Culture Becomes Experience

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Julie Larson-Green, Chief Experience Officer at Qualtrics, talks with Jesse about her career journey from small-town waitress to culture builder to Chief Experience Officer.

 

Episode Notes

Julie talks about her first career aspiration to become a waitress to pay for college and how the lessons she learned at waiting tables taught her career-defining skills of empathy and creating a positive customer experience. Julie talks about her first job in tech--as a customer service rep--and learning to code so she could resolve user experience problems at the source and the product impact she had in that role. Julie the female mentors who helped her define herself as a woman in tech. Julie shares her career path from customer service at Aldus to managing UX for Office and running XBox at Microsoft and her eventual Chief Experience Officer roles at Microsoft and Qualtrics.

Julie shares her insights on how team culture and employee experience impact the user experience and how she works to develop the right kind of culture. She shares her perspective on working toward great outcomes in the face of distrust and how to build high-performing product and customer teams.

How do you build a team culture which creates world-class products? How do you overcome organizational and engineering barriers to create an incredible product experience? How do you look at the end-to-end user experience and build products that compete based on a powerful, productive user experience? Julie shares her stories and experiences about how to build a creative culture centered around the user’s experience.

Guest Bio

Julie is passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so users can focus on what matters most. Her mantra is “People first, technology second.” As a leader, she believes her door should always ber open to listen and embrace everyone’s individual personality, perspective, style, and abilities--making teams stronger and more creative. Julie believes great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.

She has over 30 years of customer and product management experience. Her career focus has been re-imagining platforms for intelligent work. She has lead product management for SharePoint, the Microsoft Office Suite, Windows, and XBox. She oversaw the successful launch of Windows 7 and Office 365. She currently serves as the Chief Experience Officer for Qualtrics.

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/julie-larson-green-23214677
Twitter: @Julie_LGreen

Building Blocks

Put yourself into the role of the Customer Experience Officer for any organization you're a part of. It can be your company, your neighborhood association, your church group, your school board, anything. Pick one organization you're a part of - and you're the CXO.

Identify two specific experiences you would Build.

#1, As the new CXO, what's the biggest “experience gap” you have to close? What's that part of the experience of the product your company sells, or the service your group provides, or the culture of the organization you're a part of, that just needs to be improved? And what specific steps, what specific actions, would you take, to improve it?

#2, What's an experience your organization doesn’t provide today that could be an incredible Breakthrough? Where you're missing a huge opportunity to do something great for customers, for employees, or an even broader group of people? And what specific steps would it take to pull that off?

I think you'll find if you work on this Building Block, you'll get to some really pragmatic and doable things. Stuff you and the people around you can go pull off. And do YOUR part to make the world just a little bit of a better place by serving up THAT much better of an experience to people.

If you’d like to share, get it out there on social with the Hashtag #BreakthroughBuilders. Or, if you’d prefer to not share it publicly, go ahead and email it to me at jesse@breakthrough-builders.com. I’d love hearing from you and learning from what you built.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Julie Larson-Green [00:00:06] I felt like I could pivot my understanding of computing with my understanding of human behavior and what outcomes people are trying to get from computing and become more of a person that focused on why are we making this technology? What is the end user value? What are the things that customers are trying to achieve rather than just being excited about building the technology?

Jesse Purewal [00:00:41] From Qualtrics Industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, How a waitressing job, a knack for math and a prediction in her high school yearbook set the stage for Julie Larson Green to become a renowned innovator in the hardware and software space at Microsoft and Qualtrics. Julie, it's great to be with you today. Thanks for doing this.

Julie Larson-Green [00:01:20] Oh, thanks for having me.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:22] I'm so glad that circumstances happened the way that they did and we got to know one another. I'm so grateful for the time we've we've spent. We haven't spent a ton of time together in our careers, but we've intersected at some pretty cool times.

Julie Larson-Green [00:01:36] So absolutely. I mean, it was very fun to get to know you even before you came to Qualtrics. And I've always been really impressed with the work you've done with all the other software companies that you've done business with and Microsoft and others that I've been part of. So thanks for having me.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:52] So take me all the way back to the start. Take me back to where you're from and where it all began for Julie Larson Green.

