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Brief summary
Even when product builders have a groundbreaking vision, it can often be thwarted by organizational roadblocks. In this episode, we explore how Air Canada successfully navigated some of these challenges to reimagine its customer experience and its ways of working. If you’re a product leader wanting to do the same, this podcast will give you all the insights you need to get started.Ìý
Episode highlights
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- Ivana introduces the concept of three key levers that help you deliver more impact and start building momentum towards innovation. They are choosing the right initiative, selling that problem and the solution to stakeholders, and choosing the team that will work with you on that project.
- Jose suggests working backwards to figure out what the problems are. He says it's not just about customer problems because in a business, especially a larger business, you also have to highlight the business problems.
- When selling an idea to stakeholders, you see a lot of selling in a presentation with a full strategy. But Jose explains that before you even get to presentation stage, every single person that needs to be bought in should already be bought in. He advocates for co-creation and collaboration right from the start.
- IvanaÌýsuggests framing things from the stakeholder's perspective rather than from your own perspective. She gives the example of speaking to your CFO, and framing it so that they understand the financial benefits of what you're proposing. Whether it's cost savings or revenue generation.Ìý
- Ivana believes design systems are great because they bring all of the disciplines together. A design system cannot be successful unless you bring everybody who supports it together to solve a problem.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Kimberly Boyd: Welcome to Pragmatism in Practice, a podcast from ºÚÁÏÃÅ, where we share stories of practical approaches to becoming a modern digital business. I'm Kimberly Boyd, and I'm here with Jose Platero, Director of Product and Design at Air Canada, and Ivana Ciric, Director of Product at ºÚÁÏÃÅ. Today we're going to explore how Air Canada created two new products that broke established ways of working and redefined the way Air Canada builds digital products.
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Jose, Ivana, welcome. Thanks for joining us today on Pragmatism in Practice. We're really thrilled to have you here and have this conversation about product today. I think it'd be great if we could start off with a little bit of an introduction from you so our listeners can learn a little bit about you and your role. Jose, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Air Canada?
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[00:00:49] Jose Platero: Sure. I've been at Air Canada now about five years. Originally started as a product manager, managing the new loyalty redesign and launch. Over the last five years have built out the product team that's been focused around Aeroplan and our partnerships, and most recently moving into the Director of Product and Design, building a design team from a few people to about 30 people. It's been a great journey. It's been an amazing time, and yes.
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[00:01:24] Kimberly: Nice. Sounds excited. Can't wait to hear more about it. Ivana, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role.
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[00:01:31] Ivana Ciric: Sure. My role involves working with our clients such as Jose on various complex products such as design systems, machine learning platforms, retail software, and a lot more data products included as well. Part of what I do at ºÚÁÏÃÅ is help our practitioners level up on our product thinking playbook, which I also work with a ton of our clients on.
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[00:02:01] Kimberly: Great. Wonderful. Thank you both. We're here today to talk about product and talk about product at Air Canada. Jose, maybe you can take us back to the beginning. How did this initiative even kick off? What was the catalyst to say, hey, we need to relook at product at Air Canada?
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[00:02:21] Jose: Yes, maybe I'll talk about the project that I think is something that near and dear to me, which is our newly redesigned home experience. It actually starts even before I worked at Air Canada. I've always been an avid traveler. I've loved travel, but there's always something that I've really disliked, not only as a customer, but as a product person. It's really just been the experience for airlines or any sort of travel website. I've always thought that they were quite dated.
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[00:02:53] Ivana: Amen.
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[00:02:54] Kimberly: [laughs]
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[00:02:54] Jose: Right. Yes. They've been quite dated and not given a lot of love. I've seen some good experiences from other airlines that have started to break through. I always thought, if I ever get the chance to work for one of these companies, this is the thing I'm going to go after and improve. I got that chance many years later in my career and walked in. First thing I wanted to do was redesign the homepage. The priorities at that time weren't aligned. The main priority at that time was launch the loyalty program. I focused my time on that. I'll talk a little bit more as we get into it around the evolution and how we got to unlock that project. My first day was like I had big dreams and very quickly shattered.
