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The FODcast
In the FODcast (The Future of #DigitalCommerce) we explore the real career stories of the people who have made it to the very top of the sector and those who are working at the cutting edge of innovation and change right now. Listeners to the podcast gain insight into the journeys industry leaders have taken to be where they are today, the challenges they are facing now and their aims for the future.
The FODcast
Breaking the Cycle of Business Transformation Failures with Phill Gillespie
Why Do So Many Business Transformations Fail?
In this episode of The FODcast, we’re joined by Phill Gillespie, currently Client Engagement Principal at Mindera, to explore why digital transformations often fall short—and what businesses can do differently. From misunderstood MVPs to the psychological barriers that hold teams back, we uncover the real challenges behind lasting change.
💡 Key takeaways:
- Why transformation isn’t a one-time fix—and how to get it right
- The role of communication in overcoming internal resistance
- Why companies should rethink MVPs
- How businesses like Monzo succeed in customer-first transformation
- The hidden emotional factors that influence adoption and engagement
🎙️ Don’t miss this essential conversation. Whether you’re leading transformation or stuck in the trenches, Phill’s insights will help you rethink your approach and avoid the common pitfalls.
Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.
Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/
Welcome to the latest series of the Fodcast, where we bring you the latest insights into the future of digital commerce. In season six, we continue to interview some of the most respected professionals in the industry as we broaden the topics to cover what it takes to build a business within e-commerce, navigating through business change, as well as the future of technology within digital commerce. As we continue our journey to have one of the best podcasts within commerce, we ask you to like and share within your network if you enjoy our content. Hello and welcome back to the podcast the Future of All Things Digital Comas.
Speaker 1:Today, I'd like to welcome Phil Gillespie as we talk through business change and transformation, but, more specifically, what we keep doing wrong when it comes to customers and how we can be successful moving forward. Welcome, phil. Thank you, nice to be here. Great to have you on the show. So Phil spent the past six years consulting with companies such as Andigital and Mindera, where he's currently client engagement principal. Before this, he spent many years customer side in senior product focus positions. But, phil, do you want to take over and give the audience a quick summary of your background?
Speaker 2:Of course, quite happy to.
Speaker 2:The most interesting thing to people listening and watching today will be I spent a few years as the Chief Product Officer at Money Dashboard. It was one of the first fintechs in the UK one of the oldest ones really at that wave of at neobanks and open banking and it's a big thing we're involved in After Money Dashboard, trying to help people be better with their money. I was very lucky to do some work with the guys at 11FS to design and build a new bank in Hong Kong. The bank is called Mox it's for Standard Chartered. I was the first product lead given a blank piece of paper to innovate in the way that people bank in Hong Kong. That's now rated as the fifth best bank in the world and I'm very pleased about that.
Speaker 2:Spent a couple of years consulting myself and then joined Andigital to head up their product and customer experience consulting practice and a couple of years ago I joined Mindera where I was splitting my time between being a client engagement account director and doing some strategic innovation on the learning and development side and also with our ai labs as well awesome, thank you.
Speaker 1:I really like the, the fact you've got a split from both sides of the fence. Obviously, some of the work you were doing, obviously before consulting and then obviously in the last uh, last six years or so, consulting across a variety of different uh industries, companies, etc. It's going to give you very broad knowledge and I know this is an area that you're very passionate about as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and thanks for that. It's one of those things that gives credibility when I start talking to people. Is the okay, all right, yeah, you've, you've been in the trenches, you've done it, and I've done it predominantly from a startup or startups within bigger companies as well, so it's not. I've had massive programs where the risk of failure is very low it's relatively small things, but where the risk of failure is incredibly high and the potential downside is incredibly high, but the the upside is massive as well.
Speaker 1:So look as, as mentioned, today, we're going to be talking about business change and transformation and we're kicking things off boldly. So why do businesses constantly fail at transformations, especially product transformations, phil?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question, and one of the things that does amuse me is why I'm smiling already. If we wind the clock back by 15 years or so, we were going through a wave of digital transformations and this was, you know, the single most important thing. Financial services were one of the first places to actually go through that. That was the first wave of transformations. We're now on our fourth wave of transformation, yet every single time, we keep making the mistake of thinking this, this is a one and done event. We we make mistakes in how we set ourselves up. We make mistakes in the way we actually go about the change and communicating it, and then are thinking that, okay, yeah, you know what I, I'm done. I've been to the gym once. That's me fit forever. It's like. No, this is a continual evolution that moves on, and if I talk through the four waves in my head the transformation 4.0, if you like, the first wave being the digital transformation the vast majority of reasons why that failed is because we didn't do digital transformations. We digitized things. If I think about financial services, the amount of places that simply took a paper loan application or paper credit card application, digitized it and put it on the web and got you to do exactly the same things. It wasn't really until the mobile revolution brought about by the iPhone, changing was moving for accessing the web from laptops to mobile devices. But when we started using mobile devices and that mobile revolution kicked in, we then started to create digital solutions that were not just a simple digitized version. That was good, we're all sorted with that. I'm like, right, okay, we now have digital solutions. We're great.
Speaker 2:That took us to the second wave of agile transformations, and one of the big problems in there is the idea that people were doing agile. That's fundamental flaw in a fundamental lack of understanding. People were treating agile with a capital A. They were treating it as a thing that you just simply do, rather than it's something you actually are and you be. So what the majority of Agile transformations ended up being is you're going to have a morning meeting. It's going to be the first thing of the day. You're all going to get together. You're going to justify your job yesterday, you're going to justify your job today, you're going to say no blockers at the end and then you're going to carry on and do your work as normal and you're going to make vague forecasts around the future. It's so far detached from the principles of agility and the idea of what the benefits you get from this flexible mind-sight and adapting. But that's the way that the agile transformation became and after a little while people weren't getting the value from it. They were realizing this is not good.