Julie Larson-Green [00:02:00] Oh, my gosh. You want to go all the way back to where I grew up? I guess I would start by saying I'm from a very rural area of Washington. It's close by the Canadian border. It's a logging country. And I'm the oldest of three girls. And we had a very close knit community, but also extremely rural, very small school. High school was six hundred people, seventh through 12th grade. So really, really small.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:27] Wow. So what about that was notable for you? Did you kind of blend right into that? Did you feel kind of outside of that?

Julie Larson-Green [00:02:37] No, I don't think I felt like I fit in from the beginning. And I was also the weird girl in math class that really liked math and enjoyed math. But it was just me and my best friend all through middle school and high school, she and I were the only girls in those classes. And so I was a little bit on the outside, but I was used to doing all the things that boys did.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:57] What was it about math and mathematical thinking that appealed to you?

Julie Larson-Green [00:03:02] I think it's that was the logic and also the sense of completion that you get from solving the problem and just being able to test your brain. And so I just like the logic of it and the challenge of it. And so it was really fun.

Jesse Purewal [00:03:16] And so if I go back to rural Washington in your household with no sons, only daughters and I met 10 year old, 11 year old, you you'd be sort of sitting there working out math problems and you'd be challenging yourself. Who were the kinds of people that were behind you who were putting wind in your sales at that point in your journey?

Julie Larson-Green [00:03:39] Well, definitely my parents my dad had a very big influence on me and how I thought about my world and my life. And they were very much focused on me doing well academically and expected a lot of things out of me. I remember one particular moment where I came home from school, all very excited about the things that I was learning, about what I might be when I grow up. And one of the things I thought I might be was a paralegal because it seemed like you needed to be logical. You need to be smart and be able to remember things and that you can have a big impact on the outcome of cases and things like that. And what I expected my parents to be excited for me, but my dad just looked at me and said, well, why would you be a paralegal, not a lawyer? And that was kind of an aha moment for me in that I was putting a box around myself and what I was capable of and at a great upbringing, a great childhood, lots of freedom to explore and and not a lot of expectations on the roles of men and women, really. And they're really just pushed me to be my best self. And I also had a grandmother who was from Ontario, Canada, and so she had traveled and lived in big cities and she would tell me about the world and she'd tell me about the places she visited. And that also had an influence on me. And I knew at a pretty early age that I probably wouldn't be living in the same community when I grew up. And then I moved to the big city in the big city to me was Seattle. And I came to Seattle and loved it and been there ever since.

Jesse Purewal [00:05:18] So tell me about the first job you ever had. Tell me about the first time you went out and started making a little bit of a living for Julie Larson Green.

Julie Larson-Green [00:05:29] Well, my first job was picking strawberries and I lived in this agricultural area and my first job was going out in the fields early in the morning and picking strawberries for the cannery. And that was a very short window of working. But I started that when I was in fourth grade. And at the same time, after my job was done there, I started washing dishes at a local family restaurant in our little town. I think my first job when I was washing dishes and being a prep cook and things like that when I was young and in high school, led me to want to become a waitress and led me to want to. Do more than just being a prep cook and waitress seem like an aspirational thing where you can make more money and you could create a great experience for people. And so that was probably my first job where I aspired to something that was about experience and impact.

Jesse Purewal [00:06:31] And what was the kind of experience, what was the kind of environment you could create for for people where you worked and how important was the element of hospitality? And and what did you learn from that? Would you take away from that?

Julie Larson-Green [00:06:47] When I look back in my career, I really do think that waiting tables had a big impact on my ability to have empathy for others and really see what's going on and especially peripherally in meetings and things like that. The people who have the body language that says they need something or they want to say something, but no one's around them or just the perfect awareness of what's going on with people. I got pretty good at being able to read tables and and understand who was needed more coffee and who was happy with their meal or who was unhappy with their meal. So I think that taught me a ton about human behavior and how to approach different types of people and how to adjust your message in order to be heard better. And I really think that's carried through. I've always believed in that kind of customer service orientation. That's what computers, the user interface for a computer is actually that it's customer service for the computer. So how can you make it so people can accept it and are enjoying the experience? And that's really bled into everything that I've done.

Jesse Purewal [00:07:53] So set the scene for me here. As you're moving through high school and getting ready for college, you're you're waiting tables. You're learning about what it's like to create an experience and get input insight into people and at the same time making a little money. And you're also getting really good at math and you begin to teach yourself programing coding, is that right?