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[00:03:48] Kimberly: [laughs] At least for a time. It sounds like you eventually got there.
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[00:03:54] Ivana: Exactly. This is very common across a number of our clients that we work with. You have these ambitious product builders. They have great vision. They know they felt the pain as customers, and they want to solve customers' problems. But, they're working within an organization that has its business priorities, that has established processes, and a lot of people who know how to do their job really well. It's just really hard to steer that ship or that plane, if you will, into a slightly different direction.
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As I talked to Jose about some of the initiatives that he's worked on and that I've worked on, we realized that there were a lot of similarities to folks who have successfully managed not only to build innovative products, but also to change the way that teams worked. We found through our conversations that there were three key levers that you start with. It's not just about saying, I have this great vision, and automatically the tides will shift and everyone will come and join you on this mission, you actually have to do a little bit of work or maybe a lot of work in some cases.
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There are three key levers, turning points that will help you deliver even more impact and start building momentum towards that innovation. They are choosing the right initiative, selling that problem and the solution to stakeholders, to the whole team, and then choosing the team that will work with you on that project, that initiative, and ultimately making your vision a reality. We'll go more into that throughout this conversation.
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[00:05:46] Kimberly: I always love a good framework, so I'm glad we're starting there with some levers. Maybe we can speak to the first one that you highlighted, and it starts really with choosing that right initiative. Jose, can you talk a little bit more about how you went about that?
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[00:06:03] Jose: Yes, and I think my vision at that time was very emotionally driven, and so it wasn't fully formed at the time. I just knew that I had to come in there and relook at this because there's something wrong with it. My initial half big pitch was around redesigning experience, but it just didn't resonate. It wasn't impactful enough. It was very much like, again, it came from an emotional state, so it took a bit of time for me to unpack what the real problem was. At that time too, that home experience, nobody wanted to touch it because it worked. Nobody really fully owned it. There was a lot of, not fear necessarily, but there was just a lot of resistance or people just didn't want to get into it.
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What I thought was, okay, I got to work backwards and figure out what the problems are here. It's not just about the customer problems because in a business, especially the size, customer problems only move people in a little bit. You also have to highlight the business problems. With a very small team, we started doing some research, trying to really unpack this and figure out what was wrong with it. What we realized is that over the last five, 10 years, the products that Air Canada offered had grown, especially with the introduction of the loyalty program.
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The experience hadn't scaled properly with the amount of stuff that was going on. For customers coming in to look for a certain thing, it was actually quite confusing. This is like a drastic, extreme example. I always thought about it as like looking at the million-dollar homepage where it's just like everything all at once. We described it as like, where's Waldo for the customer trying to find what they're trying to get to. It wasn't that bad, but you want to paint a picture of the customer pain.
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[00:08:13] Kimberly: No, that sticks in the mind. That's a good [laughs] mental image.
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[00:08:17] Jose: When we talk to customers, they come to do core actions. They want to book a flight, they want to check in, and then maybe they want to look at something with their loyalty program, or they want to find some information. We validated that. That became the first pillar, helping customers find what they're looking for fast.
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Now, the second part of this was there was a marketing problem or a business problem. That is that we have a lot of stuff that we want to showcase and we want to drive people to these actions. There's so many different lines of businesses that they're all competing for a very limited spot. We looked at the spots that we had for this promotion, and they're really small and they had very little uptake. There was a lot of hunger games, sort of fighting for that spot for the result to be very minimal. We're like, okay, let's figure out a way to give all of these lines of businesses contextual ways to promote their products. That was the second one. We're going to solve that problem.