Speaker 2:So we ended up into a third wave, a third wave of product transformations and, on the simplest level, there you have a bunch of engineers who were previously the most important people in the business but because customers were, the focus was now suddenly on customers. Right, we need to get product people in. Let's take these business analysts. Let's retrain them over the course of a week. Let's sheep dip them. Change their job title to product owner or product manager. Great, now you're in charge developers. You just get to build whatever these product people say. Product people you go, you work out what our clients actually and our customers need.
Speaker 2:Surprise, surprise, that's failing badly because it's disenfranchising the engineering people. It's not creating a sense of community. There's still no agility in it and the vast majority of solutions are being created in an ivory tower by product managers who don't really get any of the principles and just randomly deciding what they think would be good and what they're. A bunch of data is actually pointing towards that. It looks like you know, if you ask people what they want, they'll tell you faster iPhones to split.
Speaker 2:Two analogies there, and fourth one we get to is this big AI transformations that we're going through now and again it's a. We've got a bunch of tech. Let's try and find a solution that we can. Let's try and find a way of leveraging it into our business and that will make us a load of profit. It doesn't. It won't. There are principles behind it. There is obsessions with customers. There's bringing people together. There is obsessions with customers. There's bringing people together and there's so much about the change process that gets lost. But on that simple level, you have the promise of something magical and then just failure to get any of the principles and wondering why it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:So I smiled as you were talking through some of those. I mean been, uh, been in the game now for nearly 15 years and I hear about a lot of this on this side of the phone, but particularly the the points you made about product. Um, the amount of people I've spoken to that have just said the company just doesn't get the product mindset. They've hired me as a product owner but I'm not being a product owner. Or, uh, I go back maybe five years when the role was starting to become more prominent and, as you said, it's like a glorified business analyst and it's like, well, it's not, but that's that was seen as like the, the go-to. Let's promote our bas into a product owner or product manager and uh, yeah, it just makes me laugh because it's stuff that I've seen and uh, and seen regularly as well yeah, I mean, it's the equivalent of, you know, finding someone who is good at running and going.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give you a one week course and you're going to be a yogi master at the end of it. You're going to, you've got legs you can move, you've got decent cardio fitness, but that doesn't. That's about where the comparisons, uh the similarities, stop. It is such a totally different thing that. But it's like, yeah, we'll just sheep dip you and there you go, and they're setting people up for failure rather than success and unimpressing their customers as well so look, you mentioned at the start of this that, um, we keep making the same mistake, that it's that, it's a one and done and it's not.
Speaker 1:And you're not the the first person that said this to me. As you mentioned, we're now in our fourth wave. Why are we still making the same mistake like why have we not learned the lessons over the last 20 years or so?
Speaker 2:I think there's two things here. The first one is psychology, um, and then the second one is investment. I'll talk about the psychology bit for a second, if you want. We can talk about the investment in it. I the the psychology.
Speaker 2:I mean this, it's. It almost sounds like common sense and it is when you talk to someone outside or when you put yourself in a third person. But you're and you're in the moment, the execs, the C-suite that I've been involved with. They spend months thinking about a transformation. They hire consultants, consultants with good intentions and good skills and then you go through this process of crafting the purpose, the reason why behind the transformation, the need for it, the commercial drivers. You shake this all up and then one day you surprise people. It spooks everyone because change frightens people and they have an instinctive limbic reaction to it, where they go into freeze, fight or flight mode. They're panicking. They're panicking on what does it mean for me? What does it mean for my job? It creates fear. Yet the people who've set this up they've had three, four months to actually think through this get used to the change understand what's actually happening. So they're so far ahead in the journey happening. So they're so far ahead in the journey.
Speaker 2:The second part of the psychology aspect is about communication, and I'll give you an example from when I was a CPO. Myself and my CEO were convinced that we had communicated amply about the likelihood of a decision being made. We'd sowed the seeds, we'd communicated, we talked about it. We knew that people were bored with what we were actually saying. When we came to actually announce it, it was a shock to everyone in the company and that really took us back, because we were convinced that we had really bored people with this. We might have had one or two conversations with someone over the course of a couple of weeks, but when I multiply that with the different people I was speaking to, I was having 20 conversations a week about this. But of course it's only one or two conversations with you and, to be quite frank, you don't listen to everything I say. Nobody does. There's a very limited filter of what actually sticks. So I may have said it, I may have buried it in other things, I may have not added the amount of route, of the correct amount of weight to it, or simply it just passed through people's heads.
Speaker 2:So the when you think you've over communicated, communicated, you almost certainly haven't. I've once in my career had a team of people literally beg me to stop talking about something because they said to me I get it, you really don't have to keep talking, we get it. And they could recite it back. And that was the point. I was like, okay, one, I've definitely communicated that enough and two people will tell you if they've heard it. I will tell people, my colleagues, my peers, if I've heard something from them over and over again. I'll tell my friends when they're telling that same story over and over again. It's like, yes, I know the punchline to this, we've got it, but we make that mistake that we think we've over communicated. So you've got change aspect of spooking people, you've got the over communication or lack of over communication, and I get. The other thing really is the third aspect of the, the psychology. Really is the what?
