Mobile First

Laks is the co-founder and former CTO of Zenefits. Since the company's founding in 2013, Laks has led and helped expand Zenefits' business, which serves tens of thousands of companies. Prior to Zenefits, Laks served as a software engineer at SigFig and as a project leader at D. E. Shaw & Co.

Keith Krach has served as chairman of the board of DocuSign since 2009. Krach started his career at General Motors, becoming the youngest vice-president at age 26. He later co-founded B2B commerce pioneer Ariba; took the firm public in 2000. By the end of his tenure, Ariba had reached $34 billion in market capitalization.

Tony Ball is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Business Unit at Entrust Datacard. He joined the company in 2016 to provide leadership, global strategy and innovation for the access control and authentication solution segments. Ball has deep industry knowledge and previously served as president of IAM for HID Global. He has held executive roles at HID, Gemalto and Schlumberger Technologies where he began his career with over 20 years in multiple leadership roles across the globe. Ball studied finance and business at Bournemouth University and completed the International Institute for Management Development executive leadership program.

Mr. Roth leads Dignity Health’s innovation efforts, which seek to create and test novel services, programs, partnerships, and/or technologies from within and outside of healthcare- that challenge the status quo and have the potential to reduce the cost of care, improve quality, and/or increase access to services. Working in concert with Dignity Health employees and physicians, Mr. Roth works to anticipate emerging trends and technologies with the goal of incubating, studying, and scaling efforts to improve care.Mr. Roth holds a Masters degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelors degree in Public Health from West Chester University.Mr. Roth regularly advises venture capital organizations and co-manages Dignity Healths Strategic Investment Fund.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

As Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Upwork, Hayden leads the product and design teams and oversees the company’s product across desktop, web and mobile. She is an expert in product strategy, innovation and fast-paced execution and revels in breaking new ground on challenges at the intersection of product management, product design and business management. She leads a team of 30+ product managers and designers in developing a product that enables freelancers and clients around the globe to work together in a new model that is radically changing the hiring and job-finding paradigm from a chore into a delightful and instantaneous experience. Learn more about her perspective by viewing a recent article she wrote on Medium about how businesses can outsmart the talent war by tapping into the independent workforce online. Hayden holds an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University.

Trey is the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

Our GuestTrey is the Chief Product Officer for Mood, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Trey is most passionate about solving the retail challenge today with technology. This entails figuring out how to engage with consumers in a meaningful way – how you do that in the most efficient way, how you create that connection, and how you use technology, most specifically mobile technology.. When he was a kid, Trey wanted to be a National Geographic journalist and go take pictures around the world and write stories. He realized when he was in college that this may not be able to get him money, so he got a degree in Finance. He started his career at Accenture where he got to learn software development process to solve business problems. Trey joined Mood Media as a consultant to help with device strategies but ultimately joined full time as a technical product manager. They take content -- whether its video or audio-- curate it and deliver it to lots of different systems and his role was to figure out the platform component of it all. In the last couple of years, he focused more on being on the shadows and internally-facing to support what’s in the market and take ownership of the product. As a kid, looking back, it was all about telling stories for Trey. He loved to write and take pictures and ultimately, that is telling stories and he shares that it’s the same now in the media company; it is still just about trying to tell stories. But what gets him excited is using all these technologies to create that story, that experience.Mood is the world’s largest in store media solutions company whose goal is to create greater emotional connections between the brands and the consumers. They do this by using sight (video digital signage), sound (audio, music), scent, and social and mobile components. Mood had recently done a visually stimulating study entitled “The State of Brick and Mortar in 2017” which embodies a lot of the company’s learnings. What interested him most is the data showing that people want assistants so we need to augment technology so that associates will be provided with better tools. Trey’s biggest learning lessons include not looking outward as much as they needed to which resulted to development of products which were simply wrong. They learned the hard way that if they wanted to develop something new, they have to have conversations with consumers.Network connectivity was also one of the bigger challenges that they had to overcome and speed, supporting different devices and platforms are things which they are trying to hone in on.

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Oji Udezue is the head of product for Atlassian's communications products, which just launched its first new product since IPO: Atlassian Stride. A product veteran with past roles at Microsoft, Bridgewater Associates, Spiceworks and his own startup, InterMingl, Oji is passionate about bringing new scalable products and ideas into the world. He mentors startups with a focus on companies with diverse founders, and drives startup investments in Africa as a passion project. His ultimate goal is productizing functional telepathy but for now will settle for transforming how teams and the people in them, communicate and process social data at work.

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Our GuestJeetu Patel is Chief Product Officer at Box. He leads the company's overall product and platform strategy, driving Box’s long-term roadmap and vision for cloud content management in the enterprise. Previously, as Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform at Box, Jeetu led the creation of the Box Platform business unit, overseeing product strategy, marketing and developer relations. He grew the team from a nascent product to a revenue generating business line and key element on Box’s overall suite of offerings. He also led corporate development & M&A strategy as well as Box for Industries.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:The thing that drives Jeetu more than anything else is the extent of impact of his ideas and projects that he had done. People spend a lot of time at work and their team’s mission is to ensure that people’s lives at work get better –there’s less friction, teams are more productive and dreams get attained. Jeetu grew up in India and come over to the US at 19. They were wealthy before but his family had gone through hard times. America has given him a break and with the help of mentors, he had the realization that whatever he has his mind on, can come to pass. These experiences had molded his way of thinking and drive him to look for the following characteristics in people that create a level of tenacity and success: a degree of curiosity of how things work, the ability to drill things down to the core and the most important of all of them, a hunger to fuel the passion.Box is a content manager company whose mission is to power how the world works together. Everything they do is around content: managing content, how content participate in business workflows, how you share it, how you collaborate around it, how you secure it, how you get value from your content. This started with a problem of taking large files and transferring them from one person to another as they are working on projects. Their solution was a system in the cloud which allows people to seamlessly share and collaborate and over time they delivered and built it to the enterprise. Box has a three-phased approach on problems:First phase is where they incubate an idea. The goal during this phase is to identify a problem that’s big enough to solve and come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market. After this, you maniacally focus on the product market fit. The second phase is identifying a repeatable selling motion, and once this is established, begin to scale. Don’t try to scale prematurely, that is for phase three.Get your product market fit first, get those flagship 10 customers, identify the successful, get a repeatable selling motion then scale. Don’t do it until then. In finding talent, you have to have a good mix of people who has experience and the right potential. You can’t just have people who are high on experience because as you get more experience, you become a liability as you often get overly prejudice in your views and your experience of your past. You will then have to spend time unlearning the patterns of your past. So ensure that you are hiring people who are extremely capable and have experience in the right areas but do not over index on experience only as a fresh mind can challenge the status quo much more so that someone who is already tainted on how things work. Also, keep the size of the team small as they will spend their time actually doing the work done and not coordinating things.Jeetu also differentiated power users and marginal users and advised to focus on the latter so you can go out and drive growth. You have to deeply understand what the marginal user wants and how that might be very different from what the power users want, and you have to make trade off exercises between the two. When you are going out to determine market fit, look at your power users. But once you get past product market fit and grow you user base, make sure there is heavy emphasis placed on the marginal users and the way you build out their capabilities. Jeetu also shares one of the powerful concepts that their organization has constructed which they have been doing to more and more of their teams. They brand this with a code name PEAPOD: Product Manager, Engineering, Analytics, Program Management, Online Growth and Design. QuotesWhen that lightbulb goes off, a world of possibilities opens up for you. It’s just a matter of ‘Oh, now, I can decide to do anything that I want to do because as long as I want it badly enough, I can go get it”. Failure wasn’t an option.Great leaders tend to be simplifiers. They drill down things to its core essence.The three things that I look for the most from the people that I hire: Are they hungry? Are they curious? Can they distill it down to moments of clarity which create tremendous amount of inspiration for people?Come up with a solution that is meaningfully differentiated in the market. Do not have a solution that is 20% better than someone else has. If it’s not at least 10x better than what is available in the market, the chances of people moving to that solution is slim. One of our cardinal rules that we use internally that is very counter intuitive is, start by doing something that don’t scale so that you can sustainably scale.Don’t try to scale something prematurely. The quality of the problem that you end up picking is directly proportionate to the success that you are going to have in solving that problem. The harder the problem, the higher the likelihood that you will succeed. As you get more experienced, one of the things that become a liability is that often times, you get overly prejudiced in your views and your experience of your past. The best work gets done when you have a small team.The single most important thing that you need to have is hunger. If you got the right level of hunger, you can move mountains.Rapid Fire QuestionsWhat is your definition of innovation?Innovation is building something that’s ten times better than what’s available in the market.Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?One of the people I work for once said to me, “Strategy is super important but I’d rather take a mediocre strategy with excellent execution rather than an excellent strategy with a mediocre execution.” So, I would go as far as 70% to 30%.What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?Don’t overcharge for your product. Leave some on the table and give customers more value than what you have actually charged for. This keeps that customers coming back.Don’t hire people who are not hungry. You won’t win.What is your favorite business book? The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben HorowitzWhat is your favorite app? Facebook WhatsApp Twitter Mail Browser

