A 5-Step Formula to Digital Transformation Success Part I: Understanding Customers and Journey Mapping

This is part one of a two-part interview I had with Howard Tiersky , author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling book "Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance". Forbes named this book as one of the top 10 most important business books of 2021.

During this first part of the interview, Howard shares his insights about digital transformation and the importance of fostering "love" from customers. He describes the 5-Step Formula to Digital Transformation Success that is documented in his book and elaborates on the process of customer journey mapping.

Listen to the podcast here (transcript is below):

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About the Contributors

Howard Tiersky is the author of the Wall Street Journal best-selling book “Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance”. This book was named by Forbes as one of the top 10 most important business books of 2021. Howard is also the founder of From: The Digital Transformation Agency and The Innovation Loft.

Follow Howard:?www.dhirubhai.net/in/tiersky

The Howard Tiersky Website: www.howardtiersky.com

Thomas Erl is a best-selling author and oversees the Pearson Digital Enterprise Series from Thomas Erl. He is the Founder and Senior Advisor for Transformative Digital Solutions Inc. and the CEO and Director of Learning and Development for Arcitura Education Inc.

Follow Thomas:?www.dhirubhai.net/in/thomaserl

Subscribe to Thomas on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@terl

Books by Thomas:?www.informit.com/authors/bio/f8d115ad-20cc-4d42-ad99-7e349d34f90d

Podcast Transcript

Thomas: This is Thomas Erl, and welcome to another episode of the Real Digital Transformation podcast series. Today I have with me Howard Tiersky, author of The Wall Street Journal best-selling book “Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance”. This book was named by Forbes as one of the top 10 most important business books of 2021. Howard is also the founder of From: The Digital Transformation Agency and The Innovation Loft. This podcast is being published in two parts. As my interview with Howard, we'll cover a wide range of topics including customer journey mapping, design thinking, digital transformation challenges and strategies. Let's begin with part one as we welcome Howard to the show. Hi, Howard.

Howard: Oh, thanks for having me, Thomas. Happy to be here.

Thomas: So your book has been extremely well received, very impactful in the industry and continues to be highly relevant today. The centerpiece of your book is a five step formula to digital transformation focused on how to earn love from digital customers. Please tell us more about that formula, that process, how it came to be and how it continues to be so highly relevant today.

Howard: Sure. Well, gosh, I've been, I've had the fortune and opportunity to work for over 25 years with scores of Fortune 1000 companies, and I've been really largely doing the very same thing for all that time, which is trying to help figure out how those companies can maximize the benefits from digital.

Of course, the degree of opportunity has grown substantially since we began. You know, digital started out 25 years ago as just sort of a little alternate curious marketing method to put your content online, and has every year become more and more important in almost every industry to the point now where, I probably don't have to tell you, businesses today that aren’t very substantially digitally enabled are probably not, you know, that long for success, running a successful business if they’re not already out of business.

And so in the course of doing all those projects and working with so many companies, I’ve had the opportunity to be part of some incredibly successful transformations. Companies like General Motors and General Electric and Merrill Lynch and many others. And I’ve also been part of some things that didn’t really work out all that well. Projects that seemed very promising and hit all kinds of problems or speed bumps, things that got canceled, things that turned out to be wasted investments.

So from all that, seeing, you know, things that have worked and things that have not worked, it's enabled me and the team, because I have a team of people that I've worked with for decades now, to sort of evolve over time an approach to helping large companies through these kinds of digital transformations that is very predictable, repeatable and effective.

And while I would never say there's only one right way to do anything, I know from my experience that there are a lot of wrong ways to approach digital transformation and a lot of potholes that you can hit along the way. And so what I try to do in this book is lay out a process that I know works. It's a path. It's the one that my team and I use, and the one that we've seen work over and over. And so my hope is that others can use this as a kind of a blueprint to say, this is a way to successfully deal with the very challenging problem of how do you take a company that may be a giant company, may be a great brand, but isn't where it needs to be in terms of delivering that digital experience to customers, which today is so, so critical to remaining relevant.

So that was kind of the genesis of this, to document and provide as a, as sort of a public service, if you will, as well as a way to, you know, promote our own consultancy and brand and agency, what those sort of findings have been from all the projects we’ve done over so many years.

Thomas: Thank you, Howard. So that has led to you formalizing a five step formula for enhancing the amount of what you've referred to as love a company can receive from its customer base. Please elaborate on that.