Speaker 2:is in it for the people, for the vast amount of your colleagues, if you start a transformation program and say this is going to be better for the business, it's going to drive revenue, it's going to drive profitability. Those aren't things that are keeping me awake at night. I'm not lying in bed wondering about how my company can be more profitable If I was a senior shareholder sure, if I. You know previous C-suite yeah, absolutely, but the vast majority of people, no, it's. What does it mean to me on an individual basis? What does it mean on my job, on my security, on the way I work, on my happiness, on the engagement, on what we're trying to achieve in our purpose, in our mission as our company? So those aspects of trying to minimize the fear from the change try to over-communicate and also explain it in terms that are relevant to me as an individual, rather than why the company is going to benefit. Because the company is going to benefit always. Companies always do, but really people are at the heart of a transformation, not a company.
Speaker 1:That's also on the psychology side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the company only benefits if the people adopt the change right, and I think the biggest issue that we're finding is that people aren't adopting the change. Uh, I've heard of tens of transformations over the years where, where it just hasn't been the case and and actually there's still issues six, nine months down the line because the staff or the employees, they don't. They don't understand the new systems or they're still asking questions around how they can do something as if they're using the old system, when actually you would do it in a completely different way. And that goes down to the ongoing training, the communication, et cetera. But it's good to hear that you learned your lesson anyway, phil, and actually you were being told to shut up politely.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, and the last point you made just then. You're absolutely right that the, that was the investment aspect, the, the amount of transformations, where you, they spend. The plan is to spend virtually all the money on the tech, on the implementation, on the consultants to help it, and then it just stops. The the better guiding principle is to spend 50% of your money on the transformation and 50% on the ongoing adoption and the learning. The analogy I use is like spending all of your money on a lavish wedding party the food, the wine, the beautiful place settings but having no waiting staff, no bartenders, no chefs, no DJ, no one even basically letting you into the venue. There's just a sign outside that says wedding this way and you go in there and it's chaos.
Speaker 2:There's no MCs, there's no, it's just a free for all. Yes, you've got very pretty tables. Yes, there's a DJ booth over there, but there's no one actually trying to get people up on the dance floor. There's no one changing the music. There's no one making sure people are fed and and have access to drink. It's just we've spent all our money. Why? Why aren't? Why aren't people enjoying themselves like?
Speaker 1:you've got to do that follow-through, you've got to do the uh, you've got to spend the money on the ongoing adoption and split it 50 50 you actually took the uh, the next question out of my mouth because I was going to ask you how much companies should apportion, in terms of percentage, to ongoing change and transformation. 50% is huge.
Speaker 2:It is, and whether it's 50, 40, 35, 60, it doesn't really matter. It's the principle behind it that you're not spending almost all your money on the actual tech, on the implementation, it on the tech, on the implementation. It's the follow-through, the ongoing, the adoption. Otherwise, you end up going back in situations like the digitization. And to give you another example here, away from the wedding, although vaguely linked to weddings, it's the. As you're going through that transformation, you're changing. A lot of things are changing. You've got tech implementations, you've got different changes of process. You're taking people on the journey and then you're going to hold their hand afterwards. It's the.
Speaker 2:There are lots of things that are going to be let go. There are going to be processes that have changed. There are systems, ways of doing things that you're not going to use, and it's kind the same as the. You then need to get rid of them and prune them and adapt to the things that aren't actually useful. It's like when you I've had this personally myself when you move house and you have a load of things in boxes and you stick those boxes in the garage or in the loft and then after several years you come back to them and those boxes are still in the garage and still in the loft and you never open them in several years. It's like this is just what this really needs to be let go, this was wasted, you're not needed it, and then getting so getting rid of them after the transformation in that continual ongoing process, rather than treating it as a great. The big bang ends on this point and then we're kind of done. It's the ongoing adoption and the ongoing learning that's. That's super important yeah.
Speaker 1:So that made me chuckle because I'm I'm going to go for a house move and an office move at the minute. Um, and the amount of things that I've picked up. I actually opened up a um, a package, uh, this week which was still in the original Royal Mail package so I'm going off tangent a little bit here and it had an order date for March 2019. This has been sat in my drawer for five, over five years, still sealed up from Royal Mail, and I actually contemplated if I need to take it with me when we move office. I was like no, I definitely do not need this, but you know, it's exactly right in what you say.
Speaker 2:That box contains sealed air that doesn't have any COVID in it. It's pre-COVID.
Speaker 1:Wow, I never thought that.
Speaker 2:Maybe I could sell it.
Speaker 1:Might not be that tight. Yeah, whilst it's off topic slightly, I mean it just further emphasises your point. So, before we move on, you've been in this space for a long time. How, roughly speaking, how many companies, um, do you believe, do apportion the right amount of money and budget and time to business change, versus the ones who don't?
Speaker 2:that's a really good question. I mean the famous stats that mckinsey trot out are around a third of companies going through any form of transformation actually get the value out of it that they want? I might be a little bit more pessimistic and kind of focus around the 25%, maybe even down to 20%. Most companies have good intentions, but when you start seeing things it's easy to just go, oh, that's fine, you know what? Yeah, actually our budgets are being squeezed, we'll just stop it there and it's the.
Speaker 2:You don't get the real value. It's the last bits that give you the real value, rather than because you're actually making sure that they're set and it's not just that you're trying to. You know you're learning the basics of how to play a game or how to get fit, but then you're just stopping. I've run one kilometre, that's fine. I don't need to learn how to run 5k or 10k. One k is fine. It's like you're not going to get the increase in your health by just doing that initial bit. It just sort of tapers off. So I'd be more pessimistic than McKinsey.
