Customer centricity is an integral piece of running a successful business, from retaining customers to building a great customer experience to delivering true value to your customers. But when it comes to building a more customer centric culture, it can be difficult to measure progress, identify your true customer benefit, and get others in your organization on board.

Leslie Witt is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health, the world's most comprehensive, accessible and effective mental health and wellbeing platform. Prior to Headspace Health, Leslie was focused on improving financial outcomes—most recently, at Intuit.

In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Leslie shares how organizations can shift toward more customer centricity. She talks about frameworks for building a more customer centric culture, why customer centricity starts with improving employee health, and how to define and measure your customer benefit.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

 

In this episode with Leslie, we cover:

(2:38) Introduction and Leslie’s background

(6:45) What is customer centricity?

(15:05) The “oxygen, water, food” framework

(31:09) How to get others on board

(34:12) Audience Q&A

(46:14) Closing and Leslie’s advice for her younger self

 

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If you want to learn more about learn more about how to shift your organization toward human centricity and lead change at your organization, check out our online Change Leadership Certificate.

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Transcript:

Coe Leta Stafford:

Hello and welcome everyone to the latest episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, where each week we talk with experts around creativity, innovation, and leadership. I'm Coe Leta Stafford, partner at IDEO. I am so excited for today's conversation. We'll be speaking with Leslie Witt about how to build a culture of customer centricity at your organization. Welcome, Leslie.

Leslie Witt:

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Let me tell you about Leslie and then Leslie, we'll go over to you and let you start talking. Leslie is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health. Prior to Headspace, she was focused on improving financial outcomes most recently at Intuit, and she has a background working with clients such as Visa, Wells Fargo, MetLife, the Gates Foundation, and the World Bank. Leslie is a former partner at IDEO where she worked hand in hand with a lot of global organizations like Amazon, Nike, Walmart, to bring services to life. Leslie has a background in architecture and has taught at Stanford. Leslie, we are delighted to have you here today. You have a rich, extensive history in design and human-centered design and a lot of organizations, so we are so thrilled to hear what you have to share and teach us today.

Leslie Witt:

Oh, well, I, I feel like the pleasure is all mine. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to the incredible crew that you've assembled as fans of the Creative Confidence Podcast. And I can't help but say that when I was a colleague, I was a fan and I feel incredibly lucky to get to have this discourse with you.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you, Leslie. It's mutual. Yes, everyone, Leslie and I know each other. We've known each other for quite a long time, but let's let everybody else get to know you today, Leslie. So as a warmup, let's keep it real simple. I'd love to know something, an item you always have with you or something you keep on your desk that means something to you.

Leslie Witt:

All right. You know, if I'm completely honest here, I'm actually gonna share with you a habit that I have. And it is a habit that is siphoned through my phone. I am obsessive compulsive, and so is my partner around word games. It turns out this is our era, even before Wordle, but we are members of the spelling bee hive, the beehive community. If you have not discovered that yet, it is well worth paying the New York Times for the game's subscription. It is an incredible set of seven letters that brings to life all of your best vocabulary ethos, and then we use it. And this is particularly fun for us when I'm traveling. We achieve amazing independently and we achieve genius together. And for those of you who are beehives, you know what I'm talking about,

Coe Leta Stafford:

I will be googling that later, as will many of us. Thank you. Is that a daily thing for you?

Leslie Witt:

It's daily, yeah. It's wordle, beehive, spelling bee, and crossword on the daily. So I don't always fit in exercising, but I always fit in my games.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I love it. Well, the other thing that I know you are very devoted to is human-centered design, and especially customer centricity. Yes. Which is what we're gonna go into today. So to get us grounded, what do you mean when you say customer centric or customer centricity, and what does it mean for an organization to be really customer-centric? Yeah, let's start there.

