That is crappy experience. And so when you start thinking about that higher level. And sometimes, in fact, I’ve often told this to a lot of the leaders I coach. I say the best experience is having no UI. You should not be creating screens.

And that’s kind of the mindset of, yes, if I have to create a screen, I’ll create a beautiful UI. Can you actually get the UI to go away? Can it magically just happen? And that’s a better experience. That should be what a product is doing for you or kind of solving a problem. And then when you do that in an organization level, that’s kind of the value. Know your user. Know the journey. Know the pain points. Know what exactly is happening with them. And then keep experimenting around solving those pain points.

One quick test for being user-centered or not is actually something I often talk about. If anybody, any business leader out there should just find four random people in their company and ask them these four questions. Question number one is, who are our top users that we care about? Question number two is what are the biggest pain points? Question number three is what exactly are we doing around those pain points? And question number four is how do we know whether you solve those pain points when we solve it? First thing is you’ll realize that all four people may have different answers. And then in case if they have the right answers, that actually means you’re already in a place where your product, your PX and XT at this point. And that’s foundational problem is like many people don’t even know that. And because you don’t know that, you actually say, okay, I’ll just give more screens, more features or more products to them. And that just doesn’t help anyone.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow. I think a very good litmus test, four different questions, right. So maybe just to recap. Who are your top users? What are their biggest pain points? I think many people will trip here, because I’m sure people will come up with different biggest pain points in their priorities, right? And then are we doing something to solve those pain points? And the last is are we actually solving those kind of problems? So maybe for you, listeners, do ask around maybe four random people in your company or team and make sure that you get the same answer.

[00:15:30] Trinity of Collaboration

Henry Suryawirawan: The next level you mentioned is about product experience, right, or product UX in this case. Many modern startups or organizations these days have a product engineering team. Is that sufficient by the way in the first place or is there something else that is required to become more PX?

Satyam Kantamneni: See, I think PX is product experience. Yes. Product engineering, product management, product anything are facets of a good experience overall. You can have a really good design and workflow, but if it’s not engineered, it’ll not work well. And that’s kind of the big difference between that. So you effectively, I’d say that to build an awesome product, you need a good engineering group, you need a good design group, and a good product management group. All three have to work in unison and kind of drive things forward. In fact, I call it the trinity of the collaboration in my book. And sometimes we also call it three in a box, that they all three have to work together.

Now, product experience is constantly thinking about what is a user’s problem? How do I solve it? What is the best experience, etc? And if I can address that and how will that look like if it’s addressed in the right way? Product engineering is looking at like, how do I solve it with the best technology? How do I make this work? How do I build it the fastest manner possible? Because if it takes three years to build that, that’s also not good. So you are experimenting. With a product management is looking at how do I get it to market? How do I build the right go-to market channels? So you effectively a good product to go to the market has to work really well with those three aspects and all three are pushing on each other.

So the diamond here comes because the pressure of the three teams. And the conflict is actually good. So it has to be collaborative and with healthy conflict. And all three are fighting for those, and that’s where good products come. And then you constantly are evaluating and addressing it. The engineering team is evaluating and addressing how to optimize the engineering side. The design team is optimizing on like, how do I keep getting better and better for the user? For marketing is looking how do I get better and better in terms of market, pricing, marketing, everything else. So that’s kind of is where all three are working together in unison.