Speaker 2:But if anyone can correct me please do so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean regardless, the numbers are low and it needs to be higher than that. I really like your analogies as well about fitness and stuff something I can relate to and I think it really helps us to understand exactly where we're in that journey. Um, so cool, all right, so let's move. Let's move on to um. The next question then, film, which is um, uh, why do companies who claim to be customer first get it wrong?
Speaker 2:that is really interesting and I I'll be in parts of these answer I'll be a little bit pessimistic. Uh, we'll start with there and I'll bring some more optimism in the end. I think an awful lot of companies in my experience from I've seen from looking at them uh, looking from afar as well, from outside they claim they have product teams. Obviously we go back to the, the business analyst um example earlier. They are really just glorified feature factories. They have senior stakeholders who decide on a bunch of ideas and give them to the product teams to be implemented. So they're being given worst case features to be implemented, best case solutions to be implemented. It's still really bad. They're not being given problems to be solved.
Speaker 2:So it's a but things that have got to be ticked off, items you've got to be ticked off. You're not starting. These teams are not starting with the customer and working backwards about looking at what the customer actually needs, how, what they, what the customer really needs, separating out what they think they need and what they actually need, their emotions, what they're trying to do, how that aligns with what we're trying to do as a business, and then trying to find those problems and then trying to find how to solve them. So the majority of product teams, even if they have cross-functional teams that are genuinely collaborating, 80 of the time they are still just feature factories implementing something that someone higher up has put on a roadmap given them, it's rare to find that they're actually being given.
Speaker 2:Here's a problem that our customers are having, or you've found the problem yourself. We're happy with it. This aligns with what trying to do now go and try and solve it and try and delay our customers are having, or you've found the problem yourself. We're happy with it. This aligns with what we're trying to do now go and try and solve it and try and delay our customers.
Speaker 1:Okay, so essentially what you're saying is that too many companies don't start with the customer first, and actually that needs to be the starting point for every business.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's the start with who your customers are. Define them. Work out what makes them tick. Work with who your customers are. Define them. Work out what makes them take. Work out who your customers aren't, who you don't want them to be. Work out what makes them special.
Speaker 2:Don't just go through a simple persona of you know, phil is this age and he's a man. A lot of those attributes are completely pointless and not relevant to to who I am. It's what am I trying to do? What am I? What can't I do? What's one of my pains? What am I? What are the obstacles in my way? What are my desires? What are the emotions that are driving it? Because it really in almost everything we do, there are emotions driving it. That includes b2b, that's not just direct to consumer. This is um.
Speaker 2:If I want to go to a, I want to go to a conference. Um, I've the privilege of going to several conferences across europe before I've. There are reasons I want to do it, but there are obstacles blocking me. There are emotions blocking me. It's what's my ceo going to say when I asked to spend a week in Barcelona? What's my CFO on our board going to say? What are they going to think of me. Are they going to go? Oh yeah, of course. Phil wants to spend a week in Barcelona. Yeah, who doesn't want to do that? And they want the company to pay for it. It's the. Will it benefit my career? Will they think I'm actually just looking for another job? All these emotions are going through my mind.
Speaker 2:Rather than I want to go to a simple conference. Send email to CEO. Ceo clicks approve. I go book flights. It's not that simple. There's so much more weight involved there. So it's starting with the customers, working out who they are. And actually, you know we'll come to the customers in a minute, but it's start with your customers. Define them, who are they? What are they trying to do? If your view of your customers is the other way around and you're starting with these are our products and this is what I'm going to sell to our customers, that's not going to work very well. It's going to fail. No customer wants to be sold to and also it makes it worse if you start describing them as target customers or target users. It just belittles them and diminishes them down. So understand them, understand the jobs to be done, give the teams problems to be solved and then, at the end of it. Shape your story to be told what you're actually going through out there and explain how those things all stitch together.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I know you've held senior product roles within the customer side, particularly with financial services. So just to be sort of crystal clear here, and and what have you? I mean who should take ownership for? For understanding the finding and then understanding the customer problem and then passing that out? Should that be the product owner? Should that be the head of product or vp, or whoever it might be?
Speaker 2:that's a really interesting question. In a fully empowered team, I would want the teams collectively to understand, validate those problems, discover them. Obviously, the product owner plays a big part in that, and the standard way of thinking of product teams is you've got your. The way I heard that in my head and the way I painted that picture is you've got your VP of product, you've got a couple of heads of product, you've got your product over. You've got a hierarchy that's coming down like that. I prefer to have it as a servant leadership approach of you've got your product donors at the top. They're being supported by the heads of product making sure things are all aligned and they're being supported by their VP of product or the CEO of. This is our guiding mission, this is our purpose. This is what we're trying to do. This is the vision of the future that we want to create for our customers the big picture view. Some of those problems and emotions will already be factored in there, but there'll be specific bits of how are you going to what specifically are our customers struggling with? How are you going to what specifically are our customers struggling with?
Speaker 2:Give you a very old example from Apple, back in the days of the iPod. Steve Jobs, I believe famously is all about customers and customer obsession intentionally didn't give customers what they wanted. The iPod example is customers were pestering them. We want a random function on our iPod. Steve was very much of the view that we have a random function on our iPod and it works pretty well. So I believe they got the iPod to be even more random and customers really didn't like it. And that's the point where you realize that customers don't want a random function on their iPod Because mathematically random. We can have a national lottery draw this weekend where we have the balls two, three and four come up in a sequence that's a random order.
