Julie Swanke recently founded her own consultancy company, Highline Digital. Previously, she served as a Digital Product Director at Target. She started her career at Best Buy working in voice-of-the-customer and digital analytics. From there, she worked her way up to Director Of Digital Product, Checkout & Profile before transitioning to Red Wing Shoe Co. Before her recent role at Target, Julie served as a digital general manager and creative services director at Panasonic North America.
In our conversation, Julie talks about the importance of prioritizing intuition and user-friendliness while building internal tools — specifically with the same due diligence you would consumer software. She shares best practices for building tools across different cultures and regions, as well as striking the right balance between prioritization areas.
I strive to create exceptional experiences for our consumers. Still, it is equally important that our internal tools and software are intuitive and user-friendly for team members and stakeholders. If the internal teams can’t be successful, we can’t be successful in delivering to our customers.
When thinking about retail specifically, consider an example in which you’re a consumer and you walk into a store. If team members seem unhappy, disorganized, or confused, something about the experience will be off. While maybe not as clear in the digital world, that same concept translates to guest experiences.
What specific tactics have you employed to ensure your business-side tools are as intuitive and customer-focused as your consumer-facing ones?
Just like anything customer-facing, I involve users and leaders as early as possible to gather insights from various levels within the organization.
From a leadership and strategy perspective, this means evaluating if there are any initiatives we can’t get to because there’s so much important, cumbersome work along the way. For team members, what are the day-to-day hurdles that keep them from achieving the outcomes that they want? I recommend doing ride-alongs and day-to-day work with users. You can’t uncover those things until you sit next to them. You’ll often realize that the things we want to solve for them may not be obvious in the existing software.
I also recommend the concept of minimum lovable products when building tools. It’s a great way to iteratively develop and create something that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It’s important to add lovable elements to anything you build, whether it be for consumers or internal team members. It’s easy for us, on the product side, to think, “Well, these people have to use our tools, but the process doesn’t need to be pleasant.” But if you think about it, if the tool isn’t pleasant, easy to use, and has some elements of lovability, there won’t be adoption.
Further, team member morale is just as important as customer morale and engagement, so applying some of that same thinking makes the change management and launching of new tools and processes successful.
In one example, we sat with users who were doing data entry and content development. We wanted to watch them throughout their entire day and see what they did.
We thought that when we’d sit next to them first thing when they started their day, they’d open the system to get to work. Then, we sat there for three hours as they did a bunch of other things and had yet to open the system. They were going through emails, spreadsheets, internal SharePoint sites, and Post-It notes at their desks, which told them what to do with a certain data point that drives the supply chain for a huge company. Where we thought our tool fit into their day was way off from reality.
Number one, I always go back to what the tools are that we would use in the consumer realm. One of the first things is to segment your user groups, both based on their goals as well as any other demographic or regional subgroups. When I’ve done that in the past, I’ve discovered hurdles that are unique to different segmentations.
For example, in some parts of Asia, I had a large user group with inconsistent access to the internet. If you’re building with the United States in mind, that’s almost unheard of. Once my team and I understood that as an underlying problem, we could prioritize the ability to work offline or save things in real-time upon entry. Those are things that would never be prioritized unless we understood the regional group.
Also, when thinking about user segments, you can start to unpack things. One thing I learned about is the cognitive load of being bilingual. People might be fluent in English aside from their first language, but their brain works in their native tongue. Often, even though they’re fluent, they need an additional 30 or 60 seconds to translate things in their head.
Just by uncovering and learning about that, we found that though translating everything might be cost-prohibitive, we could add toggles to field labels. That way, not everything being generated on the site is translated, but we could meet the users halfway to remove some of that cognitive overload.
One thing that I’ve observed in B2B software and internal tools is that people feel like it’s really hard to measure value and success. I strongly encourage teams to adopt OKRs and be comfortable with the fact that some of them might be tough to measure.
An example of how we’ve measured is the time to cost of setting something up. How much does it cost when factoring in the tools, the technology, and the time and energy spent by users to create something, be it a piece of content or data? We can start to measure the value of improving that efficiency. What’s the cost? Or what percentage of time are we on time for the deadline? What’s the value of being on time? If something doesn’t launch within an ideal period, how does that impact the business and the bottom line? That can start to provide value.
Another measure is in time to market. If you can’t get new items set up via a marketplace or into a system, then you can’t sell them to customers. So what’s the difference between getting something launched into your end customer in 30 days as opposed to 24 hours? And then how do you do that at scale? When you start building out those numbers, the business cases become even more valuable.