Howard: Sure. Yeah. So before we start talking about how you transform, it’s good to ask why, you know. I've already been sort of saying how critical it is, but what is the goal of transformation?

Transformation after all just means change. And while today digital transformation is such a buzzword that it might seem obvious, every company needs digital transformation. Well, that may be true, but it's still important to say, well, why? What is it we’re aiming for, what we’re going to change? Because the truth is that you could change a business in a lot of ways that are harmful, ways that don’t improve the customer value proposition, ways that don’t improve the competitiveness in the marketplace. So you don’t just want to change for change’s sake. You wanna make sure you're figuring out what is the change that's gonna achieve some kind of goal.

And so what is the goal? Well, you know, there are many things you can accomplish through digital transformation. You can lower your costs, you can improve your company's reputation, improve customer satisfaction, and many, many other things: create new business models, reach new geographic markets, less expensively than you might have been possible to do before, et cetera. You know, but in the end, what we've observed is that the companies that get the greatest benefit from digital transformation, what that benefit is, is the emotional connection their customer has to them.

Because from all the companies I've worked with over so many years, I think this is the greatest asset that any company can have. And if we look today, and this is what we call customer love, if you look today at the companies that I have, the, you know, best valuations, the best multiples, the greatest revenue growth, whether that's the Amazons or the, you know, the Googles or Netflix or Apple, you see a high level of customer emotional commitment to those brands.

And so we believe this is one of the most important things that companies should be saying. Well, if I'm going to transform, I want to transform in a way that's gonna yield more of that customer love. And so part of what we do in the book is take a look at this question of, well, what is it that causes customers to -and by the way, this is true for both B2C and B2B customers- what is it that causes customers to have that kind of emotional commitment to a specific brand? And so we break it down into a few different things and there’s a formula that we describe in the book, and in the end it turns out to accomplish those things.

Well, the digital transformation process is heavily geared towards allowing you to do what you need to do to be able to achieve that customer love. And the three components that we talk about in the book that inspire, what is it that causes a customer to be inspired to have those emotions, those feelings towards a brand? The first and the sort of base of it is to very reliably and consistently meet the needs of the customer. Now, just meeting their needs is not going to inspire love, but if you're not reliably, consistently meeting their needs, no matter what else you may do, well, you're probably not going to accomplish it. So this is the foundation.

And of course customer needs have been changing a lot lately. They changed through covid. They've changed prior to that as a result of many things can change customer's needs, but the digital centricity, increasing digital centricity of our culture and the way that people live their lives and doing everything using their mobile devices from, you know, dating to finances, to getting their job done to just about any, you know, connecting with friends and family, just about anything you could think of is so incredibly digitally enabled. And so, so that's the base is to meet their needs reliably, consistently.

The second is to occasionally delight them to do something above and beyond which they don't expect, and which exceeds their needs and expectations in a positive way. And the third is to stand for something that they care about to, to share a common cause of some sort with the customer, whether that is a political cause as someone like Kenneth Cole or Nike or Chick-Fil-A has done, or more of a non-political, but perhaps a spiritual or a, you know, conceptual cause, like Disney for example, has things that it clearly represents. You know, Apple clearly is not mainly a political message, but one about empowering people's creativity.

And so these are, versus Citibank probably doesn't really stand for anything to most people, and there's a lot of brands, probably more brands that fall into that category and that makes it difficult for them to inspire. And so, there's more detail about this in the book and that formula and where it comes from and why this is true and why these are the things that inspire love, but when we look at the five steps that you actually execute to transform, they are geared towards not just transforming anything, not just any kind of change, but changing in the direction that will yield that higher level of customer love, which we believe is the greatest asset than any company can have.

Thomas: Your book, the way it lays it all out is visionary, especially when it was first published last year in terms of where the industry has headed since and where it continues to go. What you just pointed out, the meeting customer expectations, customer requirements, occasionally going above and beyond to pleasantly surprise them and standing for a cause that also helps the customer make an emotional connection. So we've seen corporations do that, and as more and more corporations, especially in competitive environments, continue to adopt those approaches, based on your experience and based on what you foresee, can you give us some insights as to additional methods they could employ to further stand out and distinguish themselves in their markets? Are there additional insights or additional techniques that you could highlight?

Howard: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it is the how, because if you have these three formulas, these three ingredients of the formula to consistently meet their needs, to occasionally delight them, to stand for something that they resonate with, you have unlocked that emotion, emotional connection. The hard part is actually accomplishing those three things. And so most of the rest of the book and most of the tips and suggestions and additional ideas I have are less about, oh, is there a fourth thing or is a fifth thing, but rather, how do you do that?