Speaker 2:And the issue was that customers were thinking that I heard this artist a few minutes ago. That's not random. It's not giving me genuinely random things. It's to create that artificial randomness that makes us as humans, feel like it's random, even though mathematically it might be the most random thing that our processes can actually generate. It's all about the feeling of like. Make me feel like I'm not hearing the same artist again, make me get satisfy that emotional aspect. So those are some of the problems that you can tackle from a product owner. If they're empowered, if they have the, we know where we're trying to go and they're being supported from the, from people below them, giving the certain leadership rather than and still providing the direction, rather than kind of handing down things. Oh, oh, I've decided we're going to build this, you're going to build that half, you're going to build that half.
Speaker 1:You guys go build that and implement that and tell me when you're done yeah, again, like that analogy and the, uh, the example with, uh, the, the ipods. Very true, I mean, if you, uh, if you listen to one song and then you have it on your random playlist and then suddenly that artist comes up with another song and then you then get the same, um, the same genre of music, uh, you're like, oh, hang on, is this really random? Why have I not mixed up from r&b to to rock, to hip-hop, to rap, whatever it might be? So, um, cool, okay. So again'm going to ask you a similar question to how I did before. But is there any companies in this space that you know that do it well, any standouts that you like? These guys are customer backwards. They're leading the way, so everyone should aspire to be no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Write a press release that goes out to the market. That's got an FAQ for customers, an FAQ for internal colleagues, and if that press release is awful and people won't buy it, well then don't even write a line of code or do one mock-up Work on that press release. That's one of Amazon's famous techniques for starting with a customer looking at it and going okay, is this actually? Is this hitting all those things that we want it to? Is it delighting our customers and solving their problems? Aside from Amazon, if we look into financial services, see Monzo have worked with jobs to be done for for quite some time. They've shaped things very nicely around what people are trying to actually achieve, and barclays in the past have certainly done that. I am not so sure at the moment. I will move past that. That is barclays I.
Speaker 2:I have kind of been surprised a little bit with some of the aspects of what Lloyd's Banking Group have been doing recently. That it's a very pleasant surprise because traditionally they have been laggards and I've seen them copy things from the neobanks, get it abjectly wrong where they've copied a feature and completely misunderstood the why behind it in the emotional driver and then it's just fallen flat. One example I had in the past was I got an alert on my phone going in. I can now freeze and unfreeze my credit card as often as I like, like great thanks I, because I want to do that like two or three times a day. It's just the thanks, do you not do that? Maybe it's just me that doesn't actually Really driving in on the feature. The feature, the actual functionality, is great. This all stems from. There's an advert you can find from Barclays on YouTube where Barclays ran a very good advert of someone going to a school reunion thinking that they've lost their wallets, their purse, and then panicking and then it's okay, I know, I can actually freeze my card. So really it's the emotion that Barclays was solving for, whereas this other credit card company was simply going great, we've got a new feature Freedom, free your card. If you explain the emotion to me, then it's like oh, that's, that's actually really powerful. Um, so there's a couple of companies there and I'll give you one other example which goes back a little while, because again, I think they may have changed. My view is they've changed in the past, but, um, I a good few years I was impressed with what Blinkist were doing from a customer service side, of really pushing the putting the customer at the heart of things.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine cancelled her subscription, wasn't using it, really wasn't getting value out of it. It was a recurring annual subscription and they'd empowered their customer services people to take the right action and to do the right thing. So not only did they cancel next year's recurring billing, but they said look, we can see you haven't actually used this at all. It's not any benefit. We're just going to refund you the money you've paid, rather than just kind of trapping you into that annual thing and and that delighting uh, someone talking to you about this.
Speaker 2:My friend told me about this. That is really this kind of customer centric. Like you've empowered people, you've given them the. Your job is to make our customers happy and make sure that they speak nice things about us like great, and they did they. That may have changed in recent years. I know that I think it's a p by our and change of ownership. I could be wrong on that, but you tell us blinkist, blinkist. A good few years ago, yes, I said that I think they've been bought. They do executive summaries of books so like you can get like a 15, 20 minute audio or text okay books.
Speaker 2:Um, there is a. I should caveat that, while I do think it is good, maybe I've got bored with it, because I've read over 1100 books through there, so I'm kind of running out of books okay yeah but I love that.
Speaker 1:I love the uh, the, the way they've done that, though I mean, we, those, all of these companies have access to that data and the fact that they've gone, gone through it and said look, we've seen, you've not looked at it, we've not used it at all, have your money back. As you said, that gives them such good press. They're going to have a good experience. They'll be talking oh, do you never get what this company did? The person that they're speaking to may never even heard of Blinkist. So then they're going to go and check them out. They've got this, uh, free, free marketing just from doing doing the right thing, which I mean.
Speaker 2:Let's be honest, how many companies still do that exactly? I'll give you one other example. It is financial services, that's you know, um. This is a personal experience. It's the I contrasting losing a credit card. Before the um, before the freezing, unfreezing features were widespread from the, from the neo banks. But one credit card company I won't name because it's a bit mean now because they have moved on and they've they've got better. But phone them up. I want to count.
Speaker 2:I I've lost my, uh, I've lost my credit card. Like cool, can I get the 16 digit credit card number? I've lost my credit card? Yeah, I don't know that off the top of my head I've got a good memory, but I can't uh, if I contrast that with american express. You phone them, you phone their number and it's like I've lost my credit card. It's like, oh, dear, oh, I'm so sorry. Are you okay? As? Did anything happen? Are you like no, no, I'm fine, I wasn't mugged or anything, so it's all good. Anything else you've lost? Like no, no, it's cool, okay, let me try and find. It's all about the making sure the person's okay, checking the emotion and those little moments of truth where you have those test moments of whether people are going to say positive things about your company or they're actually going to be detractors. I think in american express do that incredibly well and of course they're famous for that really high service uh, they also answer the phone quite quickly, which helps which really helps.