The best analogy is they can have a beautiful architect who’s building a building. But then if the contractor can’t deliver, that’s also not useful. Or you can have a really expert contractor or engineer but then you don’t have a design that actually will stand apart, that also is not good. That users love. And they’ll go, they say, okay, if I’m just buying a three bedroom apartment, I just buy it with this. But then it has to be useful, usable, desirable. So all those nuances exist. But anyway, so the pressure is on all sides. You asked me a question I threw in the product management part to it too, but that’s kind of the trinity of success.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So I think the healthy tension, healthy debates that you mentioned is really important. Because I think many organizations would probably have more tensions rather than a healthy tensions, uh, in my experience, right? So sometimes they even operate in silo, right? Where design will come first, you know, throw it over to, you know, product. Product will just throw it to engineering, and engineering will throw it to the user, so to speak. So I think the healthy tension is really important.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely. And that’s exactly an example of a bad process and a bad environment. So again, if you don’t have healthy tension, that’s a bad environment. If you don’t have the process where how you’re handing off, how you’re collaborating with each other. Because throwing it across the wall and saying, I’ve told you and I’m the designer, “build it because I told you” is a crappy process. And again, many companies that do that will not go further. This is again to the point of people, process, mindset, and environment. You start seeing the trend of how companies get successful or not.

[00:18:58] 3 Levels of Experience

Henry Suryawirawan: Earlier you mentioned something that I think are really interesting, right? The best user experience probably is the experience with no UI. And I think in your book you also mentioned the technology that works the best is technology that you never even notice. So tell us how can this trinity of collaboration come up with something like that?

Satyam Kantamneni: See, I think any problem solving should be looking at, I would say, three levels of solutions. One which is like magical. One which is like immediately doable. And one which is in between. So magical is like what would a user or your constituent say, wow, man, they have thought about this. You need to prototype that. You need to think about that, because that is what a North Star for every product is. Companies like Apple made that their focus. And so they moved there. Now there’s some companies that don’t want to focus on that, they wanna focus on the medium. But majority of the companies say, okay, what can I implement fast and get out there? And through that process, you accumulate tech debt. You accumulate experience debt. But the point is, okay, you do the immediate solution of where you are. Because anytime you do healthy tension, that’s kind of the trade off. The trade off is, can I build it fast? What’s the best experience, etc?

I was talking to someone the other day about banking experiences in Asia, more so in South Asia. Banking experience in Asia prioritize security over experience. They will spend more time making you change your password than actually trying to figure out how exactly can they give you financial information in a way that you can be more financially literate as well as financially more effective in terms of increasing your wealth or whatever that is. And because that’s the priority that they have put, they have looked at themselves. Again, if you put a bunch of compliance people around an experience problem, that’s how you’ll get solutions on that level. But my question is, any of these banks, do they even have an experience somewhere in their process, which talks about what would the magical experience be for their constituents? And many companies don’t even have that. Because in the pursuit of what can I solve today, they don’t even have a North Star. And when you don’t have a North Star, you’ll not get anywhere.

So again, to your question, you need to kind of have all three. You need to prioritize between all three. And when you don’t prioritize something that is mid or high in terms of the quality of experience, then put that in your backlog as an experience debt and then keep solving it. But you need someone to curate it, track it, review it, and get there. And again, it takes discipline as anything else. And, uh, if you don’t do it, you will not get anywhere.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I think what you mentioned magical experience, right? I think it all comes back also to understanding your top users and their biggest pain points, right? And try to solve that through the magical experience. If you don’t have a unified answer for this, I think it’s also difficult to come up with that North Star magical experience.

[00:21:40] Experience Debt

Henry Suryawirawan: And you mentioned this term experience debt, right? I think all engineers, most of my listeners come from engineering background. We all know what is a tech debt. We know how to track. We know how to actually solve them. But what is actually this experience debt? How can we track them and how do organizations actually manage this debt?

Satyam Kantamneni: it’s the same way as the tech debt, right? So what I call experience debt as in simple terms is every time you are giving a user a subpar experience, whatever you have not given them, you need to put that in your debt list. And let’s say for example, creating a login experience and I’m making you sign security questions as part of that. But the best magical experiences that I just know who you are through whatever the ways I can figure out. I don’t even ask you for a login, I’ll just log you in. Maybe biometrics. I just look at the camera and I immediately get you in. I’m just giving, that may be the magical experience.