Leslie Witt:

All right. Look, it's gonna sound really simple because I think from an ethos perspective, it is incredibly simple. We'll talk a little bit more about, what are some of those barriers and frictions and what are some of the lessons learned? But at the end of the day, being customer centric is really about having and being committed to an organizational culture that puts the customer first in the way that it develops, delivers, refines, and improves products and services. So it's really about understanding, listening, responding to those things with concrete movements and doing so in a way that empowers employees across your organization to act in accord with those values. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it. There's real business value in being customer centric, even if what it fundamentally requires is a shift away from complete dependence on business metrics.

You know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is relationship building. It's advocacy, it's loyalty. And when you think about how that delivers across a customer journey, it makes it that much easier to acquire a customer, makes it that much easier to keep them. They're more willing, they're more resilient to kind of stay with you even through, you know, kind of the thick and the thin. And particularly when a competitor that has something very similar to offer comes into the foreground and it really fuels this virtual cycle where they're out advocating for you. You have broader permission to expand into other areas of their life. And you've built that solid values-based foundation on which to build.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Sounds so simple. I mean, who wouldn't disagree with that? It's an ethos. It's about a deep committed relationship, an authentic relationship. So why do so many organizations and individuals get it wrong? What are some of the challenges? Because I don't think anyone would disagree that this is important. So I actually want to invite this question out to everyone listening today too. What are some of the ways that you see organizations get it wrong or teams when it comes to being more customer centric? Leslie, I would love to hear from your experience, where do organizations stumble or get it wrong?

Leslie Witt:

Yeah. First of all, I think most are trying at some level to be customer centric. There's very few evil genius groups that are sitting there hoping to not deliver on value for their customers. But it's more about prioritization. And I'd also say to a certain extent it's about belief. Do you believe that this is something that you can do in a way that's affordable and in alignment with who you are as a group? There's a few things that I've seen repeatedly, and we got to see a lot of clients come to IDEO in order to become more customer-centric and come very much bearing the scars of some of the frictions. But I'd say for me, the top one is not actually defining and knowing why people are hiring you, what your customer benefit actually is and how to measure it.

And I know, we'll come back to that and talk about it at greater lengths. So I'll kind of leave that in the air. Not understanding the deep interconnectivity between being employee-centric and being customer-centric, and the fact that you gotta feed the employees first in order to actually grow an organization who can deliver on those missions and values. I think I've often seen that for customer-centric orgs, they overly focus on the customers that they currently have and already serve well. Versus really creating the mechanisms to understand the ones that they are not. And that has multiple impacts, but particularly it becomes very fragile when you're trying to remain relevant and can make it very difficult to disrupt your own self. And then I'd say like, last but not least, it really ties up to what is that customer benefit?

Do you understand why your customers come to you? And what they're actually looking for is reliance on vanity metrics and some of the tried and true mechanics. Like say an NPS often gets used as proof without scrutiny, and no one hires you so that they can promote you. It is not a once and done proxy for customer satisfaction or customer centricity. And you have to be always looking at what's the reality of the landscape in which you're operating. Is this a zone where, you know, I'll pick on healthcare for a moment. You often actually see quite high NPS for healthcare, but when you dig in and you understand what it is that people are rating, they're most often rating their care service provider. And that does not affiliate to loyalty or satisfaction with the health system itself. And it certainly doesn't extend to say the health payer and the insurer. And so when you start to collect these metrics and use a proxy as a complete surrogate for definition, you can get into a danger zone.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you, Leslie. But so some of the things you talked about, not actually knowing your customers, not really being connected to the benefit, the reason why a customer is hiring you. What is the job they're hiring you for? Metrics, we're gonna talk about that. And you mentioned this a little bit too, about focusing on only particular customers or the customers you think you know.