Julie Larson-Green [00:08:15] So in my high school yearbook, I said that I wanted to get a degree, a master's degree in computer science and work at a computer company. And so this is nineteen eighty. And I hadn't actually ever seen a computer except for the Apple II E that was in our office at my high school. And so the reason that I said that is I thought I could use my skills and for logic and thinking through problems and use my creativity and problem solving and use my skills and math to be able to create something that would be pretty cool. And so when I looked at when I did the research on like, what do you want to be when you grow up and start looking at what made me excited about computing sounded like the right thing. So I went to school. I decided I was going to be computer science as my degree, and I was going to start learning to write code and kind of the more traditional path. But the computer labs are only open at night. And I was waiting tables at night and I couldn't get an exception to use the computer labs during the day. Now, this is before everyone had a computer on every desk. And so I changed my major I changed my major to business management and information systems. I started working in our small microcomputer lab and started helping people learn how to use Lotus one, two, three and WordPerfect. And Symfony, if anyone remembers that. And so when I graduated, I applied at Microsoft because the biggest thing going and computing and I also applied for a customer support specialist job at a company called Aldus, a small startup. So the same day that I got hired by Aldus, I also got the thanks but no thanks letter from Microsoft. And I was hired not on my computer skills, but on these customer service skills, on the ability to listen to what people were asking me, be able to put myself in their position and be able to answer their questions. And so I started programing about 10 months into that job. And then from there, I got an opportunity to be an associate software engineer and start writing import filters for WordPerfect and word and other ways of getting text into page maker. And I worked my way up from there. So I went back to school, got my master's degree in software engineering at Seattle University while I was working, and eventually became a lead of a big area of the product and had people working for me and was really focused on helping people understand what we should build.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:56] So fast forward a few years for me at at Microsoft. When you were there, you oversaw a quite successful launch of a flagship product in Windows seven. You had thousands of people reporting to you. You had a solid product in the market, you're working at a growing company. How did you experience that time in your role at Microsoft?

Julie Larson-Green [00:11:21] That was probably one of the biggest inflection points in my career, where I was running the user experience product management team. And I had 13 folks that worked for me and we were responsible for doing the ribbon and redoing the user experience for office. That was a really hard project. I learned a lot. And then after that project got done, I got made a vice president and got asked to move to Windows to lead the product management team or program management team for Windows seven. So I went from those 13 people to five hundred and forty in one day and that was a pretty big change. I had never led that many people. So it was scary. It was scary at first. And I had a really great mentor and and people that around me that just assured me that, you know what you're doing. You've been the product manager for a long time. You've seen all these situations. You know what to go do now. You just need to figure out how to scale your communication style and how to help other people learn to do what you know you can do. And so it was a big learning experience. I'm really proud of that release. It became a very top selling upgrade and very highly regarded version of Windows. That was a lot of fun to work on. And I learned a lot about leading teams at scale and creating vision and organizing for outcomes. We really restructured the way the team was designed and brought design to the same level as engineering and product management and decision making. And and it really informed a lot of my thinking post that time in how I approach my work.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:01] Yeah, I want to come back to the Organizing for Outcomes point, but let me linger on 13 to five hundred forty. What were the things that the team excelled in and what were the things where maybe you had to invest or over invest your time to keep on schedule and to keep growing and to meet all the deadlines that were so important for the company with that release?

Julie Larson-Green [00:13:29] Well, what I learned that I've applied ever since then is that it's very important to set up the goals and the challenging problem to get solved at the beginning and to take the time to get out on the table all the points of view and all the opinions and all the things that are leading people to make decisions up front. And so the way I like to talk about it is your brain is a processor and we all have this high powered processor that we're all working together. We all have a certain amount of schooling, a certain amount of intelligence, and we're putting inputs into that processor that are informing the outputs. Well, just like with a regular computer or a physical computer, if you put different inputs into the program, you're going to get different outputs. So I learned that spending the time up front to make sure that we were all working from the same inputs was the way to get the team aligned on having shared goals and same outputs. And so that's a mistake that I see lots of people making as they just go for the conclusion because they want to move fast. But they forget to take that time upfront to make sure that everybody knows what each other knows about the problem space and that we have an agreed direction on what success is going to look like.

Jesse Purewal [00:14:51] Well, and what's interesting about the processor analog, on one hand, pulling in all of the inputs so that everyone's on the same song sheet in terms of the set of facts you're operating with is hugely important. But then you also value and generate a ton of value from the diversity of outputs that people create with that common set of facts.