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Our GuestNate Fortin has served as the Vice President of Design at Evernote since November 2015, where he leads the team responsible for delivering user interface designs, providing user experience education, driving seamless experiences across product lines and supporting design thought leadership and execution company wide. Before joining Evernote, Nate was a Senior Director at Motorola Mobile Devices in Sunnyvale, California, where he drove user-centered design practices, high quality design execution and cross-functional design management through the conceptualization and creation of innovative and compelling experiences for Motorola mobile devices such as the widely acclaimed DROID™ by Motorola and the Moto X family of smartphones, as well as the Moto 360 smartwatch. Prior to that, he was the founding Director of the Visual Interaction Design & Branding practice at Cooper, the pioneering user experience design and strategy firm. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Design from the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Nate has a fascination for digital product and digital design and how this intersects with making things to solve problems. He grew up in a small town where it’s mostly trees and John Deere tractors and his love for design started with his interest in art. He did not see a career path in art but he saw one in graphic design. He went on and learned the basics and soon enough, the small town boy became immersed in the digital industry.During his time in Motorola, he became involved in big projects such as developing the droid experience and bringing it to the masses; and Moto X which was a shift in philosophy at that time as to how we thought of the mobile device. What captured Nate’s interest in Evernote is his belief that Evernote’s vision is powerful. How to extend the brain to work smarter and succeed in a world where information is the epicenter of everything we do, this challenge is what excited Nate and got him here.Evernote, at its heart, is a product which allows you to create, capture, nurture, and turns your ideas into action. The problem that it is trying to solve is the idea of information overload and our inability to tackle this problem on our own so that we feel more organized, productive, and ultimately, successful. They serve about 220 million users all around the world. Their team is responsible for all the product experience in Evernote. To accomplish their mission, they have to be where ideas and information are and they are very platform agnostic. Mobile is the game changer for them and when he joined the team, the first thing he looked at was mobile experience, particularly in iOS. He wanted to make the product more accessible to more people so they started talking to people who used the product and from there, developed hypothesis on how they can improve. They go in with a hypothesis but they focus and observe with the goal of proving themselves wrong rather than finding data to support their notion. You have to commit to this as Nate shares that this is the key to the process. This led to a series of experiments and a lot of learning experience for him and the team. Outcomes from this included a dramatic shift in engagement to the content and they considered this as a great gain.The nature of mobile is changing and becoming broader. There are new inputs and products coming into the market for voice and host of internet of things products, for example. This makes mobile ubiquitous and this changes the game. The development in mobile is exciting for Nate as she shares that this is an authentic way to further their mission to bring people back to being in control over the information and ideas in their lives.

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Our GuestStephanie Tilenius is the Founder and CEO of Vida Health, a next-generation digital therapeutic and health coaching platform for chronic physical and mental health conditions deployed at Fortune 500 companies, large national payers and providers. Prior to starting Vida, Tilenius was with Kleiner Perkins Canfield & Byers, where she worked primarily with late-stage KPCB portfolio companies, with an emphasis on companies in the Digital Growth Fund. While at Kleiner, Stephanie invested in Nextdoor and MyFitnessPal. Prior to Kleiner, Stephanie was at Google, where she was vice president of global commerce and payments, helping build and launch new products and platforms including Google Wallet, Google Shopping and Google Express. Prior to joining Google, she was at eBay and PayPal for nine years, and in her last role was SVP of eBay.com and global product where she helped lead the eBay Marketplace turnaround. Prior to eBay, Stephanie was VP of Merchant Services at PayPal where she built the off-eBay PayPal business from the ground up into a multi-billion business. A co-founder of PlanetRx.com, she has also worked at Intel, AOL and Firefly. Stephanie sits on the public boards of Coach Inc. and Seagate Technology.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Stephanie is passionate in making an impact in other people’s lives and doing the things that matter. Everything that she had done in her career had affected millions of people and improved lives and now in Vida, she is focusing on health care and eradicating chronic conditions, which is a real problem in the country.She had worked with eBay, Google and PayPal and her experience in building products and platforms from the ground up and reimagining how things are done during her time with these companies had helped her in her current work in healthcare, which, in some ways, is one of the last industries to adopt consumer-facing technology. Vida is an app service for managing your health. They match you to a coach, a nurse or a health expert, and a digital therapy program, to work in the area that you are most concerned in. They cover both mental and physical conditions and programs focus on concerns such as diabetes, hypertension, weight loss, and smoking. They use machine learning to personalize your programs to help you succeed.Stephanie shares an example of a mobile experience of one of their customers, Jenny, which led to great results. Jenny is a 49-year old, mom of three who lost 80 lbs. in 8 months. She had diabetes, cholesterol and hypertension and found profound benefits from Vida.The new movement today is that health care is being self-care. People are now trying to track their behavior in a more holistic way than they have done in the past and this is very beneficial compared to the traditional way wherein you only get one reading per year during an annual physical exam. Vida is connected to the most popular wearables and anything out there which will enable you to monitor your health. They connect to other apps as well so they can integrate your data into one place for your coach to see. The benefit of this is for your coach to personalize your experience and help you achieve your goals by knowing everything you are doing. This day-to-day insight helps people make the right behavior change and make decisions.Pure execution and scale, just like other companies, are one of Vida’s challenges. Things get more complicated as they scale so they continue to get customer feedback – from onboarding, retention, engagement with their coaches and programs, the use of different features inside the app – and just continue to iterate. They note that they should be mindful of population profiles and their use of the app.Building a two-sided market place is always complicated and one things that has been tough for Vida is balancing the supply and demand. In addition to this, they have to have tools for both their users and coaches so this is twice the work versus other apps.