Leslie Witt:

And the customers that you have today. So I can go into this deeper later if it becomes more relevant, but when we were looking, you know, Headspace has a very loyal fan base. For those who don't know what the Headspace offering is, we're a meditation and mindfulness platform, and a lovely service. When we decided to go deep on investigating who we serve well and who we weren't serving a few years back, we collected demographic information that we hadn't had historically about our customers. And what we found was they skewed quite white, they skewed very female, they skewed very affluent. On a better kind of diversity bench, we actually were positively indexed around LGBTQIA+. But there's a huge tranche of folks who we fundamentally believe could be benefiting from practices of mindfulness and meditation, who we were failing to reach. And that I just focused on the demographic dimensions of that, but different levels of acuity of need. And once we started to focus attention on who we weren't serving well, it really changed the services that we invested in both directly and eventually through acquisition and merger.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Thank you for sharing that example. And let's go there. So we've just set the space of like, here's the big idea of being customer-centric. Let's talk about what it actually looks like in action. What are some of the things that we can actually do? So I understand, Leslie, you've worked with a lot of organizations and you have one framework that you particularly like to use and share to help teams and organizations build more customer-centric practices. So talk me through it. So I understand it's based on this idea of oxygen, water, and food. Tell me about this framework.

Leslie Witt:

I'm gonna credit where credit is due. So I spent seven years of my career at Intuit, which is a financial technology company that's pretty well famed, and I think it's well deserved, for being quite customer centric and for having invested in building the kind of mechanics and capabilities of customer driven innovation across their entire community. You know, I could go on a long vent, but at the end of the day, all organizations, particularly of any size, are run and drive behaviors based on what it is that they measure. And what they measure fundamentally tells you what it is that they prioritize. And so one of the frameworks that was the framework that unified all executives at Intuit cross function, cross region, cross product was what we called our true north framework. And it had three buckets of metrics, and we'll go into them more deeply over the course of the next 15 minutes or so.

But the first bucket was around employee metrics. Are our employees happy? Are they thriving? Are the people who we want to stay staying? And are we attracting top diverse talent? The second bucket was customers—what is it that they're hiring us for? Are we actually measuring it? Are we actually delivering it? And then this last bucket was shareholder or business metrics. And that framework, employee, customer, shareholder, fell along what we call oxygen water and food, which is that we conceived of the organization as a body. And we thought about these metrics in that level of triage. So oxygen, it turns out you can live without oxygen for about three minutes. Employees are oxygen. And so when it came to the jobs of the managers, it was, even if you were the GM of the biggest business unit, at the end of the day, if your employee metrics weren't thriving, you were failing because you might be able to achieve short-term goals, but you have deprived the future. The second bucket is customers, that's water, and you can live without water for three days, but you know, eventually that catches up to you.

And so understanding what it was that they were hiring us for, and in the case of Intuit, we had distilled it into very simple to say, harder to measure dimensions, which is they hired us because they wanted more money in their pocket, they wanted less work to be done, and they also wanted to be confident and be able to sleep better at night having completed tasks with us, whether they were a small business or someone who was just trying to file their taxes. And, shareholders are important, but they're food. And it actually turns out that the average human can live without food for about two weeks. And so as those metrics might potentially get compromised, we could keep them in the right frame of reference within that metaphor of the overall organizational body.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. It's so tangible. So let's go there. Let's dive into each one. I'd love to, let's start with oxygen. And, and for each, can you tell us a little bit like a grounded story about, about how to think about it, how you measured it?

Leslie Witt:

Yeah, absolutely. So let me talk about a few of the metrics that that stuck and that actually at Headspace, we've carried over as part of what we fundamentally look at, which is to look at employee engagement, to understand how you're doing. I think this is that much more important now as we've all gone through the Covid crisis, we're working in remote and hybrid capacities, it's harder to have that social cohesion and glue that I think just physical co-location in some ways provided for many biases, for all to understand where engagement might be shadowing burnout. So engagement being a primary. Another one is to fundamentally look at retention of highest performing employees. So are we not just attracting folks to come in, but are we retaining those who have the highest potential cross level?