For example, a lot of companies might, let's say people are thinking, oh, well I think we pretty consistently meet our customer's needs. I think we've at least got the base of that pyramid. And if so, I say, great, I hope so. But I can tell you that most companies don't. The companies, you know, that we get brought in to work with, of course they're meeting a wide range of their customers’ needs or they wouldn't be in business at all. But most companies are letting their customers down in a variety of ways. There's things they're doing that are annoying them, frustrating them, confusing them, disappointing them, wasting their time and everyone, and some of those things may be small, and some of them may be significant, but they add up to a gap between the potential of meeting the customer's needs and what they're actually delivering. And sometimes companies aren't even well aware of that. I mean, the whole world of customer experience benchmarking and defining KPIs around customer experience is heavily focused on that.

What do we actually need to measure and study on an ongoing basis to really understand, you know, if a customer walks into our store, and walks out with a can of paint, we might say, well, we clearly met that customer's need, you know. They wanted paint. They came in and they left with paint. Maybe, but do they also want some other stuff that they couldn't find in your store? Did they want a different color and they settled for the color that you had? You know, or did they want to get out of the store in five minutes but it took them 25 minutes because they couldn't find what they were looking for, they had to wait for an associate to help them. Then they kind of wanted to pay with Apple Pay, but you didn't have it, so they said, okay, fine, and they paid another way. You may have, you know, you may have put them on an emotional journey, which actually wasn't so positive at all, just because they walked out with a can of paint.

And so that level of insight and clarity is the type of analysis that a lot of companies aren't really conducting. There's a lot of mystery in the actual insights that many companies have about those areas of satisfaction. And then they may do a net promoter score survey once or twice a year, and they come out with some numbers and they go, all right, you know, this is our number. It's, you know, 18 or 37 or whatever, net promoter score.

And of course that is a broad indicator, you know, net promoter scores. Of course, some people, it's controversial, some people are for it, against it. Personally, I like to use a variety of different instruments including net promoter score because I think it has validity, it just shouldn't be relied on exclusively. But the point is those don't necessarily tell you what's really going on. They just give you a general sense of where you stack up or how you're improving. So the first step of our five step digital transformation approach that we describe in the book is in fact this type of research to really make sure you understand who is the customer, what are the different segments, what are they really looking for, and how does your, what you're doing today in terms of the way you do business meeting or not meeting their needs.

And by the way, what about your competitors? How are your competitors in terms of meeting those needs or not meeting them? Because where your competitors are not meeting their needs either, there are industries where there's certain aspects of customer needs that nobody is meeting effectively. Well, that's a huge opportunity. You know, look at the taxi industry. You know, there were a lot of things that were a nuisance about trying to get a taxi and then someone like Uber, and -but nobody was necessarily solving those problems- and then someone like Uber comes along and transforms ground transportation.

And so that is a huge opportunity for a company to look at an industry. Let's face it, taxis isn't like a sexy industry that everyone thought, you know, would be a big, you know, oh, I can't wait till taxis get digitized. You know, there's nothing more analog than moving people around in New York City or what have you, but in fact, there were many opportunities as clearly demonstrated to, to turn that into a much better experience and create a tremendous amount of value.

So that, those are the types of things that, you know, many customers have, many companies have the opportunity to understand much more detail about, and then that becomes actionable and becomes the foundation of everything that follows in that digital transformation process.

Thomas: And Howard, you mentioned earlier that an organization would need to undergo an analysis, and that leads us to customer journey mapping as part of that analysis and as the second step in your formula. And I'm assuming as a critical part of planning a digital transformation overall, because the customer journey that you end up defining and mapping out for your specific line of business will ultimately also determine how you deploy technology, make investments around carrying out a digital transformation initiative.

Tell us more about that step and your experience with customer journey mapping with different types of organizations and also some of the challenges they may have if what they realize is that they are more distanced from where they want to be than perhaps others already are.

Howard: Well, customer journey mapping kind of dovetails from the first step to understand the customer. In this sense, the first part of customer journey mapping that we always wanna focus on is the current state journey map.

What is actually happening when someone calls your call center or walks into your car dealership? Or when a company comes to your accounting firm and wants to talk to them about they're looking for a new tax accountant or whatever, what actually occurs? And you know, along the lines of what I said earlier, very often, well of course, most organizations have some idea of, it's not a complete mystery, but very often their understanding of that process is only at, say 60, 70%.