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Our GuestLisa Schneider is Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, where she is focused on strategy, product & content development, technology, and user experience. A lifelong word nerd who understands why words matter, she is thrilled to bring Merriam-Webster’s mission to life across all devices and screen sizes, anytime, anywhere.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Lisa is most passionate about problem-solving and collaboration. Problem-solving is finding out a way on how to make something better for someone and this can include the usual challenges that a project manager encounters such as finding a technical solution or solving a UX problem but can also encompass solutions for opportunities found within the organization. Collaboration is what makes problem-solving possible. This means including people, being able to recognize when a good idea comes along, having diverse teams, and we combine these, you will be able to come up with good solutions as well as support people.She was a huge bookworm and could not believe that she will be given a degree from doing what she likes, which was reading books and writing about them, so she jokes that this was the reason why she pursued having a BA in Literature. This curiosity and openness to learning was what enabled her to look at things in a different way and to transition to being the current Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, as many people know, is a dictionary company but not a lot knows that they have a robust digital footprint. They have about 300 million page use a month and most of this are from mobile. Definitions continue to be their core product but they have redefined their mission to better reflect who they are and why they do what they do. Their mission now is to propagate their rationale of the English language and to help people better understand language so they can better understand and communicate with the world.How do words make their way to the dictionary? Lisa emphasizes that as Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, she cannot get a word into the dictionary. There are rules and they are descriptive not prescriptive. They do not sit around and decide if a word is good enough or what it should mean, it is not a judgment call. They describe a language is actually used and to do that they follow evidence and have rules that a word has to have widespread, sustained, meaningful and organic used. They collect citations and these are considered data. Merriam-Webster has been data driven for almost 200 years. In the past when they were just putting out prints in hard copies, they do not have data on how their dictionaries are being used. Now that they are online, they are now able to track usage – what words are being looked at, when and how often. They did a complete website redesign which was more responsive, has more features, just something where people can go to have a good experience. They also worked in unlocking the company’s cultural personality which was inherent to the team members as well as focused on their trend watch feature to get real time insights on what’s hot and what’s not. This led to Merriam-Webster’s effective mobile presence.With their new engine in place, their social media following grew to a fun number – highly organic and very engaged. It is a vanity KPI which they celebrate but it is really important to understand what really will impact the business. They value clicks to their website or the build-up of the habit of preferring and trusting Merriam versus other content when doing searches as this creates a virtual cycle with search engines. This is where the real ROI is and they are watching these numbers.

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Our GuestCharlie Cole joined TUMI in 2015 as the Company’s Chief Digital Officer. In this role, Mr. Cole is responsible for overseeing and developing the brands’ national and international e-commerce and digital platforms. Since Samsonite’s acquisition of Tumi in 2016, Charlie has also taken the role of Global Chief eCommerce Officer for Samsonite Corporation – which includes oversight of global strategy for brands such as Samsonite, American Tourister, Hartmann, Gregory, High Sierra and others.Mr. Cole brings a mix of entrepreneurial and institutional knowledge to the Company with success in both fields, and a focus on creating structures to empower creativity driven by energy and objectivity. Prior to joining TUMI, Mr. Cole held various leadership positions, including serving as CEO of The Line, and head of e-commerce for Lucky Brand and Schiff Nutrition, the largest acquisition of a VMS company in the history of Wall Street.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:The thing that gets Charlie excited is when you enable people who think very differently to align in solving a problem. Your teams are only as good as how you can get people to think creatively, technically and analytically. The best teams have a way in getting the best out of each other while still encouraging those divergent ideas. Being the person in the center of this dynamics is what gets him excited in a day to day basis.Charlie has always been good with numbers and had a type A personality, a combination which he considered dangerous. He can look back on instances wherein he was the problem which caused the dynamics not to develop. He learned that overpowering people with just one area of expertise (in his case, analytics), will not arrive with the best answer. His arrogance drove him, broke him but ultimately, humbled him. TUMI makes the best products in the world. It is their job to help people perfect their journey whether it is across the world or from your house to subway to office. They make products across this ecosystem. They are known for their luggage but they also make amazing backpacks and electronics. They are the leader in premium travel equipment. As Chief Digital Officer in TUMI, his team is assigned in online merchandising technology, operations, marketing and wholesale. If you are touching TUMI, the brand, in a digital sphere, then they are probably in the nexus of that. Two years ago, TUMI’s margins were really low so they took a look at the data which they had a ton of (30 – 40 years’ worth); they went back to the roots on why their customers fell in love with them in the first place, what drove their product value, and what caused that momentum which drove them to where they were before they took the downward turn so that they could incorporate some of these thinking and ideology into the digital shift that they were gearing into. The bigger formula which led to a lot of TUMI’s success included understanding the device, the marketing medium and the visit. From here, they segmented and personalized to get into deeper ways to connect with their users. Charlie also talked about their three core buckets: messaging, attribution and performance which are derived from understanding the bigger customer journey. Charlie shares that what sets TUMI apart is their ability to be generative creative through the brilliant minds that they have. This does not exist in computers yet and technology is not yet close to replacing yet. Iteration is the easy part because technology has given us unimaginable ways of reiterating and optimizing.

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Our GuestJason Wolf is AVP and Global Head of Experience Design, author, Apple ‘think different’ producer, worked with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Hasso Plattner & Vishal Sikka. Practice lead at IDEO, old-School employee of Macromind (later Marcomedia) makers of director and flash technology. Authored first books on shockwave technology. Design thinking strategist and innovation change agent. Father of 3, Maker, film maker and over all artist.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Anything from the creative aspects of art is what inspires Jason. He draws a lot of his inspiration from films, television, books, other authors, and websites -- anything out there from the abstract to the total tangible. He loves to consume that, makes sense out of it and use it in his everyday work to give people things that they have never seen before and make their lives more interesting.Art has always been something which has interested Jason, whether this is doodling or scribbling at 6 years old to water color paintings. He found that the reaction that he would get from others is what drives him to do this.In the 90s, he found himself in his cubicle observing how hundreds of employees were so out of touch while they are working towards one goal. He thought, if he was the owner of the company, he would ensure interaction amongst employee and with customers to drive innovation. He would create a culture where everyone is on a level playing field. This will snowball to happier employees who can laugh and joke about things which can spawn to a more comfortable, creative environment.Jason looks at a career in three phases: when you first join a company, when you are cruising along or in cruise control and when you feel like you are winding down. He shares that at one point, when he would feel that he will not be staying with the company much longer, he would become a rebel. This would either accelerate the speed of him leaving the company or people will turn around and say that it was cool and he gets promoted. His realization from this is that he should’ve expressed himself from the get go. But to those who want to do this, you need to note that this has a lot to do with the management so feel out the environment that you are in and explore their receptiveness prior. There is no company which do not want to be innovative; they just need to understand the reasoning behind the first couple of steps that you are taking. This is the key so show them.Jason shares that he embodies design thinking. You will know that you do too if you are still thinking about design even if you are no longer at work. You can walk into a restaurant and just see a Push/Pull sign but with no handle and go, ‘Who designed this?’ This is important because to help a company innovate or change is to be the change. You have to embody or imbue this energy yourself.To incorporate design thinking in your company, have different entry points to make it really easy for people in whatever level to get into this. Then run this through a lean method approach to measure learning to ensure that you meet whatever outcome you want it to have. Continue what works and get rid of those which do not. Adapt the technique of incremental fusion of design thinking as well where you would start small to get buy ins, continue building rapport, and have the fusion continue to gain momentum as it gets those successes. There are also specific items which a company should have to promote design thinking so ensure that you work in the background to provide these resources to make this successful. There is no company out there that this design thinking process can’t help innovate on. This is not just for technology or programmers only so this means that if you see problems in the world, you can fix those problems.