And then, you know, last but not least is to look at that talent attraction. Like what volume of interest are we seeing? Is the idea that this is a great place to work out there in the ether? Who is it attracting? Who isn't it? What I wanted to tell is a little bit of a story are the two metrics that we decided to remove from our tracking at Intuit. And this goes back a few years, but I'd say like with any measurement always comes the potential for a shadow to fall and that it might encourage behaviors that aren't actually in alignment with what you're trying to do. And so the two that we ended up removing, one was what was a manager score, and that was really kind of extracting out some of those engagement measures directly on the manager themselves.

Well, what we found when we looked deeper is that for some managers, this was a great affiliation with performance. But for others, it actually manifested a kind of safety orientation to their teams that was not driving a high performing team or talent culture in tandem with very satisfied employees. And so it was kind of incentivizing and glorifying a mixed measure. The next one really was looking at time to close roles. And so I think for any of you who have tried to hire, being able to attract top talent and bring them over the line is a good goal. But what we found was that it was starting to game the system and that we were encouraging a level of role closure that wasn't actually about top talent. And so I give those as just two tactical examples, but with it, the lesson being what are you measuring and what is it doing that isn't what you actually intended. And so is there a better proxy measure or is it actually something that you should remove from your top level scrutiny?

Coe Leta Stafford:

What I love about that too, Leslie, is it speaks to how this whole metaphor of how organizations are a living system, in the same way with any measurement. You can't just set it and forget it. It also has to adapt and change. And you have to be going through that constant process of what are we measuring? Is it still aligned to our value set and what we intend?

Leslie Witt:

Yeah, absolutely. How do you actually measure employee engagement? At the end of the day, it's the result. It's an aggregation of five measures, most commonly an employee engagement survey. There's best practices around how often you measure that. Like what is that pulse that you're taking on the organization, what's the change over time? And then making sure that you actually scrutinize that based on layers of demographics, level, function, tenure, so that you're understanding for whom this organization is working well and where it isn't. And you use it not just to sort of wave a flag and say, you know, we scored an 86, that's up three points. But really as the start of a conversation, and what we do at Headspace as well as what we did at Intuit is have each leader of a functional organization come back to the table with the insights they've learned and what actions they're taking to drive meaningful improvement based upon that. So that it's really part of the loop. It closes the loop.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Mm-hmm. It's, it's not just measuring, it's accountably responding to and acting on.

Leslie Witt:

Exactly. Yeah. That full loop that says customer centric isn't just listening, it's actually the ability to go from insight to action.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. So let's talk about the next one. I know we can stay here and we can, we can follow up with more questions. Let's talk about water. And this is, this is the focus on customers. Can you just share a little bit more and a story, and maybe how to think about measuring this?

Leslie Witt:

Yeah, yeah. First of all, again, kind of deceptively simple, but you, you should ask yourself one, do I fundamentally know the answer to this? And if I know the answer, am I actually collecting the measures in order to prove out that I am accomplishing the customer benefit? And so I'll give you an example from Headspace. So Headspace is, as I mentioned, a tool that historically was about meditation and mindfulness. And it still is, but we've expanded beyond. And I'll give you the grounded story from this category, which is that we are not there fundamentally, people aren't hiring us so that they can learn to meditate. They often learn to meditate so that they can feel less anxious so that they can be happier, so that they can sleep better at night. And so, defining what those core purposes are, and then coming up with the right sets of measures to ensure that you're actually delivering on that core promise.

And in the case for us, stress and anxiety, it turns out they are great clinical measures that have been established that allow us to do it. And then there's some exciting technologies on things even like voiceprints that help you understand, how stressed is Coe right now? And if she's talking to me, you know, a few minutes from now after she's just listening to a meditation, I can start to deduce how effective it was in the moment. What we found, and I already talked a little bit about this, is that we were well serving those needs for a subset of people. And so we decided to direct our attention to who was coming to our front door. Largely, we found to just feel better, who weren't able to be supported by the services that we provided today.