So the delta between a magical experience to me kind of signing up with security questions and a second factor and everything else is experience debt. You put that in that bank and say, I’m not giving the magical experience to this user. It’s gonna sit there. And with that will also be a prototype of how that would look if we build it. And sooner or later you need to know how you’re gonna do, how you’re gonna catch up to it and build to it. Because in today’s world, where technology is getting more and more and more powerful, a disruptor just needs to kind of come and build that. And once you build that, then it becomes a norm.

And the biggest challenge of a hyperdynamic world that we live in right now is today’s magical experience is tomorrow’s expectation. Today, no smartphone gets shipped without a touch screen. But think about it, touch screen was like a 10 years, 12 years back, touchscreen was just started. Today, one year from where we were, AI is kind of big. I would say in two years, no workflows will exist without a AI component to it, right? So today, it’s magical. Tomorrow, it won’t be. So we have to constantly – engineering, design, product should constantly be ahead of the game, trying to figure out how do we solve the problems for the users. And whatever we are not doing, we put that in the experience debt.

And the good thing is as technology becomes more and more powerful, you just go back and say, yep, this magical experience which took three years last year can now be done in less than half an year. So let’s go do it.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think this is a very good elaboration of experience debt. So maybe for people who haven’t thought about having this debt or the tracker for it, do think about your best magical experience versus your current situation now. And I think if there are possibilities with your technology or maybe some kind of process that you can define in order for the users to experience that magical experience, I think that will be one of the debt that you should track.

[00:24:16] Experience Transformation (XT)

Henry Suryawirawan: The next level of your value chain is actually the experience transformation, right? You mentioned about organization, understanding about ecosystem not just the technology. So how can organization move beyond product experience, right, PX? And this trinity of collaboration into something that is more organization-wide level.

Satyam Kantamneni: So again, it’s just a more macro view of how an organization works. So let’s take how today’s organizations are run. Today, a traditional organization has a Chief Executive Officer, CEO. Under the CEO, you have a Chief Marketing Officer. You have a Chief Revenue Officer. Maybe a Chief Technology Officer. Maybe a Chief Customer Officer who kind of runs customer support as well as customer success. That’s a traditional organization in most terms. But then who’s making sure that all of them work together? And no one is. Like the CEO, the poor CEO has to do everything and also make sure that customer support works as well as customer success works as well as product works as well as my sales.

But today, sales does their thing, marketing does their own thing, and that’s kind of the silos of where things are. So in a experientially transformed thing, the organization has a vision of where do I want to take the user, where my vision is kind of tracking, and then every department works together to make that happen. And that’s kind of where you really spend the time. And then experientially transformed organization, not only you build awesome products but you build the ecosystem around the product as an experience for your company.

This is when you start looking at, again, giving an airline example. You’re thinking about like, hey, who are the transport companies that actually bring passengers to my airport? Let me go think about that experience. It could be like, when a passenger gets down in a late night, they actually are in a 14 hour flight or a 15 hour flight, how do I make sure that they have the best experience when they get the baggage? Or are they waiting there and like, it’s not my headache, it’s the airport headache. So these are things when you start thinking as an organization, because everybody is now being held accountable for the experience, and they are thinking of every facet and every piece of the experience.

I’ll give you an example. Disneyland or Disney as a company. Obviously, Disney runs a lot of theme parks. And theme parks is often used by kids. And as young kids who are getting excited with all the things around them, they get lost. Now every cast member, that means every employee of Disney, has a practice and known experience called the Lost Kid Experience. A kid gets lost. Parents get frantic. They get panicked. They’re like, oh, my kid’s lost, my kid’s lost. Any cast member or any employee of any of the theme parks, they have a process where they say, okay, fine. Gimme the picture of the kid. They broadcast the picture to their known phone line. And then immediately, you know, their cameras, their technology, everything kind of then looks for where the kid is. Nine out of 10 times or 99% times, you know where the kid is within 10 minutes because there’s so much technology that’s coming together. But they are completely the way that, the tone they’re talking about, where the kid is gonna be put when the kid is found, and maybe they’re playing with some character, those are all thought through. And that is when an organization is highly experientially transformed. Because many other theme parks are like, okay, the kid got lost. Okay, everyone’s panicking, including the cast member. And that’s not healthy.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Speaking about Disneyland, right? I think, in your book, I also got new insights, right? So the sound that you hear in Disneyland is kind of like consistently the same kind of level, right? I think in your book you mentioned like it has been well researched, the distance between one speaker and the others. I think that is a different level altogether, right? And I think you mentioned about every different touch points that user actually interact with you. It could be with technology. It could be with people, right? It could be with anything, right? The touch points have to be thought through and well designed. I think this is a key for organization to move beyond, to become an XT kind of organization.

