Breakthrough Builders

As companies around the globe struggle to find a new normal way of working —questions abound: How do we manage people’s desire for flexibility with the imperative to keep colleagues connected? And how do we make sure that we don’t regress to work models that have historically excluded much-needed voices and perspectives?

Perhaps no one thinks more about questions like these than Atlassian’s Work Futurist, Dominic Price. For nearly ten years he’s been leading efforts at the enterprise tech company to create a flexible employee experience based on listening, not speculation. And in his talk with Jesse, Dominic describes ways to embed earnest empathy into your own ways of working. Listen for his advice on how to drive change from within your organization, his reflections on delivering his immensely popular TED talk, and instruction on how to do a Personal Moral Inventory that helps you achieve balance in your life.

(6:46) The foundations of earnest empathy

(11:28) How to build belonging with authentic leadership, not labels

(14:10) Reflections on the journey to becoming a work futurist and accomplished public speaker

(23:54) How to make change happen from inside an organization

(27:54) Exiting the pandemic: hopes and fears

(31:38) The nuance of purpose

(34:45) Using the Personal Moral Inventory as a tool for achieving balance

Guest Bio

Born to Joy in the harsh Manchester Winter of ‘77, Dominic Price has a career that has reached far and wide through Europe, US and Asia PAC. An accomplished TED speaker, Dom is proud to work at Atlassian, the home of the most intelligent t-shirt wearers in business. As the resident Work Futurist. Dom is Atlassian’s in-house “Team Doctor” helping Atlassian scale by being ruthlessly efficient and effective, and spends over half his time helping our customers navigate transformation, agility, leadership, and the future of work.

Dom has a deep passion for elite human performance, highly effective distributed teams, and building thriving businesses. He has previously been the GM Program Management for a global gaming company and a Director of Deloitte.

Helpful Links

Dom on TEDxSydney: What’s your happiness score? *viewed over 1.7m times

Dom Writes: Why you should swap resolutions for a Personal Moral Inventory

Also, might be time to spring clean your work habits

Thoughts on The Future of Work

Dom’s Website, LinkedIn and Twitter

Liz Jarvis-Shean grew up with an engrained love for public service—a devotion that was realized in her work for Candidate and President Barack Obama. When she eventually moved to the private sector, the motivation was less about what she was leaving behind, and more about what she was able to bring with her—her mission to effect change at scale through story.

In her talk with Jesse, Liz describes the importance of her family and their examples of public service early in her life; the formative impact of the time she spent in post-apartheid South Africa; the way she brought together facts, circumstance, vision, and persuasion to connect with citizen audiences on President Obama's team and Candidate Obama's team; the important parallels that she sees between the emotional connections we seek from people and the excitement we want from products; how she made the decision to move into the private sector and into tech; and her reflections on driving impact at scale at Tesla, Airbnb, and DoorDash.

(6:17) How time spent at Berkeley and studying abroad in South Africa drew Liz to storytelling

(10:08) Life as an opposition researcher on an historic presidential campaign trail

(14:26) Telling stories of ‘promises kept’ to make emotional connections with citizens

(20:28) Finding an opportunity to affect massive change in the private sector at Tesla

(23:32) Blending the inspirational, the aspirational, and the practical to make a compelling narrative

(27:19) Airbnb’s impact at scale, in her own words

(30:04) How DoorDash achieves its mission to empower local economies by being customer-obsessed, not competitor-focused

(35:46) Advice for organizations: ‘Don’t just tell your story better. Have a better story to tell.’

Guest Bio

Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean is Vice President of Communications and Policy at DoorDash, leading the company’s policy, government relations, social impact, public affairs, and global communications initiatives. Liz sits on DoorDash’s Executive Management Team. Previously, she oversaw Airbnb's global public affairs and corporate communications teams, and has managed strategic communications at pioneering companies, including Tesla Motors, healthcare technology startup Nuna, and data science firm, Civis Analytics.

Liz helped shape and drive research, rapid response and messaging for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and his White House, and held leadership positions at CNBC and political research consultancy IMS, Inc. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Helpful Links

Liz describes DoorDash’s partnerships with food banks

Learn more about the WeDash program

Liz on Newcomer’s Dead Cat podcast

Liz on LinkedIn and Twitter

Rachel Tipograph implores aspiring founders to: “Know what your superpower is, and how you can align it to a problem you want to solve.” It’s a playbook she’s lived out—as she leaned on her own particular brand of fearlessness to embrace ‘crazy’ marketing ideas as Gap’s youngest-ever Global Digital Director; to found MikMak to help businesses e-commerce-enable all their digital channels; and to use her influence as an investor to champion diversity, equity and inclusion at the founder and executive levels.

In her talk with Jesse, Rachel reflects on her early years as a student, intern, and self-identified member of the ‘digerati’. She describes how being born into a family of small-business owners spawned an entrepreneurial spirit, but also deep reflections on the inequities that have historically accompanied lines of succession. She identifies the forward-thinking insights that led to the founding of MikMak. She outlines the criteria that guide her personal investments. And she leaves us with a look at the future of media, commerce, and the workplace experience.

(2:59) From NYU, to saying goodbye to Hollywood internships

(6:07) Digital Directing at Gap: Sans-scrutiny, try crazy things

(10:40) When not everyone had a voice in the family business

(13:35) Not a female founder. A founder.

(17:11) Diversity at MikMak: the progress and the challenges

(19:04) The deepening intersection of media and commerce

(24:54) The future of of the workplace experience

Guest Bio

Rachel Tipograph is the Founder and CEO of MikMak, a global eCommerce enablement and analytics platform for multichannel brands. MikMak has earned recognition for its workplace culture and DE&I efforts as a “Fastest Growing Company in America” and “Best Place to Work” by Inc Magazine, “#10 Startup in the United States” by LinkedIn, “Breakthrough Brand” by Interbrand and “Nineteen Technologies Underpin AI And Analytics For Retail” by Forrester.