I’m also a fan of NPS and system usability scores. There have been tools that I’ve started with embarrassingly low net promoter scores — so much so that I won’t even share them! It’s amazing when you start to understand just how strongly the users feel.
Lastly is adding automation to team member tools, whether that be from feeds and APIs or GenAI. You might find you have a new capacity to do things that are even more valuable for the customer.
AI is a great way to do this. At the end of the day, our company’s initiatives around generative AI making things more personal for users are controlled by the merchandising teams. To be successful in creating these next-generation customer experiences, that data and content need to be augmented in a way that can handle that. The only way you’re going to be able to do that is by improving internal tooling and applying GenAI to those ecosystems.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that GenAI is going to create everything new. It’s really about augmenting team members with GenAI so that they can be the human in the loop that creates the competitive advantage, all within the data and content that drives the customer experience.
I always go back to the OKRs. Having clear OKRs that you’re driving toward is imperative. It’s also important to give autonomy across regions. You never want one region to feel secondary to another. In that way, and I would argue this is for remote workforces as well, you have to figure out how not to lose those hallway conversations where people feel like they can interrupt and ideate. You have to be explicit in setting up time for informal discussions.
In that same way, I’ve leveraged technology. I would often say to my global partners and direct reports, “Slack me at any time. I will never answer if it’s in the middle of my night but pretend you walked by me in the hallway. I will never judge your spelling, your phrasing, or the quality of your ideas in every Slack communication you give me. This is our hallway conversation space.” Being conscious and thoughtful about creating those spaces enables the freer flow of ideas.
To begin with, you’ve got to lean on the regional experts. How people engage with technology and the overall culture is very different. I feel like I’m stating the obvious, but truly, it’s so different. I recall a time when I was working across the US, Europe, and Japan. At the time, Japanese digital experiences were very flash-heavy and the people there liked to read a lot, whereas, in the US and parts of Europe, that wasn’t true. Instead, there was more reactive content — less copy, more visual, and more video.
So, we couldn’t have had the Japanese team push that ideal experience onto our European and American audiences. It would’ve failed, and vice versa. You’ve got to listen to your stakeholders.
In one instance, there was concern that how we were building the European and the American experiences would be negative to the branding from a worldwide perspective. So, we did a study and showed the different experiences to the regional audiences and asked, “What’s your brand perception based on what you see here, there, and the other?” It ended up being neutral, and sometimes neutral is good.
Just like anything in the product landscape, it’s all about prioritization. Is there a region that’s a priority? Is there a business goal that’s shared across a region that’s a priority? What tech debts exist? Are you all greenfield? Do you need to fix tech debt first to move forward? Those are the core questions that help you balance it.
There could be an instance where, at the end of the day, the number one priority is the business in this specific region, but you want to keep the business in the other regions at the same speed. If you have that in the framework of your priorities, you can prioritize things for the number one region, but perhaps what you prioritize also benefits the regions that you want to maintain.
That’s how you need to balance it. You have to communicate that in a line. It can’t be a secret. That’s what I’ve observed so much throughout my career — any time there isn’t transparency around real goals, there’s strife.
I partner with technical experts and believe what they tell me. Having deep technical conversations about what the needs are, as well as explicitly not deprioritizing what the tech team is telling you is important, is crucial.
In general, I’ve observed that people get so excited about features. That’s what gets the board’s excitement and stakeholders’ excitement. People tend to run toward those things, but if the underlying ecosystem is built on sticks and duct tape, those features won’t last long. You’ve got to make sure you’re giving space to the tech teams to truly build at scale and the right data to know what’s needed so they can build at scale.
One thing I’d also add that might be helpful is having resourcing for product teams split by a percentage of maintenance. That way, you never use all of your capacity on new feature development. You have to use some of your capacity for the ongoing maintenance and good hygiene of the systems.
A quarter of the population is running towards AI, but a quarter of the population is running away from it. GenAI has been around longer than we think, but with ChatGPT, it now has a UI that lay people can engage with.
I have heard a lot of people say, “Oh my gosh, GenAI is going to replace product people. We’re not going to need engineers anymore.” It’s healthy to have conversations about these types of fears and directions. I like the quote that says, “GenAI won’t replace you, but you could be replaced by someone using GenAI.”
My suggestion to friends and partners is to start with GenAI helping you in your personal and professional life. Start to play with it and learn how it can help you. From that, you’ll start to understand how it can evolve your user experiences. At the end of the day, we’re going to have these huge leapfrogs where all these big ideas and concepts are going to accelerate. I hope that, as an industry, we build toward the customer and bring in new technology to support what the customer needs.
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