[00:28:04] XT & Business Moat

Henry Suryawirawan: And I think you also mentioned the concept of having a good XT means a good business economic moat. Maybe if you can tell us a little bit about this with some statistics in the business world.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely. So the business moat is actually a concept that Warren Buffet talks about. Warren Buffet, for those of you who don’t know was the world’s wealthiest man if he did not give his money away, but is a very smart guy in the financial world. He talks about investing in businesses that have defensible moats. And defensible moats are things that are very hard for competitors to kind of copy and kind of move forward. The big thing that we’ve realized as we started studying businesses that are actually leveraging the power of user-centered or user experience as a strategy is that they actually build an awesome moat because they’re competing with the users. They’re constantly trying to get better and better and better with the users. And when you start doing that, and a whole organization comes to that.

See when a whole organization comes, that means your hiring is right, your processes are right, your environment is right. Now, how can you copy all of that overnight? So for a company to be creative, they have to really kind of start from the foundation. And so now that becomes a moat. But let’s say, if you created a beautiful UI. Someone can copy that in a matter of months today. That is not a moat. A moat is when it’s so defensible that no one can just get through it or they had to put an insane amount of effort to get through that.

Now, statistically, that’s kind of where the companies have kind of evolved to being highly experientially transformed. These are companies like Tesla. These are companies like Apple. These are companies like Airbnb. These are companies like Zappos, which actually think about, you know, a lot more about the user and then build that as part of their DNA. In fact, Zappos before they were acquired by Amazon would actually say that everybody who joins the company, irrespective whether you’re a VP, Senior VP, or somebody who’s joining as a customer service agent, all of you have to take customer service calls for the first one week. Everybody has to build high empathy for who we are servicing whether you may be also a finance person or you may be a product person or you may be a person that’s looking at facilities, it doesn’t matter. You need to know your user.

And that is what an XT organization looks like. And that’s what customers are willing to pay a high premium for. And that premium is actually where, again, back to my point is like, you know, why is it that a company makes not as many products as the other competitor, but still 10 times more valuable? And there’s an answer to that is because you actually are, have built a significant moat that is hard to kind of scale.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think many people are now in this digital transformation mode, right. So I think in your book you mentioned digital transformation now has become a must. So introducing technology into your business process and things like that. But experience transformation is something for you to work so that you can thrive, right? Because it will create this defensible business moat and it will increase your value even though you may not have that many products or that many features in your system, right? But actually the experience will give us more value in terms of solving our user’s problem.

[00:30:58] PragmaticUX Playbook

Henry Suryawirawan: So one of the main thing in your book is you call this a PragmaticUX Playbook. And I think your company UXReactor has been doing this for many years and it has also won many customers and also awards, right? So maybe can you elaborate first, what is this playbook all about? How can you actually use that in order to maybe more experientially transformed?

Satyam Kantamneni: So when you are trying to transform an organization, you need to have a few things clear, right? One example like how do I know that what my users want? How do I know I’m building the right product? How do I know I have the right team? How do I know I have the right metrics? So there’s a lot of how do I statements that come together. As we started solving this for a lot of our customers, now again, I’ve been in this line of work for close to 22 years. As we started solving these things, we said, how do we make it in a way that is replicable? So again, when I was in grad school studying my master’s, my professor said something which is like your data doesn’t mean anything if no one can replicate it. And I’m like, okay, that’s profound. And I’m gonna remember that. And the same applies today. Our process doesn’t mean anything if somebody cannot replicate it.