Julie Larson-Green [00:15:19] Absolutely. And when I joined the Windows team, I had never been in windows. I used windows. I developed products on top of Windows. I was the expert on that side of it, but I wasn't an expert on the technology and I didn't think I was going to be necessarily the smartest person in the room on every single subject. So I had to create an environment where I could recognize the best ideas and recognize that the best ideas could come from anywhere in the organization, not just the people that work directly for me or just from my bosses or or from myself. So that became a very important part of my leadership style, was to really look outside the expected areas into other ways of thinking in order to come up with problems and solutions to problems.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:07] Yeah. Let me ask you about the context of working within Microsoft at that time and in general throughout your career. I think there are a lot of people who listen to this show who think about our next move or a first move in a career. And sometimes when you're thinking about a move, one of the vectors you're debating in yourself is a big company, a small company. You know, do I do my own thing? Do I go to an established thing? By all appearances, a decision to go to a place like Microsoft feels like it's on one end of that spectrum. But when I hear you tell the story of the 13 to 540, that is sort of a hypergrowth. Element within a broader organization. Do you think there is such a thing as a trade off between I'm going to go to a small place and I'm going to go to a big place, or is it much more about the experiences that you set up for yourself within the context that you choose?

Julie Larson-Green [00:17:09] I've thought about that a lot, and people ask me that question a lot for me at Microsoft. Never felt like a big place at every problem that I worked on, every team that I worked on, it seemed. Very fast moving and very intimate. Working on a problem with a set of people just like it has felt with Qualtrics, so inside of the work that I did for each of the teams that I was on, it felt very much like I thought a startup would feel. The differences were that I could move inside of the company and continue to make my reputation, take the things that I've learned, the relationships that I had built in the company to other places with me. And so I had an easier time starting over in a new team than you would if you were completely leaving and going to a new company. And then I realized that I really enjoyed not just building product, but building teams that build product and the amount of impact that you can have and the amount of output you can get and the amount of value you can create, not just for the company that you work for, but the world and the people that experience that and can build the businesses on top of the things that you you are creating and and how you can really get in the flow with your team.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:27] And what about the dimension of belonging and inclusion? I mean, today in 2020, although there are immense challenges to getting where we want to go as a society and as a group of companies in the private sector, so much work needs to be done on inclusion and belonging and diversity.

Julie Larson-Green [00:18:49] Sure, when I worked at Aldus, we had lots of female engineering leaders and that was a time in computing where there were more women that were in computing percentage wise than there are today. So I learned from some very amazing women early on and didn't really think about whether women should belong or not belong. But when I went to Microsoft, I ran a focus group for them with my peers and they asked me to come and interview for a job and visual C++. And I was the first or second woman into that organization. And early I could tell these are very deep technologists and they're working on the compiler. They're working on the kernel. They're working on really low level computing. And I've been working on end-user things on the Mac and on PC with page maker. And I knew right away that I wasn't going to distinguish myself or compete, so to speak. So I felt like I could pivot my understanding of computing with my understanding of human behavior and what outcomes people are trying to get from computing and become more of a person that focused on why are we making this technology, what is the end user value, what are the things that customers are trying to achieve rather than just being excited about building the technology. And so that definitely was a choice that I made and it definitely was uncomfortable. At many points in time. You you get called not technical or you don't know enough about the technology to be able to make good decisions and things like that. So I had to redecide many times that I wanted to be the advocate for the end user rather than trying to show off my technical expertise. And and at times I think it hurt my career. But overall, I think it helped my career because computing was also changing from being about, hey, look what we can do with this technology, and here's all the check boxes and radio buttons and all these choices you can make into trying to make it more turnkey and make it more accessible to more people who wanted just to get things done rather than learn all everything about the technology.

Jesse Purewal [00:20:58] So you in twenty thirteen had been at Microsoft for a number of years and at that point you were made the head of product and engineering for all devices, an amazing role, one that you were by rights astonishingly well qualified for. But you experienced at that time, if I remember right, some people in gaming circles because Xbox hardware engineering fell under you within this device is remit questioning the move, like, is this person a gamer? Can a woman be in a role like this? What's going to happen to the product now? So by this time in your career, or were you sort of able to shrug that off and move on and regard it as a little bit childish, or was that something that that got to you because of all the investment that you had personally made in creating these useful and great experiences, user by user?