And so the opportunity to get even clearer on what is happening and where are the points of pain that are being created. And then once you've mapped that out and there are very specific, we call it a customer journey map. And when I say we, we of course didn't invent customer journey mapping. It's a widespread practice. We have our own specific way of going about it, and I talk about it in the book. But it winds up being among other things, a kind of a diagram, an infographic, if you will, that shows these are the steps that customers go through.

And you may have multiple journey maps because you may have different types of customers or different types of tasks that customers are trying to accomplish. You know, if I go to the grocery store, doing my weekly grocery shopping, it's probably a fairly different journey than if I go to the, you know, deli area because I'm having a party and I need to order, you know, catering where I may need to speak to somebody and go through, and, you know, that's just a different experience. It's a different task.

So, you know, identifying those different current state journey maps, identifying what we like to do is identifying where the greatest challenges, points of pain, the greatest moments of negative emotion that occur for the customer along the way are, and try to map something about the severity, which includes both the, well, it's the frequency and the severity.

Some problems that can occur don't occur very often. They only occur if you're trying to check out using PayPal. Or they only occur if a particular item is out of stock, or they only occur if, you know, it's raining outside and you slip on the walk or whatever it may be, so what's the frequency? And then how bad is it? You know, is it something that if this thing occurs, it's catastrophic or is it just a minor nuisance?

And that allows us to start to rank these different points of pain in the journey because of course, that's gonna start to indicate what are the things we should probably do something about. And then there's the opportunity to do what sometimes feels like the more fun part, which is start to create the future state journey.

If we were building this whole thing from the ground up right now, we didn't have to worry about budget or legacy software or real estate contracts or anything, but we were just gonna create a vision for what would be the optimal journey, leveraging everything we just learned about what's wrong with the current journey, or what the opportunities are in the current journey to improve. What might that look like? How would we make things much easier for the customer? How would we make it a more personalized experience, and how would we create more value for the customer.

Then that's now, and now you're creating another set of maps, which is, you know, the before and after, like a weight loss commercial, right? And once you complete that, now you have, and of course there's many aspects to doing that work, but just to give a high level, once you complete that, you then have a vision for where your company potentially needs to go.

To the point that you made in your question, that can sometimes be a very intimidating thing, because sometimes you look at the vision and you say, well, yeah, this is what I would build if I was starting from scratch. But holy cow. To get from where I am to this vision, I don't even, it's like that old joke where they say, you know, you can't get there from here. You know, how would I accomplish that? The technology would need to be different. We’d need different skills. Maybe our relationships with our distributors or our suppliers would need to be different. We would, I mean, it can go on and.

So that's the point at which you need to start breaking it down into a roadmap and figuring out, you know, what's the timeline, what's it gonna take, what's practical to do? And, you know, sometimes you need to adjust the vision and say there are certain aspects of the vision that maybe aren't realistic in the next few years, and create a version of the vision. You know, there's the ultimate vision and then there's the one year vision, the two year vision, the three year vision. And of course, you have to be sensible about figuring out, you know, hopefully ambitious, but sensible, and you have the opportunity as well to try to quantify the benefit of this future vision.

What will it mean to our business if we make this transformation? Because most likely you’re gonna have to get people on board. You’re gonna need funding, you’re gonna need the whole organization to participate in making that transformation. And so you need to be able to articulate the benefit and ultimately work together with other people within the organization to make decisions about how ambitious you wanna be, how much risk you wanna take, how much money you wanna spend, how fast, and that will then help you figure out what that roadmap will look like.

Thomas: Just quickly, I wanna jump on something you mentioned earlier. You talked about the roadmaps often being multi-year initiatives where the organization realizes it's gonna take quite a while to get to the point where we realize our vision, and based on your experience with the digital communities, the digital markets changing at a fairly rapid pace, primarily in relation to technology innovation, the incorporation of data science and data intelligence, and perhaps AI to assist with optimizing customer experiences, if you have a multi-year roadmap, three or four or five years, how flexible do you need to be to accommodate how the industry may change over that time, how competitors may enter a market during that time and shift the dynamics and perhaps alter your priorities and perhaps alter the target state, the vision that you are, that you have been working toward, and how do you deal with those types of unexpected developments?

Howard: It's a great question and I think the, it's gonna depend a little bit on the industry that you're in and the situation, but I think the best approach is somewhat balanced one.