So that’s what we said. Let’s create plays for everything. Like what is a play? What are good research insights that a business should have? So we created a play for what’s a portfolio of insights. You should have formative insights, which is like constantly knowing where your users are going. You should have summative insights, knowing that am I building the right thing? And you should have sensorial insights, which is like, I’m always sensing where my experience is at any given point for my user. And so that we call it the portfolio of insights play.

And so like that we created a bunch of plays while I continue to run UXReactor. That’s our overall process, is how do we institutionalize this? Because there’s only one UXReactor in the world, and there’s no way we can support all the clients we want to support. So we said, let’s kind of put this into a system so we can create this system so it’s easy to replicate, easy to kind of deliver, etc. Then overall, the conversation came like, oh, this is still not fast enough to kind of spread the word and how to kind of drive business value by design. So we said, okay, let’s write the book. So we took 27 different plays. And so this process of curating all this different plays, we call it the PragmaticUX process. So the PuX process was foundationally a way for saying that how can we be pragmatic while we are approaching a problem? How do we create a play around it? And how do we institutionalize it?

And then 27 of them is what we wrote in the book as saying if how do I statements all the way from, like, how do I build a roadmap, to like how do I do user research, to like how do I build a customer centric organization or an experience transformed organization? So these how do I’s became their own plays. But that is all part of this replicable process that we run at UXReactor. Because we should not be doing any process at a firm like how we run at the consulting firm here. That is only one and done, right? It has to be one done and replicable. That’s basically the construct and the philosophy of the PuX playbook. And part of that playbook is what we wrote as the book.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for, you know, writing the book, right? There are 27 plays, so for you guys who want to improve your user experience or experience transform your organization to check out this user experience design book by Satyam, right? There are 27 plays. Again, there are so many things that you can maybe first research, study, and how to implement that in your organization. So I think this is very, very, insightful.

[00:34:14] PragmaticUX Mindsets

Henry Suryawirawan: That play is mostly about process, but I think in many organizations the most difficult part is to change the mindset. And it touches not just one person’s mindset, right? It’s like collective mindset of all the people inside the organization. And in your book, you mentioned a few mindsets that people need to have in order to be more user experience driven, right? Can you share us what are those mindsets? How can we inculcate that in everyone’s minds?

Satyam Kantamneni: Before talking about the mindset, we studied problem solving overall. And when you talk about user-centric problem solving, unfortunately, people confuse that with just design. And so we said, if you really want to do, which is what my firm UXReactor do, we foundationally are problem solvers with a user-centric mindset. And everything, we approach it. Any problem is like, who’s a user, what’s the problem, let’s understand and drive that. But we said that takes what we call a polymath philosophy, which is they need to be students of different domains and they need to be able to kind of think about it a problem from a different perspective.

And as we started studying it, we realized that you need five mindsets for you to be an effective problem solver in the user-centric process. The five mindsets that we call out, and I call this out in the book too, which is you need to have a experience mindset. You need to have a design mindset. You need to have an outcome mindset. You need to have a business mindset. And finally, you need to have a systems mindset. I’ll elaborate each one of them very quickly. And why is it important?

Experience mindset is you are always in a process of thinking, how do I create an experience? And one test I say is like, you know, I can tell someone to create a login screen or I can tell someone to create a login experience. A login screen means you’re designing a screen. A login experience means I have no screens. And the mindset shifts. And I always, I coach a lot of the people that I work with. I said start using the word experience in your vocabulary. And you start adding that suffix of experience in anything. You may say I’m creating the report experience. You will act differently or you’ll think differently. Don’t say I’m creating a reporting screen or reporting dashboard. Say reporting experience and then you can think through that. That’s an experience mindset.