Julie Larson-Green [00:22:02] Well, I think it definitely affects you when people put things on you that aren't accurate and make assumptions about you because of how you look or things you've worked on or and don't really know the true story or know you. I mean, definitely learned not to read comments on the Internet from this and not to pay too much attention to to social media and comments about that, because there's always going to be people that see a different side or put their own perspective on the motivations of your of what you're doing. And so I tried to be true to myself and the people that were around me and the the hardware division job was a great it was a really fun job for me because it was kind of the culmination of a whole bunch of different things in my career in that I worked on the user experience and these individual products. I got to work on the thing that was completely from the unboxing through the first use, through use of our time. And it was complete experience of something. And that was really exciting to me. And I've been known as a software person and I hadn't really worked on deep hardware. So there were things, challenges and things to overcome working with the people who had been in that space for a long time. And there was also the external perception of who should be running hardware divisions. And there are some really amazing women in the Xbox team that run big parts of our product. Bonnie Ross is the inspiration to me and she and others helped me through some of the darker times when I first took over. But there was lots of positive moments, too, where my son thought I was super cool for having Xbox on my team. And he came running in one day with his gaming magazine. And there I was like the new the new head of the hardware division. And it's like, Mom, mom, you're my gaming magazine. So I was finally, finally cool for a minute.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:03] You had finally arrived like it's one thing to work in a Fortune 50 Fortune 75 company. It's yet another thing to lead up gaming. But, boy, when you get the endorsement, they also got to visit the studio and he has a master chief statue that's still in his bedroom. And yeah, it was a really fun, cool time. It didn't last very long because we bought Nokia and Stephen Elop came back to run that the division. And so I was without knowing what I was going to do next for a little while there, I put a lot into my career and having impact, worked in a lot of different places inside of Microsoft. And it was unclear to me where I was, what my next step was going to be. And we also had an outgoing CEO and incoming CEO and I didn't know who the incoming CEO was going to be. But the day that Satya Nadella was announced, he met with me and talked to me about what he'd been thinking about what I could do to help Microsoft.

Jesse Purewal [00:25:08] This is Satya Nadella, who was then made the CEO of Microsoft.

Julie Larson-Green [00:25:12] Right. And so I talked to him right away, as soon as he was announced. I met with him that same day and he talked to me about his thinking about how he was wanted to remake the culture of Microsoft. He wanted people to have a Microsoft experience for their products, how he wanted to use machine learning and A.I. to improve people's experiences. And so he asked me to be the Chief Experience Officer at Microsoft and give me an incubation team of three hundred. And we set off to experiment on the future of productivity and how to rethink experiences and also start down the path of changing the culture. So the products that you got from Microsoft worked well together and were more seamless. And that I learned a lot from that. That was a lot of fun and I really appreciated the opportunity to do that. I had the opportunity to experiment with new ways of delivering products and kind of getting away from the shrinkwrap software way into more modern ways of working and kind of doing the hybrid of how can you create an environment where you can have the stability and change management that an enterprise needs, but also have the rapid deployment and rapid iteration and rapid incubation of new ideas that a startup would have. And so that was a lot of fun. I learned a lot.

Jesse Purewal [00:26:47] Let me ask you about the conversation with Satya and the door that that opens, because that's a key moment. Going back to your first job was to look after the experiences people were having. And so here you are in a role where now you have this kind of special ops team tiger team to go kind of invent some elements of what future experiences could be. And and you, interestingly, have this title, this chief experience officer title. At that time, it wasn't as if people knew, exactly what that meant. So in some ways, you were one of the defining forces and defining personas behind what that could mean.

Julie Larson-Green [00:27:33] It is definitely a role that is emerging. The chief experience officer role is basically taking care of the experience health of the company and being the person generally at the C Suite level like we do at a Qualtrics, where you are the person who is taking care of the experience health and working closely with the CEO and the COO on the operational health of the business and bringing together those two pieces, the operational health and the experience health and that process of, you know, selling the idea of coherence in the experience over consistency, in the experience, changing people's points of view from thinking about only their product instead of the Microsoft experience taught me a lot about culture and how much the culture informs the products that you build and the outcomes that customers experience and how employees feel about working on the products and how customers feel about working on products and how people feel about the brand of your company.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:39] Yes, see more about this piece, because to me, this is a cousin to the point that you made earlier when you said that you're thinking of humans and teams as as essential processors where, you know, inputs can create outputs if the culture you create on the inside reflects what you do outside. That speaks to not just being the chief experience officer of your customer, but also of of your employee. And so you sort of have these two sides of the same coin.

