Justina Cho is a marketing and product leader with over 20 years of experience driving growth and transformational change within the financial services industry. She started her career in consulting, working for Deloitte within its CRM practice. From there, Justina has been at Citigroup, New York Life Insurance Company, and Fannie Mae. She is passionate about the customer and champions a customer-centric culture within her teams and organization.
In our conversation, Justina talks about the importance of customer journey maps and best practices for creating them, including making them visual and accessible across different teams. She discusses how she leverages ethnographic research and infuses it within the organization and shares an example of a time when she used data to move her company in a different direction.
One of the main differences I’ve seen is that in large, well-established companies, folks across different teams may not always have a core understanding of what product management is and the value it brings. Conversely, those working at startups generally have a strong product mindset or orientation.
I’ve found that the key to setting up product orgs in large companies is education and awareness. It’s about helping people understand the core components of product management, because this is not always well-known across the different teams within matrixed organizations. You can do this by hosting roadshows, overviews, or simple PowerPoint presentations and trainings. While this might not cover everything, it will help ground people on the fundamentals of product management and also introduce common language or verbiage. It can also help identify key roles within the team and ensure role clarity.
The second thing I would say is it’s really important to articulate your strategy and vision. In large organizations, making sure that people know where they’re headed energizes them and aligns them toward a common goal. Once everyone is aligned, the product org can help the team march toward that vision. That might take time, but it’s crucial.
The last thing I’ll mention is the importance of executive buy-in. When you’re starting something new in a large organization, it’s necessary to have alignment with key leaders within the company as well as cross-functional teams. Product organizations have so many intersections and reach across so many different areas that without doing this, it will be hard to move forward in getting the org set up.
From my personal experience, the educational component hasn’t been a simple playbook that I can take and reuse. Every organization is different and my approach varies based on the maturity level of product management within the company.
One time, I did a roadshow overview that was meant to be “product management 101.” It did not resonate with the audience. I took a break after that to think about trying a different approach. Since the more academic version of the product management overview fell flat, I decided to try something different that might resonate better with my audience.
I knew that prioritization, resource allocation, and road mapping were important levers to those stakeholders. I held another product management overview using these topics, and that helped bring everyone to the table. Ultimately, it’s important to remain flexible and be able to pivot when needed.
The work product teams do is very cross functional. It has to integrate seamlessly with teams like technology, engineering, business, marketing, sales, finance, and more to make an impact. To do that, all teams must have a shared vision around the work they’re doing to drive business growth and they must align on OKRs. Having a product and customer-first mindset within the culture is important.
My approach has been to include stakeholders from different groups across the company from the very beginning. In large organizations, stakeholders need to be on the entire journey with you. Because these teams tend to be matrixed with people from a lot of different areas, it makes you — as a product owner or leader — stronger because you have the support from all those other internal orgs. It also gives you more velocity as you’re trying to set things up and hopefully helps remove obstacles sooner than if you were just doing it on your own.
Who gets more of the capacity to do the work is always a healthy debate. We’ve talked about giving leaders a set capacity level at the beginning of the year depending on their group’s priorities and how they ladder up to the strategy. Leaders can reprioritize capacity with one another as needed.
It’s also helpful to maintain transparency around what is available, the timing, and what can be done. As a leadership team, there should be honest and open conversations about trade-offs.
I’ve commissioned ethnographic research when the organization is embarking on something really new — when we need to understand the full landscape of what’s going on. When gathering this research, I make sure that we have crisp criteria of the customer segment we’re looking to reach.
Once the research is complete, it’s critical to infuse it within the product management process. I believe a really effective method is to share as much of the raw interviews or anecdotes with key stakeholders across the organization as possible. Doing so creates the opportunity for employees to know what it’s like to sit in the actual seat of that customer and understand their sentiments firsthand. That moves people. I’ve been on calls where employees become emotional while listening to customers because they didn’t fully realize some of the challenges they were facing. It’s a powerful perspective.
At one of my prior organizations, we heard about the struggle that many Americans experience in buying a home. We listened to the financial difficulties they faced, how the process was unclear, and how many of them were unable to access certain resources. It was really tough to see fellow Americans struggle through that.
As an organization, we felt empowered to find opportunities to help. We were able to provide resources online to assist people in different parts of their housing journey.
Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool to understand a potential customer need. You can identify moments that matter where you can lean in to support a customer on that journey.
An important component of building these maps is making them visual and accessible across different teams, not just your own. I’ve gone through many iterations of what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes they’re too academic, or sometimes they’re in an application that not everyone uses. Keep it in a place where colleagues can easily access it so that people can constantly refer back to it.
For opportunities identified through the journey, you have to figure out where it can fit within the product roadmap. You have to size it out, see where it ladders up to the strategy, vision, or OKRs, and prioritize it within the roadmap.
You can also take a test-and-learn approach where you say, “We’re not going to go all in on this right now because we’re fully committed for this period.” Testing the capability to a small group is an easy way to get insights and traction.
One of the most effective ways to present these findings is on an easy-to-use, interactive interface. The map is created so that it includes the perspective of certain personas that make up the customer segmentation. I’ve used smiley faces to show when something is working well and sad faces to indicate friction. This makes it much easier for different stakeholders within the organization to digest. I also like to include features that are more user-friendly compared to a linear process map, like double-clicking on an area to show the details.
There was an initiative I was working on that was fundamentally going to change the digital experience for customers. The experience had many elements to it that were important to different stakeholders and business units across the company. Many colleagues were hesitant to make changes to this experience, as it was a vital element in meeting the business goals of their specific organizations.
I assessed and gathered data to figure out the current state and performance of the experience. I looked at web metrics to see how things were performing digitally and used tools like eye tracking to see what was working and what was not there. I also used heat maps to see where all the activity was bundled and took feedback from real customers and prospects. The current state assessment showed where there were places to make things better for the customer.
I leveraged all this data to propose a different approach to the current experience. This included functionality, features, layout changes, and a different creative and feel. Using data propelled me to get support from all of these key stakeholders and leaders in different groups who were holding on tight to the previous experience. The data showed them that there was an opportunity to do more and do better.
I launched the new digital experience, and it was favorable. Sales targets for the organizations increased, as well as brand sentiment. The data was the most important factor in helping move the organization in a different direction.
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