The second thing that I talk about is the design mindset. A design mindset is, as I said, you need to be thinking like a video gamer. I need to experiment. I need to build the first prototype. We need to test it. A design mindset is like I rapidly sketch, I rapidly iterate, I rapidly build. I’m starting to build something. And I say show me something. Start acting. Don’t talk about it. Design something. Build something. That’s a design mindset. And if you don’t build it, then you’re just a concept.

The third thing is an outcome mindset. What impact do I want to bring when I do this? If you do not know the outcome, or you could talk to a hundred users, but did you really understand what actually makes them win or not win? If that, again, talking to a hundred users, this is one of the mistakes I see a lot of product managers make. They say, I spoke to users. But did that help you drive an outcome to build a scalable product? Or did you just talk to the top two customers that actually spend the most money with you and then you just went and spoke to them and say, I’m being user-centric? No, that’s not user-centric. So again, outcome is I want to build a scalable product, and that is outcome mindset. So again, you need to constantly be thinking of outcome, not the activities. Until your outcome is achieved, you are not sleeping or you’re not giving up on that. That’s kind of overall the outcome mindset that you have to kind of put in into your process.

The last two is business mindset, which is like, how is this gonna drive business value? Higher adoption, higher retention, higher satisfaction, higher engagement, right? Whatever it is, you need to know very clearly, how is this driving business value? Just because it looks good, it feels good, it’s the right thing to do and doesn’t drive business value is also of no use because we all get a paycheck and economies depend on business value. So we need to make sure that we are constantly doing that. And that’s one of the mistakes that many designers make which is like they’re so focused on the desirability that they forget on the usefulness and the effectiveness as a business.

And the last one is actually a secret that many people don’t understand is being system centric. Think about the forest before the trees. Many people get to the trees really fast. Oh, I’m gonna build this feature. I can tell you I had a workshop a couple of weeks back. And immediately everybody’s like, okay, what do I build? What requirement do I write? Don’t figure out the details before you figure out the system. And the system is way more important. If you understand the system, the forest will actually tell you different things than the trees themself. And many people jump into the detail like what screen do I build? What feature do I build? Like first more foremost is how does this fit in the ecosystem? What is the ecosystem? The system is very important.

And that is when you bring these five skills together, that’s when you can become a very powerful user-centric problem solver. And so when we recruit, when we groom around these five mindsets, and when these mindsets are leveraged well within an organization with the skills of the right design methods in the right environment, that’s again when you drive insane business value by design.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! I think it’s a very, very good mindset, right? And I think it’s really hard to achieve to have all these five. But again, like what you mentioned here is very insightful, right? For example, like using keyword experience instead of screen or UI. So I think many people still kind of like in this mode, what screen do I need to build, what UI looks like, right. So I think change that with experience and systems thinking is also very important, right? Don’t just build more and more features, but think about simplicity. In your book, you mentioned build simplicity instead of introducing more complexity.

Satyam Kantamneni: And one thing I always share as when I share these mindsets, it takes a lifetime to master these. But it takes you a minute to be mindful of these. And I say start your journey from being mindful about it and understanding that am I actually thinking the system or am I thinking the business? Am I thinking the outcome? And then take your lifetime to master this. The people who will master this will actually end up being the Steve Jobs of the world or the Enigmas of the world, or the Elons of the world. The people who actually are getting mindful of that are actually in the right path to be a problem solver in a user-centric manner.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think that again is very insightful. Be mindful about it, right? It takes just maybe a few seconds or a few minutes, right? But mastering it will take a lifetime.

[00:40:14] Organization’s Empathy

Henry Suryawirawan: So another thing that you emphasize a lot to become user-centric is actually have empathy. Again, empathy here sometimes is just viewed from a lens of a person. But how can organization have more empathy towards their users instead of just having empathy from the individual point of view?