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Meet Our Guest:As the VP of Innovation Labs, Linda Tong is focused on building out the vision and strategy for AppD Labs, the innovation center of AppDynamics. Prior to this role, she combined her love of product development and football as the VP of Product and Innovation for the NFL, managing the product vision for the owned and operated digital properties across all 32 clubs and the league. Linda was also an original team member at Google (Chrome and Android) where she helped launch and shape the developer ecosystem for the Android OS.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Linda finds constantly challenging herself fun. This means finding new problems to solve, new ways to push herself in new directions and new technologies to explore. She is super curious and loves learning so what’s great about her profession is that she can do all of these in her role as VP of Innovation Labs. It has always been core to her that when she sees things, she would push herself to look at the pieces around her and think about how to reimagine, reorganize and restructure them and unlock new value. A big part of her responsibilities in AppDynamics are focused on thinking about the future of the company. She thinks about the unique spaces that AppDynamics is in and how do they start innovation within the organization to unlock new opportunities which are adjacent to their product line and the industry that AppDynamics would be a good fit for. She also heads their product experience team which thinks about how they can bring the best experience to their customer as they evolve through time.AppDynamics is an amazing tool which crosses the entire technology sack to give you insights on how your digital products are performing. It gives you visibility into the entire complex ecosystem of apps and ties the connection of that performance back to your business so you can be more insightful about how your digital products are doing. It makes you continue to make smart decisions around operating them.Linda’s team focuses on the customer experience side of product development. They partner closely with product management and engineering to understand the new products and features which they want to expose and for what customers. They help design and develop these and constantly iterate to continue to create value for their customers are they go forward.Their task is two-fold: thinking about their user and thinking about the right approach to product development. When you build products, it’s a massive hierarchy of product need so it’s all about understanding a problem and really defining that so you define a value that you want to unlock. Their team is focused on understanding what that problem is and they call it utility. This is their core and they focus their first round of product development surrounding this. Once they move up this hierarchy of need, they then ask how they would iterate after unlocking this utility so they can improve functionality. Once they nail down this to things, they move up to start unlocking the why so they can keep their customers engaged and build a longer relationship with them to get more value.A challenge in AppDynamics is that they are helping companies through their digital transformation so they should be able to run their agent or have visibility into thousands of different technology stacks to be able to give them insights into it. This can be super process complex but their output should be really simple to understand.Being acquired by Cisco, building collaboration and empathy is something which can prove to be a challenge so they came up with Think Factories. These includes identifying problems and cross functional teams, bringing them into a room, defining these problems and identifying solutions. This fosters camaraderie and builds relationships and ultimately transforms an organization. Coming up with these Think Factories entails getting buy in from every level – this is the key. Linda shares that measuring success is really difficult in terms of innovation because a lot of times, you get 95% fails and 5% success (if you are lucky). It’s all about failing fast, learning from every single experience and trying not to make the same mistakes more than once. Success has to be redefined in a different way.

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Our GuestVaibhav Vohra is the Head of Product Management for SAP Digital Interconnect IBU Group. He has launched award winning marketing products at SAP. Prior to SAP, he designed satellites and took on other challenges in Aerospace.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Vaibhav has a passion from taking things from laboratory to launch whether it’s a diamond-coated cutting tool or doing a spinal cord injury research for a new treatment. Bringing this lab eureka moment to something that’s commercially viable has become a great passion of his and this is what motivated him all these years. He is also a big fan of deconstructing products like chefs do to food so he loves reducing the clutter to the noise. The unrelenting focus to the problem is something that he is really passionate about and he believes that failure is just a rite of passage. In this day and age where care is defined as financial benefits, what if care is using a mobile device to provide this duty that employers need to carry so we can get responses in just minutes? Mobile is the future of work; it can be the tool which can help employees be better taken care of. SAP is primed to do this around the world for various industries.SAP is one of the largest software companies and much of their growth is due to the cloud. Vaibhav is part of the group called SAP Digital Interconnect which helps enterprises run better through rich, mobile experiences. It’s the last mile connecting mobile apps, processes and people.The SAP Digital Interconnect team focuses on the next line of business applications. They are trying to solve how people want to be connected to and what context are they in and to determine this, communications is the operative word to be able to potentially change a brand or a business. You have to have conversations with your customers and the differentiator between listening and hearing is understanding. The product that they are currently working on which enables better experience is SAP People Connect 365. This system aims to bring in HR and Risk Content data and create content workflows to help enterprises reach their employees in the moment of need.Vaibhav shares that they found that 90% of the APIs fail in their enterprise initiatives but the 10% which succeeds gets exponential growth. He suggested three major things in able to achieve success: APIs should to be simple to understand; mobile developers should connect with others through repositories and communities and build efficient process; and technology independence. The result of these three would be programmable digital interfaces which will take over the world.Products can always be made better as it is an everlasting approach. From a tactical level, think of ways how to expand such as including customers in the design process, personalization and thinking of user experience versus UI.

Our GuestJonathon Hensley is CEO of Emerge Interactive, a digital experience company, where he works with clients to transform business strategies, user needs and new technologies into valuable products and experiences.An accomplished writer and speaker, Jonathon has lectured on topics such as the connected consumer’s impact on business, creating value through data-driven experiences, and user-centric approaches to innovation. In 2012 he was recognized in the Portland Business Journal’s “40 under 40” as one of Portland’s emerging professional and community leaders.Under Jonathon’s stewardship Emerge Interactive has committed to a simple philosophy: The relationship between Emerge and its clients should exist to create real and lasting value. To change the conversation. To move people to action. To inspire and motivate a team to focus on what matters.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:2:55: Emerge Interactive is a digital experience company which focuses on high-value digital experience on new opportunities and solving high-value user experience challenges. A lot of companies are struggling with digital modernization and there is a void in the marketplace of firms with expertise and experience to solve these challenges -- this is the void which Emerge Interactive fills. Mobile First is an extension of this as this podcast is a platform which aims to dig into what’s happening on this front. 4:52: With 20 years of experience in helping clients create digital experiences, the main friction area which Jonathon sees in not having a co-creative approach in companies is the fact that many businesses do not start as a digital business. The challenge is coming in with just one set of expertise and integrating digital to be part of the core.6:00: Co-creation is the idea of going beyond collaboration. Instead of working as separate team, you have to work as a single team unified with a common purpose. Co-creation is a methodology to support this. You combine the expertise of people across the business and the experiences of your customers and bring these all to the forefront of the process to quickly and effectively get to the most important needs of the business. 2:55: Emerge Interactive is a digital experience company which focuses on high-value digital experience on new opportunities and solving high-value user experience challenges. A lot of companies are struggling with digital modernization and there is a void in the marketplace of firms with expertise and experience to solve these challenges -- this is the void which Emerge Interactive fills. Mobile First is an extension of this as this podcast is a platform which aims to dig into what’s happening on this front. 4:52: With 20 years of experience in helping clients create digital experiences, the main friction area which Jonathon sees in not having a co-creative approach in companies is the fact that many businesses do not start as a digital business. The challenge is coming in with just one set of expertise and integrating digital to be part of the core.6:00: Co-creation is the idea of going beyond collaboration. Instead of working as separate team, you have to work as a single team unified with a common purpose. Co-creation is a methodology to support this. You combine the expertise of people across the business and the experiences of your customers and bring these all to the forefront of the process to quickly and effectively get to the most important needs of the business. 8:43: Some of the Jonathon’s takeaways from our first 50 episodes are: The spot-on idea that an employee experience is an enabler to the customer experience. Internal transformation can be very difficult but nothing can be more powerful in delivering an amazing customer experience. The reaffirmation that ideas are powerful but what it really comes down to is the ability to execute. This is the make or break in an organization. The ability to build great teams is fundamental to success. Get the right people on the right seats with the right expertise to get you where you need to be as a business.The uniform understanding with our guests that it is critical for businesses to understand their data. Thinking of data as service -- looking at how they move from upstream and downstream -- through the organization is becoming essential. 14:41: Jonathon shares what we can expect from the show moving forward: guests bringing in perspective, best in class tactics, strategies which are taking place, and how they are driving change and innovation in their organization. Beyond sharing experiences and insights, we will unpack to everyone what co-creation is to solve all the problems out there which we are trying to solve.20:14: Inspired by our guests’ reiteration of the importance of having a great vision and an actionable plan to get there, Jonathon shares that they are working on a product vision and planning checklist which listeners can use as a great resource. On top of this, they will also be releasing an eBook specific on how to make a business case for your mobile initiative in understanding what problems and friction points you are solving for and what kind of impact it will have in the organization.