Rachel has also been recognized as a thought leader by leading media publications including Forbes (“30 under 30 Who Are Changing The World”), Fast Company ("The Most Creative People in Business") AdAge ("The Most Creative People of The Year"), Adweek ("The Young Influentials Shaping Business and Culture") and many more.

Helpful Links

MikMak’s website

Rachel’s podcast: Brave Commerce

Crunchbase: MikMak secures $10M Series A

Appearance on Forbes: Building An E-commerce Presence That Sells

Rachel on LinkedIn and Twitter

Kristine Chin, VP of Customer Experience at Twilio, talks about how understanding “Enthusiast” customers empowered her to build great experiences. She discusses her education in political economy, with stories of how systems thinking helped her develop her problem-solving approach. She shares what she learned from losing her home in the Oakland Firestorm and how a semester in Slovenia helped her better understand herself and her career interests. She talks about her leadership roles at eBay, Ten-X, and Twilio.

Kristine shares her perspective on what it means to be customer obsessed and about collaborating with customers to build a strong marketplace. She shares her philosophy of being “delightfully persistent” and creating a customer-first culture. She shares key things she learned about setting up a successful customer experience program.

How do you attract customers to a new platform or marketplace? How do you set up a new customer experience program? How do you influence change in a company? How do you create back-office changes to support a strong customer experience?

Guest Bio:
Kristine joined Twilio in 2018 as Vice President, Global Customer Experience. She is responsible for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience. This includes spearheading a company-wide effort to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and raise awareness of their needs.

Kristine previously spent 3 years at Ten-X (formerly Auction.com) as SVP, Customer Experience and 12 years at eBay, where she ultimately served as general manager of the $4B eBay Motors category and ultimately lead eBay’s North American Partner Strategy & Operations. She holds a patent for features to display inventory to the right buyer – and has four additional patents pending related to matching sellers and products with interested buyers.

Kristine’s experience also includes work with enterprise, SMB and consumer customers. She began her career in strategy consulting to the telecommunications industry. She holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and a Harvard MBA.

linkedin.com/in/kchin/

Building Blocks:
A CX leader's most important role is to help other teams discover the customer. Who are they? What are their behaviors, needs, attitudes? Where are they satisfied, and where are they stuck? The only way you can deliver that consistent end-to-end experience, the one you draw up on that journey map as an ideal state - the only way you can execute it is to have teams across the company locked in on the customer, and then collaborating, to take action - to either design NEW experiences or address parts of the experience that need to be fixed.

Think about what opportunities you have in your role to collaborate better across teams to give your customers a better experience. Maybe you're a marketer looking at customer feedback on the product all day long, but you don't know that much about your company's next feature release or product roadmap, and spending more time with the product team could help out. Or maybe you're on the engineering team and you've got a backlog that seems exciting, but you think you could build even better if you knew the emotions and associations that customers have with your current product. Whatever it is, write down ONE OTHER TEAM, and the names of TWO SPECIFIC PEOPLE, whom you can reach out to in the next week to start to start to do some silo spanning, and get to better outcomes for your customer.

Helpful Links:
“ROI of Customer Experience 2020” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/roi-of-customer-experience-2020/
“Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture” by Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/xm-institute/creating-and-sustaining-a-customer-centric-culture/
“Where Net Promoter Score Goes Wrong” by Christina Stahlkopf; Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-net-promoter-score-goes-wrong

Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999 and spent more than 15 years with the company. As Vice President of Digital Media, Bill launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive In Residence with Maveron, LLC, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. Bill later served as the Chief Operating Officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today Bill is co-founder of Working Backwards LLC where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.

Kim Scott is the author of Just Work: Get Sh*t Done Fast and Fair and Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She lives with her family in Silicon Valley.

Gurdeep Pall leads the Business AI Group at Microsoft, a team comprising Research Scientists, Engineers and Business Leaders bringing digital transformation to business tasks through the power of AI, including a recent effort to train Autonomous Systems with Reinforcement Learning efficiently. He is also responsible for Microsoft Garage and Hackathon, a hyperscale grass-roots innovation program. Prior to this, Gurdeep was responsible for Skype, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams efforts, including starting Lync (now Skype for Business) and developing it into a multi-billion-dollar business. Gurdeep’s favorite technology moment was demonstrating the world’s first live real-time spoken language translation within a Skype call at the Code Conference in 2014. Gurdeep joined Microsoft in January 1990 as a software design engineer after graduate school at University of Oregon. He has worked on many breakthrough products in his tenure. Pall was part of the Windows NT development team, working on the first version of Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 as a software design engineer, all the way through Windows XP in 2001 as general manager of Windows Networking. During his work on Windows, he led design and implementation of core networking technologies such as PPP, TCP/IP, VPNs, Internet Routing, and Wi-Fi, and parts of the operating system. Pall co-authored the first VPN protocol in the industry - Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) - which received the prestigious Innovation of the Year award from PC Magazine in 1996. He also authored several documents and standards in the networking area in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body in the mid-1990s. Since then, amongst other things, Gurdeep has led Conversation-as-a-Platform, Microsoft Speech, Tellme, and Bing Maps initiatives. Gurdeep Pall has been a keynote speaker at many industry conferences over the years. He was named one of the "15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference" in 2008 by Information Week. He co-authored "Institutional Memory Goes Digital," which was published by Harvard Business Review as part of "Breakthrough Ideas for 2009" and subsequently presented at the World Economic Forum 2009 in Davos. Pall holds 25+ patents in networking, VoIP and collaboration areas. He has served on the board of trustees of Ashesi University, Ghana.