Speaker 1:I know it's not always a free service of American Express, so you kind of expect to get a better service when you pay an annual fee for it. But yeah, my experience with them has been far superior to every other bank I guess, with the exception of some of the challenger banks like Monzo. But again, I guess you could argue they also have their restrictions. Given the fact that it is all online and it's all through the app, you can't just speak to somebody, and I know there's a lot of people out there that do want to speak to somebody?
Speaker 2:um, so darling as well, do stuff um. Chase, bizarrely, is actually part jp morgan. That was a massive company. That's a pretty decent bank, that. But they're right, they don't have that front-facing customer service that that american express do um. And yet american express's technology is still pretty damn good as well. Albeit they're providing credit cards, they're not providing current accounts, savings accounts, loans, that the complexity of the whole financial ecosystem yeah, it's not quite as quite as large as it.
Speaker 1:So, all right, cool, well, thank you, thanks for that. Certainly a number of companies there that have, uh, that stood out over the years for doing the right thing and putting the customer first. Let's move on to the last question, then, one that I am excited to talk about. I think, particularly given a lot of conversations that I've had, see MVPs as the starting process for transformations. You start with the MVP, you unlock some ROI and you go from there. So, in your opinion, why do MVPs fail?
Speaker 2:Yes, this is my personal view, some of the stuff I've spoken to before. If people disagree with me on this, that is totally fine, and please do not take the conversation that follows as a way to run your business or to to treat this as you know.
Speaker 2:free consulting advice disclaimer I started off that my personal professional experience, there are so many problems with mvps. It is um the. There are two, the biggest challenge. We'll start with the first challenge.
Speaker 2:There is a definition that was set out by Eric Ries on his blog and then he adapted it and put it on his book, the Lean Startup. Most people who use MVPs have not read the Lean Startup, so that's a start. Please go and read that. The definition I want to to say is on page 78. I can't remember exactly. It's close enough to 78. And the blog's definition was the maximum amount of validated learning about our customers in the least amount of development effort, or least amount of effort. So what's the most amount of validated learning we can get about our customers in the least amount of effort? That's what an MVP is. That's what it is in the lean startup world. That's what it is in principle, in the theory of it.
Speaker 2:In the real world, an MVP is almost always a political settlement across multiple departments where everyone who has any form of power insists that must go in, that must go in. Oh, someone's pestering me. Okay, I want this going in, and you end up adhering to the most vocal person being another use of MVP that you've just got this mess of things being thrown in because it just satisfies people's ego, people's politics. None of it is about the customer, it's all just this political mess of oh no, this has to go, so you've got all that.
Speaker 2:There are challenges which will come to the way to actually do it, but my, my personal take on, uh, on the vast majority of mvps and company is that it it's not an mvp, it, it's simply not. You can call it, you can call it whatever you like, it, it doesn't really make any difference. It's not adhering to the, the principles, the, why, the, the, the value you're actually getting. You can call it an mvp if you want, you can call it bananas and pajamas, it doesn't make any difference. It's the same way that people say we're doing agile and I cry and part of me dies inside when I hear that it's the.
Speaker 2:You are agile, you work with agility. You can't do agile. It's not a, it's a, it's a mindset. It's the same principles applied to to an mvp. So it's that massive disconnect between what it's meant to be and where you actually get value and this. We've changed it to mean something completely different, because that's just the way business language moves on and we we've now decided so you could easily cut mvp and agile from the lexicon, the business lexicon, and it would make lots of people's lives easier so what?
Speaker 1:why is it getting lost, though? Is is it? Is it due to cost? Is it time?
Speaker 2:care, focus, combination of everything I think it almost goes back to the beginning thing we were talking about the transformation. It's the lack of setting out the why, of understanding what the purpose is, understanding the principle behind it. So if I look at any from my perspective, I don't use I haven't used MVPs for years. I tier it up into three levels. I have a minimum viable test, which is the press release. It's the painted door where you create a mock website and you have click here to sign up and just test to see whether people will actually. That is validated. Learning about my customer with the least amount of development effort. With Gen AI tools, I can actually do that pretty fast and I can actually work out. Is this something that people are actually interested in?
Speaker 2:Very famously, dropbox did it with. They created a video. They put it on their website. There was a load of Star Trek references in the video. For if you can see that online, and they said if you want it, this is how Dropbox works, click here to download. When you clicked here to download, it went. Yeah, it's not quite ready yet, but if you put your email address in, we'll ping you as soon as the EXE is available for Windows and no line of code had been written.
Speaker 2:They then took I believe they took all those the signups that they had because they're incredibly popular, and took it out to investors and said look at the demand we've got. Did something very similar with when it was doing a uh, a fundraiser money dashboard. We did a crowdfund, uh, a while ago. It was that at the time it was the largest crowdfund in europe and we were testing the idea and I was chatting with my ceo about this and said, okay, let's treat this, let's do a minimum viable test, let's actually work out what's the least amount we can actually do, rather than committing to all the effort of going through a proper crowdfund and a fundraiser and the financial and legal headaches with all of that. So we carefully phrased a question. We used Typeform at the time, which was an early piece of technology and is a lot more common now, and we asked people if they, in theory, would potentially be interested if maybe one day we thought about doing a crowdfund to get all the legal disclaimers. In that we got a massive uptake of people saying yes and a massive demand which shocked me shocked, I have my ceo, shocked. Everyone's like, wow, okay, that is fantastic, we are going ahead and doing this, and we did, but it was validating the idea. The level above that really is the. There's two levels where I look at a minimum viable solution rather than minimum viable product. I think this is the. I'll get into the depths of why, my eyes, mvps fail.