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Our GuestKevin is Chief Digital and Innovation Officer and a member of the global Executive Board for HH Global. He is responsible for technology, driving innovation, digital brand control programs, and digital strategy for HH Global. Kevin is also responsible for two HH Global Financial Services customers and digital transformation projects for HH Global’s client base. Kevin moderates the HH Global innovations group, HH Labs, which he formed in 2009, as well as being the Executive Board sponsor for HH Global’s Sustainability and corporate social responsibility programmes.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:The things that gets Kevin most out of bed everyday morning is the disruption that we are seeing in technology and how this can fire and streamline processes with clients and make solutions better. There’s just so much stuff you can do which will make things better and this gives him so many opportunities to do great things.Technology is one of Kevin’s passions and where you can see something which can make a process efficient, add value or can improve an experience, you have to seize that – and that is what Kevin is currently doing.HH Global is a global marketing execution company. They are in the outsourcing business and they support their clients below their creative master agencies. Typically, big brands have a master agency which creates conceptual items and HH Global is there to help execute that. They do this across three core channels: marketing print, secondary packaging, and cross-creative production. They save their clients’ money and simplify workflows.As Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Kevin was originally focused on all things digital until they have formed an innovation group called HH Labs. It gained so much traction and interest from clients that he was asked to focus more on this. His role now is to talk to clients how to disrupt and improve what they are doing and add to their business more than those three core channels to advance them to get ahead of the curve in their particular sector. HH Labs goes out and finds various solutions and what sprung this investment and what caused it to grow to what it is now is the passion of people who have day jobs in their business. Nearly 25% of their workforce are members of the community and effectively are digital talent scouts who are either listening to their clients for what is keeping them awake and feed this back to the group; or they are actively looking in trade shows, listening to podcasts, or subscribing in digital newsletters. They get fired up by all of this as this gives another dimension to their job and their role, and ultimately, they find it satisfying to help solve a problem for a client.Some of the cool things they are doing right now surround digital signage and proximity and point of sale. It’s like a mash up of clever Google technology at traditional point of sale and proximity beaconing. An example of this would be a case study of Coca Cola ads in a mall where it will show you customize ads as you walk through. It uses mobile handset data to serve customize ads so as you walk down the aisle it will recognize that you are male, location, buying habits, your last interaction with Coke, etc. and it will serve an ad which is contextual to you.

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Our GuestJeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, focused on building a more agile and transparent marketing operation accountable for driving revenue growth through demand creation and strong brand reputation. She believes in leveraging innovative and digital initiatives to help achieve her goals, and her background in education fuels her passion to inspire both consumers and the teams she works with.Prior to her role at Mercer, Jeanniey was Head of Marketing and Growth for Barnes & Noble, where she drove the transformation of the NOOK business from hardware to app based. Her previous experience includes launching the world’s first digital newsstand for Zinio, growing the business to more than 20 million active consumers. She also launched and ran the global Digital Dialogue business for Ogilvy and Grey Direct’s Global Email Marketing business, establishing the world’s first email marketing practice inside an advertising agency.Jeanniey holds a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh. A recognized “Woman in Business” and an entrepreneur, she has authored three books and launched five companies, including Ringblingz and the Email Experience Council. Jeanniey was recently named Networker of the Year by the Internet Marketing Association and is the Chairwoman of their Women’s Leadership Group. She also serves on the board of MarketingEDGE and as an advisor for select high-potential start-ups. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Jeanniey shares that she is at her happiest when she inspires people. She enjoys teaching new tricks and help people in general thereby she constantly finds innovative ways to do this. She mentions about a story when she was in 7th grade when she pitched the idea to create homemade fortune cookies for a bake sale. It was a smashing success (and a grand team effort) which revealed her entrepreneurial approach.Jeanniey shares how she loves problem-solving, looking at ways she can bring improvement, making people happy, reach an end goal or changing the world for the better. She is also a very practical person and is always excited in getting involved in anything new. This speaks as to why she had five businesses in the past.Mercer makes a difference in the lives of more than 110 million people every day by advancing their health, wealth and careers. This focus creates more secure and rewarding futures for their clients and their employees — whether designing affordable health plans, assuring income for retirement, or aligning workers with workforce needs. They are like the Intel Inside of HR companies. It is a phenomenal company in terms of impact as it drives organizations to provide employees a better life. Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and her job focuses on two areas: increasing brand visibility and driving growth. They market themselves as strategic partners to their clients rather than a vendor or a solutions provider. Part of her role is to look at possibilities of digital transformations in marketing. They look at how they can integrate digital strategies, best practices and the coolest initiatives they see into what they are doing in a daily basis and how it can impact user experience.Their focus for growth for product and services is in user experience and how it is happening in all relevant channels. What they are seeing making a bigger impact is understanding user journey and how it starts the search for answers in those various channels. Time is currently their only challenge right now as they are now on their last five months in putting all of their initiatives together. They are now analyzing impacts and after that, they’ll go back to their CEO to share the results and see how they can leverage on this data for their growth. A few months ago, they had launched a new initiative called Mercer Digital where they are marrying all the incredible insights that they have in the people side of their house with consulting services and everything related to HR, technology and the future of work. They are creating an ecosystem which places companies ahead of the curve as far as solutions are concerned.

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Our GuestAs CMO at Art.com, Sullivan-Cross oversees all marketing, communications, and analytics initiatives for the company, working to position Art.com as a prominent lifestyle brand in the e-commerce space, while creating an engaging narrative to inspire consumers to make a personal connection to art. Prior to Art.com, Sullivan-Cross was Vice President, Growth at Pandora where she strengthened the Pandora brand and developed marketing programs that contribute to the company’s active user and revenue growth, as well as its customer retention gains. With over 20 years marketing experience, she is an innovative data-driven marketer with a track record building and growing businesses at companies such as Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., Dictionary.com, Evite, Billboard and Adweek. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Lisa loves the combination of art and marketing, forging new grounds and marketing a product that she is passionate about. This is why she had worked in the movies or music because if it is not something that she can connect to or have an impact on, she will find it difficult to market. Lisa started out her college career in business but she shifted to communications about halfway through as she felt that a career with the latter is more in line with her passions. She then set her sights on advertising and marketing and started her career on the ad agency side for a start-up. She handled Amazon as her account for three years and learned from the company’s data-centric approach. She then moved to the client side because of her love for data. Lisa joined Newline and Warner Bros. then made her way to Lucasfilm by cold calling their Head of Digital for about 15 times to pitch him the idea about having an e-commerce division. She took a risk in joining as a contractor but it paid off. She then made her way to Pandora as she was attracted in starting the growth discipline from scratch as they didn’t have anyone in the company in the growth role. Performance marketing can also be called direct response marketing so you have strict KPIs that you are working under. In here, everything needs to be evaluated on return on ad spend and ultimately, LTV. In brand marketing, KPIs are different as you are trying to change hearts and minds. Increase in brand awareness, preference for the brand so that people will ultimately use the product. These two are both equally important and they work together. In Pandora, Lisa helped set up the infrastructure to help track and measure all their marketing activities. They had high level business goals so they set specific KPIs to each piece of what they did. 80% of the usage was on mobile app and, since this was 4 years ago, the biggest marketing challenge was tracking view through and click conversion all the way through to LTV. Art.com aims to make art accessible to everyone and they are doing this by transforming the way the world discovers art. There are lots of pain points in choosing an art piece and bringing it home so they are working on alleviating this. Help people express themselves and connect to others and as CMO, her main focus is to diversify their performance marketing channels to attract higher value customers. Their biggest constraint in this area was their lack of focus in mobile and right now, that is where they are establishing their presence as their customers are in mobile. They have been able to optimize mobile experience and inject growth mentality to the team.