Julie Larson-Green [00:29:13] Absolutely. And that was one of the things I that really got to experience and learn when I started leading the office team where we had a very strong culture and individual products Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all working together, tangentially together, thinking about Office as a selling motion as much as an experience for people. And so we started to break down and experiment with breaking down some of the walls between the apps and organize things into instead of the individual apps, organize them into capabilities. So instead of having that word and PowerPoint team separate, we combine those together and created a authoring and storytelling team. And so the world and the purpose for those products, instead of the PowerPoint team's job helping people make PowerPoint, their job, became helping people communicate ideas and being part of this bigger pie of helping people be productive and getting their work done. So all those things kind of are what led me to Qualtrics and thinking about tools that would help people connect and make coherent their culture, their products, their customer experiences and their brand.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:28] Walk me through that time when you made that transition. Tell me a little bit about what was going on in your head and whether or not it was a difficult decision and what kind of dimensions you evaluated the opportunity on.

Julie Larson-Green [00:30:44] Well, I almost didn't do the interview because they're looking for a chief people officer and the company was on high trajectory, growing very quickly. And they were looking for someone to come in and build the people systems. And while I really enjoyed creating the environment for my teams and creating the the structure of operating and the values for the team and and the culture and culture is very important thing to me. I didn't think I would be able to stay in my lane about the product, and I thought I would definitely want to meddle and understand what we're building and have opinions about what to build. And and so I was going to turn it down and I met with Jared Smith, Ryan's brother and co-founder. And before I could say, hey, it's been great getting to know you guys and I really like what you're doing, but this isn't the role for me. They offered me the chief experience officer role and said, you know, it starts out you've talked about two things. You've talked about culture. You've talked about product design. And so we want to build a role that is those two things that we're going to give you, the people operations team and the design team. And it's small, but it's a start of us moving towards to be more design led and experience led in what we build, in what we develop. And I said yes on the spot because it just seemed perfect. The two things I cared the most about people and design or culture and design. And so fast forward, I was able to take that role from those two starting points to building up a really efficient people, operations team and a recruiting team, you know, hiring like crazy, we've almost doubled the size of the company or more than doubled the size of the company since I got here. And so that's thousands of people a year that are hiring. And we also now have a very effective people operations organization that's run by Russ Laraway, who came in and was doing our our training of our managers. And we have a really good system now in place for around performance, pay, promotion and equity model. And on the product side, I was able to take that design role and turn it into a product vision and leadership role and help move Qualtrics into experience management. So in the first year, we made a lot of changes, a lot of movement to platform the way we're thinking about doing things so we can scale and move more quickly and led the product platform, team, PM team, as well as design across to everything and research, product research cost everything. And so it's been lots of fun. It's been a lesson in both product building and building and beating the market and meeting the aspirations of where we think this new category can be and how important it is for every company on the planet to understand the experience that they're putting out in the world, as well as building up the individual disciplines inside, as well as building up this thing called CXO, where, you know, you are taking care of the experience health of the company and our understanding, the employee experience that you're creating, how that informs the customer experience, what the product ends up being like, and then ultimately how people feel about you as a company and your brand.

Jesse Purewal [00:34:09] Julie, will every company in three to five years in tech need to have a customer experience officer? Or are there models where the customer experience officer, accountability or mindset needs to be deconstructed across the person running products, the person running talent, the person running the marketing? How would you reckon with the potential creative tension that says on one hand, having a CXO with accountability makes a ton of sense? On the other hand, isn't everything a company is doing with its brand, with its product, with its experience, with its employees? In a sense, experience and experience officer is in every technology leader.

Julie Larson-Green [00:34:57] I would say the answer is yes. So it's both. I think the company needs to be focused on experience. That's what sets great companies apart already today is the experience you put out in the world. You can have two competing products. The one that's going to win is the one that meets the customer needs the best and it's the the most pleasant to be part of and the pleasant, whether it's a service, a software or a hardware device. All of it is you're going to win an experience every single time. There's lots of examples of that. And so they take that forward and into how we built the product and how we relate with customers and what we do in our sales motion and what we do in support and how we take care of people. And and in turn, you know, customers feel that and come back for more. So so I think it's very important role that it's important to have somebody in the C Suite who's responsible for looking across all of these different things and making sure they tie together, because once you start looking at it, invariably people will start with wanting to measure their customer experience. They're probably already doing it in marketing or they're doing CSAT or NPS or other things where they're trying to see where they're at and how they're comparing to their competitors or just how they can improve their experiences down the road. And we're starting to see this a lot in our business does start to see that the employee experience is has an impact on that customer experience and that we need to make sure that everything is aligned, that the things you incent in that employee experience help inform how you want customers to feel about what you're putting out in the world.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:40] I love that. Thank you for such clarity on that point. Tell me what you think it is going to take to be an effective leader in tech over the next, let's call it five to ten years. What kinds of experiences do you think will turn out to have been a good use of someone's time over the next few years? If if they want to invest of themselves and grow themselves to to be a leader in the industry that you and I are in?