On the one hand, you certainly don't wanna have your plan so calcified that you can't change it. That somehow if circumstances change, like for example, something like covid hits, well clearly a lot of roadmaps were thrown out the window and priorities completely juggled when something like that occurs. So I think it's very important that you have a process for continuing to sense if something significant has changed in the industry, or like you say, with competitors and other things, or just with your customers and their needs and expectations and if necessary, make the changes.

At the same time though, I think some companies err on the other side. They chase their competitors. They may have a solid plan to mature their customer experience over the course of two years, and all of a sudden, a competitor makes a move and the priorities completely shift. Even if you don't know yet if what the competitor chose to do is even going to be successful, or you have one bad quarter, you know, profit is down a little bit and you all of a sudden get scared and you slash all the investment budgets for the things that you're working toward.

And so, you know, I think you can certainly, you certainly need to make sure that you have the agility to make changes as rapidly as possible, or as rapidly as proved necessary. But then I think you want to have kind of a firm hand on the rudder and not let yourself be blown around by everything that happens or you know, we just heard there's gonna be another interest rate, you know, change. Is that the kind of thing that should change everyone's digital plans? Well, probably not, but, you know, there are a lot of businesses that are right now saying to themselves, man, if interest rates go down, sorry, go up another three quarters of a point, how are we gonna respond to that? Because it affects the finances of their business and it affects possibly consumer spending and things like that.

And I'm not saying it's not appropriate to be looking at those things and considering what should change, but when you're talking about long term transformation, you have to be determined too. And you have to make sure that, you know, if you are headed in a certain direction and you hit a storm, you should try to move through that storm, you know, and unless it's so bad you have to take shelter. But that would be my, you know, that would be the balance that I think companies need to find.

Thomas: You know, we've seen scenarios before where those companies that dedicate themselves to carrying out successful digital transformations, the ones that realize the true benefits of doing so and are more proactive and aggressive at doing so, and perhaps even have better funding than others to do so from their stakeholders. If you have a vision, it's three year roadmap, you're comfortable with what you're working toward, and one of your competitors steps in and realizes a comparable vision, a comparable target state, within a year. Out of the blue, there's a tendency to panic or scramble and perhaps jeopardize or undermine the digital transformation plan that you have.

But at the same time, if you don't reprioritize, then you risk losing some market share, you know, situations like that. This being more of a, the markets, the digital markets being more prone to unforeseen disruption. I'm just curious if, you know, if you've encountered that and what you would advise a company to do if they find themselves in that situation.

Howard: In most cases, you just need to keep going. You know, if you have rooted your transformation vision in customer research. And by the way, you know, transformation isn't a binary thing. Hopefully if you're working on the transformation, you're starting to see some things in the marketplace. You're starting to improve some things. You're starting to release new capabilities, and you, the most important thing you can be doing is to test that with customers and to see how are we getting the response from customers that we anticipate.

Because if you start down a vision, and hopefully you're validating that vision up front, but you're rooting it in customer research, and it actually relates a little bit to the third step in the book, which is to build the future because we talk at great length in the book about design thinking and the principles of actually creating new digital products and experiences and how you do that in the most effective way because you can have a vision of an overall journey. It's kind of a high level vision, you know, but when you get into the details of, okay, you know, we're gonna create this app that lets people check their orders and understand the status of the thing that they requested, that sounds great, but like, that can, that can succeed or fail in the details. The user interface, the speed and performance of the application, the accuracy of the data, all that kind of stuff is critical. The devil’s in the detail, so to speak.

And so one of the aspects of design thinking, of course, is to test things with users, to continuously be building minimum viable products and evaluating those and getting user feedback in structured ways. And in the book, I talk a lot about how to get user feedback to make sure it's accurate, because if you ask the right questions, if you ask questions in a certain way, you can influence the answers you get. And sometimes we want to hear that everything's great, but that's actually not helpful to us if we just figure out how to get our customers to always tell us things are. It's really more valuable to get customers to tell us what's wrong because that's something that's gonna be actionable. Because ultimately customers will tell us when things are great with their pocketbook, but we wanna see it first through research exercises so we're getting that leading indicator and we can see if we're heading in the right track.

So, you know, in answer to your question, if you're going down a certain vision for transformation and you're discovering that, you know, customers are not responding to this the way that we had anticipated, well then you need to make a big change. And you need to be prepared to do that.