And this was largely why I joined the company, because what we had found was that especially during Covid, folks were seeking out any type of mental health support that they could glean. And we were seen, although we hadn't forecasted ourselves through this or broadcasted ourselves as such, they were coming to us for mental health support proper. And these were people in very high levels of acuity, intense depression, intense anxiety. They needed human level support. And we essentially had sort of opened a front door to care by offering them a trusted brand and a brand that promised that they could feel happier, but not actually having the service pathways in order to deliver on those needs and changes. And so we ran a pilot around offering mental health resources. It was wildly successful in terms of appetite and desire, and it was the major input into what became the merger of Headspace and Ginger about a year and a half ago. And what is fueling what we currently have in the works for enterprises, which is a fully unified offering that brings to life for our customers a continuum of care that delivers on that core customer benefit.

Coe Leta Stafford:

I mean, what began as just being more customer centric, listening, acknowledging the audiences you weren't reaching, actually opened up an entire new product experience, and that delivered tremendous value, or that's the intent anyway.

Leslie Witt:

And I'd say that that set of metrics on how it delivers values, has a customer-centric lens to it as well, which is really establishing, well, the first value it has to deliver is actually health outcomes. You have to be able to use it and desire to use it and have it deliver on the core promise, which is that you're less stressed, you're less anxious, you have less symptoms of depression, hopefully you're sleeping better. If it's not delivering on that, then we have no right to actually advance into the next category, which is that it's available to a broader swath of folks that it's bringing revenue into the company and eventually that it's delivering on being a profitable service.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. One thing I'm appreciating too, about your experience, Leslie, is a lot of us in our organizations have easy ways to measure behavioral things like number of clicks or transactions. You make a case like so important to so much of our customer centric efforts is the qualitative metrics, whether it's anxiety or stress, all these things. So thank you for just showing us too that that is and can be part of how we design more customer-centric.

Leslie Witt:

I would say absolutely, that those things don't have to stay qualitative. So, you know, for instance, we use very well accepted clinical standards. One's called the PSS, we use the GAD-7, the PHQ-9. There are these quantitative translations of those categories. We also work heavily with outside scientific clinical researchers to create peer reviewed studies. And so figuring out how to take a qualitative insight and what could be a subjective measure and translate it into something that's scalable and quantitative, I think is really key.

Coe Leta Stafford:

That's great.

Leslie Witt:

Yeah.

Coe Leta Stafford:

So let's go in the kind of quantitative and the very measurement and let's wrap up the third pocket here, which is food. So tell me about a story, and how do most organizations think about this, and maybe how should we think about it?

Leslie Witt:

Well, I would say most are a buffet, right? Like this category is not deprived very often. I think that there is an easy way because I think when you look at what, say a CEO, is most held accountable for by a board if they're public, by their shareholders, is delivery on financial metrics. And so, again, when you think about how does an organization become truly customer-centric, part of that is to say, as an internal organization and then as an operating board, are we actually holding the executives accountable to deliver on these core metrics? Are we looking at and inspecting and scrutinizing employee satisfaction? Are we looking at inspecting and scrutinizing delivery on customer benefit? Do we give that anywhere near as much airtime as we gave the last quarter's delivery on revenue margin customer growth? And very rarely does the last category get ignored. I would say it is over loved and overindulged. And so that what you were really looking to do with a framework like this is to create balance and to ensure that that daily habit of opening up a dash isn't just to look at the business metrics. The business metrics matter, but they need to be cast within a broader network.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. So Leslie, you've worked in a lot of organizations, you have a ton of expertise in working with teams around customer centric. So what if this isn't part of your culture? Or what if your team or org is struggling, or there's some pitfalls, what are one or two ways that you encourage people on how they can help shift and grow this ethos in their part of the world or in their context?