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As Senior Vice President of Presence and Commerce at GoDaddy, Lauren Antonoff oversees the development and operations of our website builder and e-commerce solutions for small business around the world.Prior to GoDaddy, Lauren spent eighteen years at Microsoft, where she was most recently Director of Program Management for SharePoint, leading the effort to make the SharePoint a tool that people love to use to get work done. Her leadership was instrumental in building one of the most successful products and businesses at Microsoft, and helping SharePoint navigate the shift to the cloud.While at Microsoft, she founded the Step Up Program, designed to increase the number of women in senior management roles by helping women become stronger candidates for these roles. Lauren studied Rhetoric and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Lauren has surprised herself when she ended up in software as she thought she was going to be a civil rights lawyer. But as she thought about the problems that we encounter in technology, she felt that she can make the world a better place if she can solve these problems so people can use technology to get things done in their lives. She attributes her attitude of going out there in the world, taking on the challenges as you can and fight for the things you believe in to her mother, fighting for what was right.As Senior Vice President of Presence & Commerce at GoDaddy, the job was supposedly pretty straightforward: they help people make websites. But when she got there, it was way more than that. The group had a whole portfolio of tools designed to help customers establish their businesses online. Website builder, online store, SEO products, listings product, etc. Immediately she learned the disparate teams were stretched too thin. A key change she implemented was to address the platform it as a singular customer experience rather than a portfolio of products. One experience which helps people get online and create a holistic experience to guide them through their journey.GoDaddy is known for domains but they are more than that. They can present a whole range of solutions that they are likely looking for and this is what they are trying to showcase in their project, GoCentral. It’s a suite of capabilities which include a website, but just as importantly, also the things which come after making a website: managing your social profiles, engaging customers through email marketing and the whole nine yards.Bringing individual pieces which are currently in silos to work in concert together is one of the challenges that their company is currently facing and making use of data to understand what is working and what’s not is key. If you can use data to measure whether something is effective, you have the most powerful tool.How do you know which hypothesis to prioritize, how do you know which one is worth testing or not? You can use inputs to get ideas and use an agile methodology which is hyper targeted and placed in a controlled testing environment before rippling it out to other areas and environments. Dip your toe in the water and if it works, double down on it.

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Our GuestBen Parr is the author of the best-selling book Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention-- named the top marketing book of 2015 by Strategy+Business Magazine and Small Business Trends. He is Co-Founder and CMO of Octane AI, the CRM for Messenger marketing. He sits on the board of directors of Samasource, the global non-profit dedicated to impact sourcing and giving work and is a member of the advisory board of Lufthansa Airlines. Previously, Parr was a venture capitalist, a columnist and commentator at CNET, and Co-Editor and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. He is a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Ben is passionate about two aspects: solving a complex problem which he has not solved before and creating a scalable solution to that problem. He believes it’s never enough to just solve a problem then move on, what excites him is scaling the solution to the entire planet. He started with this inclination in college and this got crystalized when he became an editor in Mashable. He believes that he has the ability, thus, the responsibility to change the world for the better. It’s part of the reason why he does a lot of the things he does.From editor to VC, to being an author and starting a company, he shares that the rudimentary skillsets needed in each of these roles are the same. It is the switching that’s hard because people can be super focused in one thing and be great at that but when you change roles, your primary focus will shift and you need to exercise those muscles that you have not flexed that much.Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention is a book that Ben has written and he shares that it is a deep dive into the psychology and science of attention. He wrote it because lots of companies come to him for him when it comes to items such as press, marketing, user acquisition that he realized all these areas fall around the same thing, which is attention. Thereby, going deeper in this subject could be helpful. He went through years of research, interviewed about 50 experts to understand the key things which trigger attention, the seven stages of attention and how to capture attention in each of those stages.The seven stages of attention go in the order of how early in the stages of attention they happen:1 - Automaticity – automatic sensations and how certain colors captivate our attention automatically versus others.2 - Framing – we use framing to decide which things to pay attention to or not.3 - Disruption – we pay attention to the things which violate our expectations of the world.4 - Reward – certain types of rewards and the way they are delivered change the way we behave.5 - Mysteries – the right kind of storytelling captivate our attention for a lot of psychological reasons.6 - Acknowledgment – we pay attention to the people and things which pay attention to us and provide us validation, empathy and understanding.7 - Reputation – triggers our attention based on reputable sources of information, the power of experts, and the power of the crowd.About Octane AI: Messenger marketing is the new email marketing. Billions of people used messaging apps and if you need to reach the younger demographic, you need a software which could communicate to build campaigns to reach this audience to do all that but it is yet to exist. This is where Octane AI comes in. It’s built as a CRM using bots and AI in order to automatically communicate with customers starting with Facebook Messenger and eventually to other platforms. Their target market is companies and brands which are already established. Octane AI can be used for awareness but it is especially ideal for lead generation and conversation. Their biggest challenge right now is writing content for conversation. Writing for newsletters or blogs is one thing but writing content for conversation is another. It’s different and you have to script out what you are going to say and what you want your audience to respond. Once you get the hang of it, the possibilities open up so it’s a new thing that we have to learn.

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Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care engenders hope in the lives of its patients and their family members. A community-based organization, Seasons Hopsice is on an ongoing mission to find creative solutions which add quality to life. Through the firm belief that individuals and families are the experts in their own care, we focus on the patient and family experience and empowerment.Our GuestBalu Natarajan, M.D. is a graduate of Northwestern University Medical School and has been the Chief Medical Officer of Seasons Hospice since 2005. He served in various capacities for Seasons from 2000 until 2005, including holding the position of Medical Director of the Illinois program.Board-certified in internal medicine, hospice and palliative care, and sports medicine, Dr. Natarajan has authored book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has also lectured across the United States and around the world, including at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Physicians. He won the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in 1985.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Dr. Natarajan loves helping people and he learned early in his career that he is one of those physicians who can inspire other physicians to be better or to improve their workday to be able to do more for people. His current role in Seasons Hospice allows him to support 4700 patients a day through hundreds of physicians, hospice aids, social workers, nurses, chaplains and other team members who work together. He loved technology as he was growing up and thought he would be doing computer or software work. When he was 16, he went to a science show and one of the sessions featured a cardiologist who passed around an artificial heart after talking to them about it. He was hooked to science the moment he held that heart in his hand.His accidental journey to Hospice started when he needed a job for a year when his wife needed to go somewhere for school. He became a hospitalist for a year taking care of hospitalized in patients. He found himself referring patients to Hospice then did a talk one night during a team meeting, and it involved from there.Hospice is based in Chicago, Illinois and had just turned 20 years old. They are a joint commissioned Medicare certified hospice and their job is to take care of patients with life expectancy of 6 months or less. They are the largest employer of music therapists across the country and have a foundation which supports their patients non-medical needs. The communities they serve are generally urban and sub-urban markets. They serve 4700 patients a day in 29 cities from coast to coast.Dr. Natarajan’s focus is patient experience and he has all the support of all the doctors as well as the Nursing and Education and Quality Support of Care departments. His team takes this incredibly seriously and what they have been working on right now is getting the right person to the right patient at the right time, given the backdrop of short length of stay. Basically, this pertains to how they can serve to those who are acutely in need who just came into the program, and at the same time, getting to the people that they have been taken care of for months now. It’s not an easy thing to do and they are hoping that technology can have a huge impact on their ability to do this.He believes that the areas where technology can really make an impact on in their field is acuity scale, patient perceptions and developing a tool which can take all the triages and determine which patients need to be prioritized overlaid with geography. The challenges they are encountering right now in applying technology include connectivity (which is the biggest), rules and regulations which clarify which is a visit or not, and other logistical, legal and technological barriers.