Speaker 2:From an MVP, you tend to have a, if you imagine a triangle with core functionality at the bottom, kind of making it usable and reliable, and then sort of like a bit of polish and delighting people at the bottom, and they'll do a really thin layer of functionality and make sure everything is available and they go okay, once we hit this 0.5, we're going to release it and we're going to ship it out. They do, and customers hate it because it's ugly, it's not very usable, it's certainly lacking all forms of polish and it's just an absolute mess. If I compare and contrast that with let's take some of the approaches of the neobanks. I've talked about monzo earlier. The same applies to revolut and starling, but monzo is a. We'll use monzo as the the example. Instead of taking a slice from the bottom of the triangle, the pyramid, you take a slice down, so you've got a little bit of functionality, a little bit of usability and a little bit of delight. So you're just taking a small aspect of functionality and releasing that to your customers.
Speaker 2:What does that mean from Mondo's perspective? Well, it is you have a bank account that is actually just a prepaid debit card where you can actually spend money. You can't move your salary in, you can't do direct debits, you can't do standing orders, you do payments in and out, but you've got this kind of semi-bank account that for people like you and me, it might work, especially if you give me near perfect exchange rates when I go abroad. So I've got a problem that I need to be solved. I've got an emotional need that I don't like being screwed over by banks when I'm spending. I don't like really taking over, taking out money at travel bureaus, bureau de Charge and getting screwed over on there. So I've got the okay. You're hitting this piece of, you're delighting me, you're delivering what I need and you're delighting me at the same time. Cool, that's not going to be good enough for my mom to bank with. I'm not even going to be good enough for my brother to bank with.
Speaker 2:So you then take up another slice down the pyramid, this second minimum viable solution, and just keep slicing it. You add in the ability to do direct debits Still can't do standing orders, but we keep building it. We then start doing standing orders, we then start allowing people to put their salary in and you start building out these slices each time, making sure that you're delighting your customers. And what you're doing is you have the idea of a solution that you're trying to get to for your customers and that's what you're working towards. And that's probably the other big issue I have with minimum viable product.
Speaker 2:If I could, I would abolish the word product from our industry, from our sector. The word product from our industry, from our sector I don't want to hear about. The only time I should hear about someone shipping product to users is, if I'm re-watching, breaking Bad. It's got no connection to being customer first and customer centric. It's not about product. I'm about creating a solution for my customers and that's where I think the if we just start talking about I'm building a product, I'm building a product, I'm building a product for my users. Well, if my product is a mobile app, I will build a mobile app and I will submit it to the Play Store and the App Store and it will exist. So tick, yeah, great, all done. Product has been shipped.
Speaker 2:Why are people not using it? It's like, well, I was just obsessed about building a product. If I rephrase that and say I'm going to build a solution, I'm going to be able to solution to my customer's problem. Building a solution, building a solution. When I actually release that, have I been successful? I don't know. I need to check in with my customers to see if I've actually solved their problems. And that little shift in replacing product with solutions it changes the focus to am I solving the customer's problem? Am I actually doing something that gives them value rather than me? It being all about me going. I'm building a product, I'm doing this, I'm going to stick it to an app store and then why aren't people using my product? It's like it's not your product, it's about your customers and it's a solution that you're trying to build to serve them. That's the way the relationship goes customers and me, rather than me going.
Speaker 1:I've shipped this to you and now you need to use my my product I understand exactly where you're coming from there, but a question I have for you is we're getting very uh pernickety about the, the words and their definitions there, which which is fine, do you? But I guess my question is do you feel as though companies say they're going to do an mvp, but they are actually doing an mvs, but they're just calling it an mvp, or is that a problem in that they're actually just not doing that at all?
Speaker 2:I would. I'd be very happy if that was the case. I think they they say they're doing an mvp and they're also doing agiles like neither of them are true. You are your borderline. Yeah, I don't know what you're doing, but it's just a mess. It's like you're you're basically letting floodwaters in and they're just seeping up and they're kind of making everything soggy. It's just this. There's no polish, there's no delight. It it's trying to do everything at once and failing everyone. Basically, rather than having very specific focuses.
Speaker 2:And if I go back to the, so if I go back to the Monzo as an example, you don't have to doing these slices down there, you know, like little slices of cake kind of thing you don't have to release on your first slice. That can be internal, it can be friends and family. It can be an alpha list, a beta list. It can be trying to create publicity because there are only a certain number of people who will actually be prepared to use your solution when it's got a limited amount of functionality. Yeah, sure, it's still going to be delightful. Yes, it's going to make people happy, but a lot of people are going to wait until you've got a much broader offering to solve their bigger picture problems, and that's fine, because if you try to please everyone from day one, you're going to fail. But if you say I'm going to solve a certain set of my customers' problems, I'm going to delight them, I'm going to learn and I'm going to validate, because everything changes the, the demands, the needs, the market, the feeling, what your, uh, what your direct competitors are doing, what your indirect competitors are doing, um.
Speaker 2:A quick note on the indirect competitors money dashboards. Competitors included um, facebook, um. Competitors included Facebook. They included Amazon, and while neither of those work in the personal financial management space, we had a mobile app. People were judging us on what was going on on Instagram, what was going on on Amazon, because they'd set the bar for delighting customers. They'd set the bar for something that is beautiful and actually really useful. So it's not. You know Barclays isn't competing against Lloyd's, or you know Monzo, it's competing against the most beautiful apps out there. Because this is what I expect. I expect to hit, I expect this delightful experience if it's on my thousand pound smartphone.