Julie Larson-Green [00:37:11] I think it's still the same thing that I thought it was 30 years ago, which is it's about what technology can do to improve the human experience.And so getting lots of ideas and understanding, creating empathy for what other people are going through and how to use technology to improve that experience for them, as I think continues to be the number one thing. And I think that being more open to other ideas, being listening more, being curious about other people's experiences and really bringing together what you know about technology and the challenges in the human experience and and matching those things together.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:55] That's great. And what do you think would be your key piece of advice for an aspiring builder? Julie, if there's somebody who wants to go make their mark on the world and their community, their organization or even themselves, what would be the piece of advice you've accumulated over the years in your various roles that you'd want to share and leave people with?

Julie Larson-Green [00:38:20] To me, it's the Simon Sinek book. Start With Why? So why are you doing this? Why are you building this? What is your hypothesis? I use the scientific method to help bring people around and bring people together to the thing that you think needs to be built, be open to look to the ways of getting there, be open to outcome, be open, you know, strong on the on the output or the vision of where you what you want to achieve, but be open to how you get there. So I think the most important thing is to spend that upfront time dumping all the marbles out on the table before you start sorting them and putting them in piles, get everybody together, understand where everybody's coming from, what they bring to the table. Sky's the limit.

Jesse Purewal [00:39:07] Well, Julie, this has been fun. This has been a joy. It's gone by so fast. You are a brilliant mathematician. You are an astonishing programmer. You are an innovative technologist. You are astounding people leader and certainly one of the colleagues I'm incredibly proud to call a friend. So thank you so much for being able to to do this.

Julie Larson-Green [00:39:35] Well, thanks so much, Jessie. It was really fun talking with you and I hope people enjoyed hearing my story. And that will inspire some people or people to get into computing and help make technology better for everyone.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:00] All right. Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to my conversation with the fabulous Julie Larson Green. It was so great to take that trip with her into her past, up to her present and explore some of the early experiences that shaped what she's done in her incredible career.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:14] Now, as you all know, one of the things we do after every one of these shows, since you are breakthrough builders, is to lay out some building blocks. A building block is an action I want you to take, inspired by what our guest on the show today has shared. It's a way of taking a core element of the conversation and applying it to you. Julie talked today about the thread that has run throughout her career and her life putting experience at the center. She's got a deep, authentic empathy for what people want and need for fixing what's wrong and for creating experiences that work for people started back in her first job as a waitress, and it extends into her current role as the chief experience officer at Qualtrics for this week's building block. Here's what I'd like you to do. Put yourself into the role of that chief customer officer or that customer experience officer for any organization you're a part of. You're the CXO of your company, your neighborhood association, your church group, whatever it is, just get into that head space. Pick one organization you're a part of and now you're the chief experience officer. I want you to write down two things. Number one, as the new CXO, what's the biggest experience gap that you have to close? What's that part of the experience of your company's product or your group's service or your organization's culture that just needs to be improved? And what specific steps, what specific actions would you take to improve it? And number two, what's an experience your organization doesn't provide today that if it did, could be an incredible breakthrough where maybe you're missing a big opportunity to do something great for customers or for employees. And what specific steps, again, would it take to be able to pull this one off? I think you will find if you if you work on this building block, you'll get to some really pragmatic and doable things, stuff that you and the people around you can go pull off. It might seem daunting at first, but in order to get to the monumental, you start with the incremental and you do your part to make the world just a little bit of a better place by serving up that much better of an experience to people. If you want some templates and tips and tricks on how to get started, check out the show notes it's right here in the app. You're listening to this episode on or over on our website. Breakthrough-Builders.com. That's Breakthrough Hyphen Builders Dot com. Take care Breakthrough Builders and be well.

Jesse Purewal [00:42:36] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 1Jesse Purewaltechnology, experience management