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VMware delivers digital transformation by starting from the outside, in. Starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways to deliver strategic outcomes.Our GuestRobin Matlock joined VMware in July 2009 and serves as senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Bringing more than 25 years of marketing experience in the enterprise software and services sector, Matlock is playing a leadership role in positioning VMware as a market leader in Mobile Cloud. As CMO, Matlock is a key member of VMware’s Executive Leadership team responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:As a marketer, Robin believes that it’s all about your personal brand. At an early age, she had already figured out that you have to differentiate yourself. Case at hand was the time when she ran for student council despite the fact that nobody knew her because she was new. She broke out from the rest by doing a skit, which nobody ever did during those days, and she ended up winning. If you want to stand out from the crowd, she learned that you have to be courageous and do something a little different. All these braveness came from her mom as she loved the stage and encouraged her to be bold and creative.In her heart of hearts, Robin is a business person. She loves the dimensions and complexities of growing a business and she finds marketing as a culmination of all the input and how you formulate a strategy basing on these. If you are not grounded in the business, you can be creative and cool but you will not be relevant.Robin started with Sales but segued into business development. From there, she went on to product management and then into the traditional broad-based marketing.VMware is an enterprise software company focused on large companies deliver IT services extremely efficiently. There are three big themes that they are focused on: cloud computing; mobility; and risk, reputation and security. VMware empowers IT organizations to help cause digital transformations by severing complexities of physical hardware, software and application environments and make it almost push-button simple.Digital transformation is not just a marketing ploy. It is very real and is happening right underneath our feet. Take Uber and Airbnb, for example – the concept of building a completely new industry using software is disrupting entire industries by thinking experience through software. This is digital transformation and in order to make this happen, you have to have the thirst and curiosity to transform, in general. Waiting for another person to figure it out is a sure way for you to be obsolete five years from now. You must think about how technologies change your business model as we are all impacted.Bringing about digital transformation in your business, you need to start from the outside in. It starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways on how to go about this.

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Our GuestMike Fletcher is the General Manager of InComm Digital Solutions, leading a team of 140 employees who are focused on providing digital and physical gift card fulfillment and services for InComm’s mobile, incentive, reward and e-commerce partners. InComm Digital Solutions powers digital and physical gift cards services for hundreds of leading bands in North America and abroad. Prior to his role at InComm, Mike was co-Founder and CMO of Giftango. Giftango was a pioneer of digital gift cards and developed the industry leading digital gifting platform for the incentive, loyalty, reward and mobile application industries and served customers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia. Giftango was acquired by InComm in December 2012. Prior to Giftango, Mike was COO of Point West Credit Union. He spent time analyzing mobile payment initiatives on behalf of the Credit Union industry as part of the Filene i3 program.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Mike loves learning and new challenges and one of the things which excite him is complex problems and the end-to-end process of those complex problems. The notion of seeing an opportunity to fix something and improve lives or processes; and putting together a vision, chasing after it and taking it to fruition is something of interest to him. He also loves growth so it is exciting for him to work with bright people and help them in their professional growth. Customer experience and making lives better through the things that they are working on is definitely also among the list of his passions. Mike has shown entrepreneurial skills as early as 12 years old when he mowed lawns and discovered the need for marketing. At the age of 16, he started a company pulling out carpets and prepping floors, which led to a slightly more complex process of the business after that. The understanding of the importance of how each facet of the task tie up together and how, if they work together, it will all end right, fascinated him ever since. He started out his career in the Athletics Department at Portland State University and moved on to Operations because of his interest in customer experience. From here, he stepped into the Credit Union space and was also talked into joining a start-up called Giftango. This was his entry into the Financial / Technology sector where he learned more about technology. Giftango was acquired by InComm back in 2012 and this is where he is today. InComm is the technology and the distribution company behind gift cards. When you walk up and take a gift card off of a rack from a store, it doesn’t have any value on it yet. It will only have one once you pay for it and it gets swiped at the point of sale. InComm is both the distribution marketing and the technology company which makes all these stuff work. They have 500k points of distribution and have tremendous global reach with over 35 countries on the physical side. Now, think of this same concept except that it’s in a digital space – whether it’s an app, a website, or some kind of digital consumer experience such as redeeming your points gained from credit cards. This, now, is InComm Digital. InComm Digital’s primary product is their API (application program interface). Their customers build their own tools or user interface and through their API, they can communicate with InComm and ask them to create a specific action. They are growing very rapidly and scalability is one of the things that they are focusing on. Because of the different models that they serve, there are always new opportunities on the ways they can help refine the tools to solve business problems. One of the things that they are excited about in line with company growth is the open loop side of the business which means Visa, MasterCard, and American Express-type of gift cards which can be sold digital for a variety of reasons. It’s not a mature process as of yet but they are spending a tremendous time surrounding this project.

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Our GuestIt’s no accident Katharine found her way to Ruby. Her career has focused on working for companies that value and support human connections, including roles in product management at Ancestry.com and AAA. Her desire to restore the human connection in our increasingly technological world comes with a top-notch pedigree, including a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Oxford University. She brings the perfect combination of passion and experience to lead the evolution of Ruby’s product and service. Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Katharine has worked with technology for most of her career and is fascinated with the challenge of taking technology, which is usually a way of taking the human element out of processes and experiences, into something that we can use to smartly expand the reach of meaningful human connection as opposed to completely eliminating them. Her passion for technology is has evolved from an early start in childhood, and has always been interested in computers and future tech. Her father, a computer engineer, always had the latest equipment at home. She followed that passion by taking Computer Science, then becoming a software engineer at Hewlett Packard. Now, he is keenly interested in how we can use technology to shape customer experience and broaden connections between people.Katharine is keenly interested in the decision-making process inside organizations -- which drove her to attain her Masters in Business Administration. During her stay at Oxford with students of different nationalities, she learned how to manage business at an international scale. Fascinated by observing trends in different countries, she sought to understand how technology is used in different countries. So much of this is driven by culture and for her, this was the turning point in discovering her passion for understanding how factors such as people and the culture impact how systems, technologies, products, and services are being developed.Ruby Receptionists is a remote service which provides personalized live, virtual receptionist services to thousands of small businesses throughout North America including Canada and a few in Puerto Rico. As these are real people answer the phones, this allows them to make great impressions and allow these small businesses never to miss a call. Their data show that 60% – 70% of callers hang up if they get a voicemail greeting or not get a live person or having a human being pick up the phone really helps businesses grow and capture these opportunities.The secret to their success boils down to hiring the right people for the job. What their co-founder quickly learned: the culture where your employees work has a direct impact on how they deliver service to their customers. Due to this, they have a line of recognition programs and activities designed to ensure that this motivation is maintained by putting them in an environment where happiness is fostered and where they are encouraged to grow and thrive.Ruby has grown from 200 employees to 400+ in the last two years and some the challenges that they are facing right now are those things which actually worked for them when they were smaller. Some of their processes are no longer scaling and are getting brittle so their focus for their organization this year and the next is upgrading their systems and figuring out how to integrate them. Ruby launched a mobile app but it did not deliver the desired outcome and went defunct. As an industry leader, Ruby’s primary focus is to improve customer-facing applications and create a seamless experience. They are also completely re-architecting their back end such as moving things to the cloud. Kath believes that with the new customer-facing website plus the new mobile app, they can really go deep on the customer journey and will see how pieces interact with each other to allow them to deliver more value.