Speaker 2:So yeah simply not getting the what the vast majority of companies are just creating, this political compromise that's got nothing to do with an mvp and one of the easiest solutions for me would be obviously understanding the why behind it. But really, the more you can stop using the word product and the more you can replace it with solutions and replace the word users with customers, that shift, that little shift in the mind. It changes the intonation, your intention rather, of what you're trying to do and shifts your mind to a wow. Okay, not taking my customers for granted, I'm actually trying to delight them and you end up with with much happier customers who become raving fans and you create. You have a lovable solution I love.
Speaker 1:I love the way that's ended there with the uh. Just there's a couple of small tweaks changing users to customers. It sounds really silly, right, but actually just those small tweaks can change how you're sat in a meeting and how you're thinking about said, said person and how you need to impress them and what have you? It changes the whole psychology behind it, which I know is something that you're very hot on. But before we finish things up, I just want to go back to your point around Monzo. I know they've been brought up a few times in this conversation, but I've been struggling to think of another business or company that has disrupted so much in the last 10 years.
Speaker 1:I look back to when Monzo broke on the scene. As you said, they were prepaid bank cards. Now, if they didn't have I mean, if you just say a prepaid bank card on the face of it, that sounds annoying. It sounds like it's restrictive. Why would I want it? It's painful, but actually they tapped into some of the really key things around the transactions when you're going abroad. They also gave you really easy access to look at where you're spending your money and actually made it a thing. Do you want to know where you're spending your money. Do you know how much you're spending on food in tesco's out on beers? And they they managed to turn it into this really cool uh app that you wanted and then, even better, they made you actually had to get invited to use it, so you wanted to be part of this cool club and they absolutely they they nailed it. And I remember when I got my invite I was like, yeah, I'm gonna try the new monzo, I loved it that is I.
Speaker 2:I mean, yes, scarcity, you're part of a gang. You've got that unity, lots of principles of influence that are being activated there. I'll tell you one final story. I remember when it was Mondo. I remember being at Money Dashboard because they had to rename themselves and they're like how are we going to rename ourselves? I think that was a stroke of luck. I've spoken to Jason, who used to be the CCO. Jason used to be the chief customer officer at Monzo. They didn't have a chief product officer. They had a chief customer officer, which I'm incredibly jealous of, and if I could do my time again, I'd probably be a chief customer officer at Money Dashboard rather than a chief product officer, because that's much better. So, um, something that I could definitely change if I got to go around again.
Speaker 2:But they were, um, really obsessing about their, about their customers, delighting them, understanding their jobs to be done, understanding their emotions, creating that exclusivity, and I think one of the things that definitely helped them was that they weren't the first bank, they weren't't. Other people were further ahead with them, atom were further ahead with them and they decided to do the most crazy UI that I've ever seen with bubbles, and they ended up pivoting elsewhere, and I know that they. I know that they use the a lot of the tagging categories that the work had gone into money dashboard, the tagging categories that the work had gone into Money Dashboard. It came up in conversation and I'm very proud of that because it probably takes us to one last point about innovation. Which is one of the challenges companies have and this is maybe a topic for another time is the trying to innovate. It's like great, we've now got a blank piece of paper, convenient blank piece of paper here. We've got a blank piece of paper. What are we going to do? How are we going to set? What are your direct competitors doing? What are your customers expecting? Work out what is great and then stand on the shoulders of giants. Don't just try and reinvent the wheel. And when you find that actually you can't steal with pride obviously not I'm stealing any ip or anything that's truly copyrighted but take those ideas, build on them, work with them and actually, if you get something, if you find a roadblock that has never an obstacle that has not been overcome before, that's where you need to put your time and effort into innovation because, surprise, no one solved it before.
Speaker 2:So if I was opening it. If I was starting a bank now, I would open bank accounts with revelry, starling monzo, american express, mox. I'd get an account from hong kong. I'd find out what the best of the best were doing. I would learn from them. I'd understand the why behind it all and then I would iterate and I would try and build, stand on the shoulders of giants and and that's a a really good way rather than going we've got to do everything ourselves. We've got to start at zero and you end up just creating lesser solutions to your customers' problems.
Speaker 1:It goes back to start with the why Exactly. Yeah, thank you. I think that's probably a good spot to wrap things up for today. That time absolutely flew by, but I really enjoyed that conversation. Thank you very much, phil. Thank you very much for having me. Absolute pleasure to be here. Um, so there we go now.
Speaker 1:This is the final recording of 2024. Now, this is likely to be released somewhere in february, so it might sound a little bit strange when I say that, but I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to everyone that's joined me on the show. This year. We've had an absolutely bumper year. I believe we've recorded over 30 episodes, we've released over 20. And then, when you're hearing this, you have already heard a couple of episodes in 2025. And just want you to know that 2025 is going to be a huge year for us, becoming bigger and better, and I can't wait to reveal all the conversations that we've had and we've got booked in and but I hope you really enjoyed the conversation today with phil. I really enjoyed it. I've took a lot, taken an awful lot from it, and um certainly know that if anyone says the word MVP again, I will be correcting them and I'll be pointing them in your way, phil.
Speaker 2:Any, any time Happy to talk about minimum viable solutions anytime, Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, it's something that I can. I can really. Your passion comes across and I'm sure everyone will pick up on that as well. But look, thank you very much again and I will see you all very soon. Thank you, Thanks, James.