Satyam Kantamneni: So as an organization, again, it’s an environmental variable. For an organization to be empathetic on the user. Not only do you, first of all, you need to kind of have the data, share the data, and keep repeating the data. That’s kind of how change happens, right? So for example, in organization, if somebody is joining the company today. Same thing. I’d say user play out of the Zappos playbook and say, put them into listening into customer service calls for the first week. And that’s how they get hyper empathetic. Maybe even at the end of it, get them all together and say let’s solve a problem and then take an idea that… so within the first two weeks they have already kind of thought about the user. They have ideated around it, they have come up with a solution, and you have already experimented and installed it. That changes the velocity of innovation.

But again, the fact is you’re thinking constantly of the user. And as I said, for an organization to do that, they need to incentivize it. They need to have a process around that. They need to make sure that people are given the time and the benefit. Just because you are in finance or you are in some other tool doesn’t mean that you don’t have good ideas. How do you bring other people together around those users and talk about how to innovate around them? That’s when an organization really is kind of driving the value. I would just say again, first, knowing who your user is, putting the data.

Many people join a company not even understanding how that product is gonna get used. What are the pain points of that user? They’re just like, okay, fine. I’m building a product for doctors. Okay, but do they understand the journey of a doctor? Most times, no. It’ll take maybe two, three years before they kind of get there through their own mistakes and learnings. But do we really need to spend two, three years to get there? Maybe they could just observe a doctor for a day. Now, in one case, we actually created videos. We created material. We actually put that as part of somebody’s onboarding journey.

Now, today’s world, as the world is getting hyper distributed. You may have people in Singapore, India, Malaysia, Ukraine building products for somebody in the US. Or other way around, somebody in US building products for Egypt or some other place. But for that to happen, you need to understand how that works in that local environment. And for that, you can’t send the whole company to those countries. So how do you extract that? How do you present that? So this is where an organization can actually become highly user-centric and then incentivizing around that, right?

I often say that many companies talk about releases. Any company, oh, we are good. We released this feature. We have released this. We’ve released that. And my question to them is how do you know that you actually have built a better experience from last quarter to this quarter? And they have no idea. If revenue is not a measure of user’s experience, revenue is a measure of your business growing well. But maybe users are just tolerating your bad experience because there’s no other alternative. Until alternative shows up and then you’re gone. So again, that’s kind of where if you have the measures, organizations that are empathetic to the user, measure the user, track that user, highly communicate around that user, that’s kind of when you truly become hyper efficient.

[00:43:24] Getting User’s Feedback

Henry Suryawirawan: When you said that right. I think many organizations have this NPS, you know, user feedback, or customer support rating, right? I think that’s not enough definitely, right? What can we do more in order to get this continuous feedback from our users?

Satyam Kantamneni: So I think NPS is a good model, right? But again, how do you get consistent feedback from users and consistently talk to them? Consistently extract that data. The other day I was talking to a CEO. He basically instituted this process in the product where he’s now getting, in three months, he got 27,000 feedback from his users saying that this is what they like, they don’t like. And they wrote it and it was integrated in the product itself. And he has a dedicated team that looks at that data, synthesizes the data, and their new product requirements just comes from that. That is user-centric. Then you actually have NPS, which is like, you know, your likelihood to recommend. Absolutely, that’s one more data sent.

Data side, you’re getting your data from your customer service. You’re getting your data from your sales. All that data has to be curated into a single place and then synthesized in a way that you can effectively learn. Think about where your user’s going. Obviously, today with AI tools, you can make that magical. You can actually synthesize a lot of these things really fast and kind of come back with what are my top priorities, top focuses. And once you have your top priorities, you need to have top experiments that you’re running around that. So again, it’s all interesting aspect, but you need to have all those listening posts. You need to be curating from those listening posts. You need to be tracking them. And then making sure that you’re solving it and solving it in a way that the user’s experience goes up.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So it’s a cycle at the end of the day, right? Not just collecting but also sharing it, understanding the insights from it. Build it, you know, solve it, solve those problems, right? And again, iterate back again. So I think the cycle is really important here.