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Peter is a well-known industry expert in eCommerce and omnichannel technology, having previously held the role of Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research where he spent 5 years leading Forrester’s global research on digital commerce technologies, helping to challenge the thinking and lead change for eCommerce executives undertaking major digital transformation and commerce technology programs. Today, Peter leads corporate strategy and business development for Magento.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Peter is passionate about digital disruptions so he gets excited if he has opportunities to deliver innovations that completely disrupt the way we do things. It’s all about making life simpler, removing friction, and making experiences seamless and intuitive as there are still a lot of day-to-day things which we really do not need to go through. What gets him up in the morning is thinking of new ways to leverage technology to make lives more efficient. Peter had a Bachelor’s Degree in Manufacturing, Engineering, and Control Systems so he left the university thinking that he wanted to be a mechanical or manufacturing engineer and build things. However when he walked through the Ford plants, it became clear that manufacturing wasn’t for him. E-commerce was emerging and Peter involved himself into a big, high profile project at Ford to attempt to sell cars online. This took him out of the factory, and prompted him to learn to code.Joining Forrester was game-changing for Peter and for his career as it got him into a unique position to do research. For him, it was a privilege and a unique opportunity to have conversations with senior leaders and to be able to try to predict where things are going, drive insights and make recommendations to these leaders. Magento is a global market leader in the enterprise e-commerce platform with over a quarter of million merchants globally to power their e-commerce sites. The platform transacts over $100B annually and a fun place to be because of their diverse, global clients. As VP Strategy at Magento Commerce, Peter is focused on the key technologies that will change the way consumers shop and interact. Peter believes that mobile has probably been the single most disruptive thing that has happened in the industry and where we are today is a transformational shift. We are now rapidly moving beyond mobile first to mobile only. With the right mobile experience, it will be far easier to shop in a mobile device than a laptop or a desktop so we can rapidly going to a world where the vast majority of e-commerce transactions are done through a mobile device. In his research, Peter shares that innovations that we should expect includes having a better ‘check out’ experience wherein we do not need to key in credit card information to complete a purchase because of digital wallets, Apple Pay, multiple payment options, or use of finger print or digital identity. The navigation of moving to pages will also move to become voice-based or maybe even, making a purchase may just be as simple as a thought – a thought will trigger a delivery at our doors two hours later. These examples are a bit far-fetched -- but we may be closer to it than we know.Accepting the fact that we are moving to a mobile-only world is a must so when you must think about the investments that you are going to make in the coming months, it should all be focused on how do you get to mobile only. You need to look at the ways that you are interfacing with your customers and rank them on how you compared to a mobile experience. Make sure that you are obsessing about the reality that we are rapidly moving towards a mobile-only world so if your desktop site does things which your mobile sites are not, you are in the wrong place as it should be the other way around.

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Our GuestPaolo Bergamo became a visiting professor at UCLA (EE dept) in 2002. He worked in the group of Leonard Kleinrock, the “father of the internet” who built the first three ARPANET nodes. Paolo then left Academia to join a mobile technology startup, called Sendia, based in Santa Monica, CA. Sendia became the first Salesforce acquisition in 2006. Since then Paolo has been the lead of mobile products for Salesforce. In 2008, the Salesforce Mobile app was the first business app ever in the iPhone App Stores. He’s currently SVP for Salesforce1 and Mobile, defining the mobile strategy and leading mobile product management.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:A combination of events and items shaped Paolo’s interest around communications and drove him towards mobile: as a young student he considered himself more of a mathematician until a teacher pointed out he was an engineer. His father working in the telco industry for 35 years in Italy, and Paolo was always obsessed with bundling and hiding all the different wires sticking out from his computers. This led him to explore mobile and wireless at an early age and encouraged an educational and career in electronics. He was very much inspired by his experience learning from Leonard Kleinrock - literally the father of the internet.After two years in UCLA, he learned that he really enjoyed research, teaching and loved to be around young people who are passionate and want to learn. However, academic research was a little too lengthy, and provided almost no opportunity to productize inventions. In order to fulfill his calling as an engineer, he knew he needed to take an idea and actually get it out in front of people - get feedback from actual users and consumers.The opportunity to join Sendia, a start-up building business tools for early-era mobile phones. They wanted to translate the most important business tools into mobile. The first web services started appearing in back end systems, like Salesforce. We built a middle layer between the web services API and the mobile phone. They built the apps for a mobile phone highly optimized for offline data communications. It was a success, they were acquired by Salesforce and he became a product manager. In 2007, when the App Store was launched for 3rd party developers, Salesforce Mobile app caught Steve Jobs’ eye and Sendia received a phone call. It was a success once more and people started trusting him to manage the mobile strategies, product and platform more and more. Paolo shares that with all this he believes that rethinking mobile is the key to innovation. Paolo talks about Salesforce’s legacy as one of the companies which built the cloud. They help customers to do business in a whole new way and enables companies to be smarter and more efficient. He believes that the mission of any large enterprise is to go back to the era where the quality of customer service is no less than excellent and they aim that they will be the platform which will enable businesses to do this.As SVP of Mobile in Salesforce1, he is moving the needle towards their goal by mobilizing data, business processes and collaboration. They also have optimized applications, like Wave, should businesses need to slice and dice data. They are also enabling customers to build their own applications for their own customers through mobile platforms and SDKs. They have a low code, no code mantra wherein every time they build a piece of code or functionally, anyone can build an application in a visual way. All these applications are all connected as they are not stand alone applications and this is where he comes in as a product manager. Discover the critical challenges they are facing include tactically deciding which devices that they will support out of the box and which ones to delegate to partners; the challenge of making it really easy for an intelligent admin to orchestrate events from multiple systems and channels in line with their low code, no code mantra; and having a center to cater all systems. Rapid Fire QuestionsWhat is your definition of innovation?Innovation is anything that freezes us from the mundane tasks and gives us back the time to do what we want.Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?30% idea and 70% execution. When you do things right and you execute well, you are going to be in a good position to give people your strategy in the moment in which your idea is not successful.What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?Adapting. What took you here will not take you there. You need to keep challenging yourself to scale and be less of a control freak.What is your favorite business book?Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz WisemanCrossing the Chasm by Geoffrey MooreEscape Velocity by Geoffrey MooreWhat is your favorite digital resource?Mobile FirstFreakonomicsThe Rubin ReportWhat is your favorite app and why?SlackFitbit

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As Chief Digital Officer, Peter Grambs is responsible for the all the digital initiatives at Marlabs, including the Digital practice which covers AI, IoT, Big Data, and Salesforce.com. This includes new business development and marketing as well as delivery assurance and support. Main focus areas include supporting the digital enterprise, digital transformation, and helping Marlabs’ clients achieve greater business value through the emerging digital technologies.Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:What makes Peter go is helping his customers, delivering something which will help their business, leveraging on technology and putting together the puzzle which makes up people, process and technology to come up with a solution which will make their clients business better. At the end of the day, it excites him to see this happen. Peter grew up in the Washington area and went to law school with the intent to enter politics but during the time that he was working in Congress for a Congressman, he realized that what they were doing wasn’t all that great to the point that he was asked to do things which he shouldn’t be doing. He left this for a more ethical job and went to business school, majoring in Finance. Influenced by his father, he then found his passion in technology through their boutique IT company.Peter had always liked being in the lead area of technology as he believes that digital is simply exploding in our economy right now. It is a perfect storm (in a good way) with big data in one hand and the technology on the other. In the past, people look at data as a tactical nuisance which is difficult to manage but now they realize that it is a strategic asset and has great benefits when you analyze and unlock its value.Use cases abound and are all around us. In retail, it’s understanding customer experience and what the customer is interested in, so that you can start predicting patterns and have productive conversations with them. These can also be used in financial services, fraud detection, geographic behavior, in medicine, entertainment, auto manufacturing – just about in any facet of the business, big data can be leveraged to start making better decisions to make great customer experience. It’s all about collecting the data so you can start applying the higher level analytics and IA to it. In terms of application, some firms have been able to apply big data analytics affectively but for a large part, people are just beginning to understand the opportunity that is out there. It going to be pervasive that data is attainable and is not hard to implement because we are getting more practitioners in the industry and this will be a core service in the business.Marlabs is currently working on MAdvisor, their AI platform that pulls together the pieces of the puzzle which include algorithms and big data intake in a relatively short amount of time to produce useful information from used cases. It will enable them to, in a couple of weeks, show a client insights which are locked up in their data.