Leslie Witt:

Yeah, at some point. And it's always wonderful if it's earlier rather than later. Having top down advocacy and even mandate is really important. I've actually said no to a good number of jobs where an organization is looking to bring in a change agent to make them customer-centric, as like an advocate and irritant in the system, but without giving say, large organizational swaths of control, or embedding this into core policy, you will struggle to find that inefficacious way to work. And I think most often the organization will struggle to find more than the value of putting you on a PR platform internally and externally and, and getting the value for it. So I'd say making sure there's not a sort of vanity set of roles. And I think design and innovation leaders in particular need to be on the watch out for that.

Why is this critical to an organization's future focusing on delivering on that, how customer-centric will actually fuel being business-centric and business growth oriented versus posing those as antipathies. So really finding the right sets of stakeholders to identify this as a core need. It's much more critical to deliver on when it's a need versus a nice to have. I would also say that one of the things I really believe in is how do you demonstrate value as quickly as possible? So there might be, as you kind of chart out the changes necessary, a very wide constellation of possibilities and gaps and improvements needed, or, you know, even step change innovation in order to get to that place. Particularly if where you're starting is that this is a foreign idea or way of operating within the organization, you need to put points on the board.

And so without knowing specific context, I would say that figuring out what myths you might be able to bust with someone in the organization who is friendly to this idea and keen to experiment, and tackling a zone where you have very high level of confidence that you will be able to show how operating in this modality delivered on the organization's needs, which almost always are that it's an alignment with some level of business delivery. So kind of building up some foundation of trust so that then you can start to go more far afield. If you start in the far afield, very seldom will the organization start to glom around you and be magnetically attracted to acting in this capacity.

Coe Leta Stafford:

Love it. Oh, Leslie, we could go on and on. I think we need an entire series of guidance from you, but we are out of time. I have one final question for you, which is just a fun one. And while you think on it, I'm gonna wrap us up. And your question, Leslie, is what advice would you have given to yourself at a younger stage in your career? So while you think on that, I just wanna thank everyone for joining and thank you everyone for listening today. We've been talking with Leslie Witt, Director of Product and Design at Headspace. If you haven't checked out Headspace, I encourage you to do so. They just launched a partnership with the National Parks Collection, and it’s divine.

So I encourage you to check it out. As you know, we've been talking about change leadership in part of this conversation. If that is something you are interested in, I'm thrilled to mention we at IDEO U are about to launch a new certificate program in change leadership, which is all about these things, about your employees, your customer centricity and your business impact. So if you're curious, you'll learn a human-centered approach to this leadership. Unlike traditional management, this is all about putting people, not the process, in the center of everything you do. So I encourage you to check that out at ideou.com/changecert. And with that, let's go back to you, Leslie, on final advice for a younger Leslie.

Leslie Witt:

Okay, great question. I think the nugget I would share with young Leslie is, you don't have to be the smartest person in the room and with that mediate the level of speaking to listening and be open to challenging your own sense of expertise.

I’d probably tell her also to learn how to meditate, because at that level, I think everyone needs to learn how to take care of their mind and to have the ability to calibrate stress and anxiety and learn that there are tools and resources out there to collectively help you and everyone else feel better.

Coe Leta Stafford:

That is beautiful. Thank you Leslie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone for listening.

 

About the Speaker

Leslie Witt
Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health

Leslie is the Chief Product and Design Officer at Headspace Health, the world's most comprehensive, accessible and effective mental health and wellbeing platform. Prior to Headspace Health, Leslie was focused on improving financial outcomes — most recently, at Intuit, and previously, with a wide array of partners including financial institutions, fin-tech giants, payment providers, retailers, and non-profits including Visa, Wells Fargo, MetLife, the Gates Foundation, the CFPB and the World Bank.

Beyond her forays in financial wellbeing, which she formalized as a new business while an Associate Partner at innovation firm IDEO, she has worked hand-in-hand with global organizations like Amazon, Nike and Walmart to bring to life retail, hospitality and health & wellness services. Leslie received her Bachelor of Architecture from Rice, her Master of Architecture from Princeton, and most recently taught at Stanford University. She is currently a board member for Filoli Historic House & Gardens in California, a National Historic Trust Property.

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