[00:45:04] Tips to Get Started

Henry Suryawirawan: For many organizations or teams who aspire to be more like what you just mentioned and they don’t have access to UXReactor. Maybe tell us like how can we start any kind of skill set that we need to build or any kind of person that we need to hire in order to fulfill this experience transformation?

Satyam Kantamneni: I would say the simplest thing is start with the user. As I said, the four questions I gave which is like, do you actually know who your top users are? Do you know their top pain points? Do you know what you’re doing? What you are doing about those pain points, not someone else. And that’s kind of, I being active around the user is different from others being active around the users. And then how do you know that you’re gonna measure the success? I think that’s a simple mindset that allows you to quickly understand, how am I making a difference to the user? You could be an engineer, you could be anyone as a matter of fact. And then if you start understanding that, then you have good conversations with your peers, with your leaders, with your partners, everyone else that you kind of work with.

And that shift automatically starts doing that. When you start thinking that, am I building a feature or a feature experience, that’ll also start bringing that shift in how you think about it. Knowing that, you know, hey, what experiment can I run very fast, is also a good mindset because think about it. Who actually is doing it? The engineers are doing it. And so if you can quickly kind of ideate and build a solution around something. Who else can do it? You can do it. And when you do that, you effectively have built it in such a fast manner that you can test it out really well. And then if it works, then go for it and build and double down on it. But these are all simple things that can effectively start making that macro changes. But I strongly would say that being user-centered is more a mindset before it’s actually a process.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think everyone can start with that kind of mindset like what you mentioned, right, the four questions. And also the thinking in your day-to-day job, how can you become more user-centric, right? And not thinking in terms of features or UI screens or even like, for example, releases, right? So always have this user-centric mindset. Thanks for that. And if you want to have more advanced techniques, do check out Satyam’s book, right? User Experience Design. There are 27 plays that probably you can leverage on.

[00:47:10] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So Satyam, as we reach to the end of our conversation, thank you so much for your sharing by the way. I have one last question that I would like to ask you which is something that is mandatory for all my guests. Usually I call this three technical leadership wisdom, but I guess we can also call it design leadership wisdom. So maybe if you can share the three wisdom them that you have for us today.

Satyam Kantamneni: I will repeat what I’ve already shared, which is kind of just to be consistent. You know, when in doubt follow the user. Many companies follow competitors. They say, oh, they are doing it, so we should do it. Don’t do that. I mean, you can do that once or twice. Do it because your user cares about it. You’ll always get to the right answer.

The second thing is experiment the heck out of everything. Build it, test it, iterate on it. Don’t sit there. I had a mentor of mine who said this a long time back and this stayed true to me. If it came to your mind, then why have you already not done it? That relentless urgency of experimenting, like why are you just sitting and thinking about it, just do it. Get on it.

And the third piece I would share is obviously always know what your vision is. Where do you want to take this? What’s magical for your user? If you don’t know what the North Star is for your user, you’ll be dabbling in the details. Again, you’ll be dabbling in trees without understanding the forest. But know what a magical forest looks like. At least, have a vision. At least, think about it. Spend some time on that. And when you do that, automagically, everything starts coming together. Again, we call it the law of attraction. When you know what vision you have in your mind, it you will get there sooner or later.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Also share it with more people, right? It’s not like, just like for example, one Steve Job, you have a great vision, but you never share it. Or you don’t ask people for feedback, right? I think that’s also probably very important, right. So sharing it with your people, with the organization, that magical experience and try to make it happen.

So Satyam, if people love this conversation, they wanna reach out to you or ask you any questions, are there any places online that they can reach out to you?

Satyam Kantamneni: Yeah, the people can reach out to me so many ways. Again, LinkedIn. Send me a mail, whichever way. This is a topic of my passion as many people already have realized by now. Again, I think the world needs a better place one experience at a time. So absolutely.

Henry Suryawirawan: All right. Thank you so much for your sharing today, Satyam. I’m looking forward for having more organizations and teams become more experience-centric and user-centric.

Satyam Kantamneni: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Henry. It was really a privilege.

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