And that could be because your vision was wrong initially, or it could be because it was right. But, you know, the customer's needs have changed. And again, you know, if you started something in November of 2000 and 19, and you started piloting it with customers in April of 2020, you may have discovered that, you know, now that we're in the pandemic, your customer's needs have radically changed and the thing you thought was gonna meet their needs won't.

But I think if what you're instead seeing is, oh no, you know, some new, you know, Amazon's launching a new product in our space, this competitor has just brought something out. You know, a lot of that can turn out to be noise. You know, I mean, Google announces, what was their product called? You know, Google Plus, the Facebook killer, you know. Didn't work, you know.

I remember I was working with NBC years and years ago when Hulu was launched and Hulu was a joint effort, I guess you could call it, between Fox and NBC to create at that time what was supposed to be the YouTube killer. Now, you know, Hulu was launched and was wildly successful, but it didn't kill YouTube. It had nothing to do with YouTube, really. It was a different type of product.

So I mentioned all that just to say that sometimes what seems important in the moment, what seems like it's gonna have a big impact on what you're doing in the moment, it can, but I think a lot of times people are overly reactive. If you've got a good vision, you're building a transformed user experience, a transformed business experience for your customers, and it's testing well with customers, you keep going and don't let yourself be distracted by things that are going on in the marketplace. Because, like I say, you know, that may or may not be important in the long run.

But what else are you going to do, but try to make your value proposition for your customer better and better? I mean, I would ask, what can your competitor do that would make you say, you know, I have this plan, this vision, this transformation vision that's gonna make my customer experience much better, make my product more valuable to the customer, make it more efficient for the customer, make it more personalized, but maybe I should throw all that away because of something my competitor just did. What could your competitor possibly do that would lead you to say that, you know?

But I understand your question and it's a reasonable question because a lot of times people do get worried and disrupted by those types of things. So I think, you know, in a lot of cases you gotta look at what's going on. Of course, I'm not saying you should go forth with blinders on, but, you know, take the blinders off, but a steady hand on the rudder because if you've got the right transformation strategy and vision, the biggest mistake companies make is they stop executing a successful strategy because they get scared.

Thomas: And just to conclude that scenario, when you have a disruptive force entering your market, would you say it's also wise in addition to not having a knee jerk reaction to it and changing your plan, but to perhaps study what that new organization or that new influence, how successful they are or not, so that that perhaps gives you more intelligence to improve your road plan overall?

Howard: Absolutely. Sometimes it's a great gift when a competitor comes out with something similar to what you're building, and you might think, how could that be? I mean, you know, they've just scooped us. Well, you know, customers usually don't care who was first at something. I mean, I know people talk about first mover advantage, but most customers don't care. They just care about are you gonna meet their needs right now? And they don't care if you only had the feature a year ago and your competitor had it two years ago. Once you're at parody, it's no longer important to customers.

But if a competitor, let's say you have an idea for a great new capability that you want to add to your product, and a competitor launches it first, well, yes, just as you say, study that like crazy to understand, okay, the competitor tried to do something similar. First of all, was it successful at all? Because if it was an abysmal failure, then maybe that’s a clue that you’re headed in the wrong direction with respect to that aspect of your vision.

Secondly, most things that are new, most innovative new ideas are not at a hundred percent the first company or the first iteration of them. Probably like, think about the first ebook reader that came out, you know, or you know, the first MP3 music player, which by the way wasn't the iPod. There were many MP3 players on the market when the iPod came out and Apple looked at the, so, you know, Apple could have said, and maybe Apple was developing the iPod for several years before those other MP3 players came out. I mean, I really don't know the timeline, but let's just speculate. Apple could have said, oh no, you know, what were some of those companies back then? You know, creative technologies. Remember that company, whatever they were called, they came out with a MP3 player. You know, should we stop? Should we, should we change our strategy? You know, I mean, no, but yeah, let's see how customers are liking that product, because we may be able to learn from that real world test and improve our product even before it comes to the marketplace.

So I certainly agree. You wanna see this as an opportunity to use their product and market. Buy a bunch of, you know units, test them with customers, learn from what's working and not working, and you can inject that knowledge and insight into your transformation process a hundred percent. I think that's genius.

Thomas: So that was part one of our two part interview with Howard Tiersky. In part two, we'll get more into design thinking, how it relates to customer journey mapping, as well as Howard's insights regarding digital transformation strategies and challenges.

Please note that although this transcript was professionally prepared, it has not yet been reviewed by the contributors for accuracy. Please report any errors to the newsletter editor.