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Now we've got people framed around customer and framed around business. There was a third lever that pushed us over the edge, which was not only have we scaled, but so has we've also evolved how we represent the brand. When you start looking at the full experience, it's quite disconnected. What we wanted to do was create a more cohesive brand experience for customers so when they land on Air Canada, no matter where they are, they feel like they're part of Air Canada. That actually, and we'll talk about this, birthed a different product, which was our design system, which is what we worked on together. We were able to solve the first two problems, but then we found an even bigger problem that we needed to solve as well. It was like this.
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[00:10:15] Kimberly: You were just starting to unpack it. Then there's more hidden behind.
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[00:10:21] Jose: I think that framing was what enabled us to get people bought in and we brought people along the way, so they were able to see the problems, we showed them, and then we showed them the testing. Then we show them a vision of what the future was. I think that got us closer, but there was still some fear. It's we haven't done something here. It's the customer facing, like it's the face of Air Canada. Anything we do impacts us.
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We're like, "Okay, well, how do we do this and minimize the risk?" We're like, "Okay, what if we build in public, but we do a smaller beta?" We built this beta. What was interesting about the beta was that we released something bare bones and we got a ton of feedback about it, but because it was only to a subset of groups and we framed it as a beta, it was okay. Not only was it okay with our customers because it could give us feedback, it was okay for our business because they didn't feel like we were-- it didn't impact anything negatively. It actually give us that. It allowed us as a company and a product team to be able to operate that way, operate faster and get the business a bit more comfortable to not having like a big bang release, right?
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[00:11:45] Ivana: Yes. So many excellent approaches all rolled into one here. The way that you were able to step back from your vision and say, "This is guiding me. This is my North star, but let me talk to these people in marketing. Let me talk to brand. Let me talk to technology. Let me talk to people who really care about the user experience." Then you brought your vision down to a vocabulary that they all understood and that was really important to each of them. Then you understood that if I tried to propose a really big redesign, nobody will go for it because brand to every large company that relies on customers purchasing something from them, interacting with them, touching the brand is really sensitive.
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You want to do a lot of research around it. People are very careful. Even when we look at large tech systems, you don't want to make code changes for something that's really small or often clients don't want to because they're afraid that if it's just working, don't fix it. Don't make any changes because what we really care about are that customers don't experience downtime, that customers can still find what they want.
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It's that combination of you hit on the customer experience and you were really passionate about that and solving that, but you also understood what the business needed. You understood the drivers. You understood that just like many other companies, you scaled at such a rapid pace, and you had great teams working with you and for you that were building really quickly, but you could see a way to elevate both the brand and the experience in a way if everybody got on board and that's exactly.
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Going from full redesign, you picked an initiative that solved multiple problems, that could be rolled out minimally, and you focused on rolling out the beta, which as you said, it gave the business and all of your stakeholders confidence that your ideas sound, you gathered evidence so you were able to move forward and you were also able to demonstrate that doesn't actually cost that much to put something like this in place.
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[00:14:23] Kimberly: Interesting in hearing both of what you just shared, it always sounds like, especially when you're touching the front end of the customer experience and something so closely tied to brand, there's that tension of like, "If it's not broke, don't fix it, but hey, it could be better. What's the tipping point to help provide an impetus to actually make that change and get folks out of their comfort zone and move forward with something different?"
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I think what I heard a lot of what you were sharing, Jose, is the amount of people, psychology, influence building, stakeholder management, a lot of time spent on that upfront, but truly that is where it sounds like a lot of the hard legwork needs to go in first, ultimately making the build work that much easier. I know, Ivana, that you shared that one of the three levers is selling the idea to leadership. Jose, you started to touch on some of that, but having gone through this, do you have advice for listeners who are really passionate about a product idea such as you were? They're struggling to get the movement, get their stakeholders to have buy-in and confidence that that's the right path forward. What advice would you give them on how to sell their ideas?
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[00:15:56] Jose: Yes, it's interesting because I've been learning over and over that this can be somewhat of a repeatable thing. I always think about it, well, recently I've been thinking about it as these like loops that just get bigger and bigger. With the idea of selling, you see a lot of selling in a presentation with a full strategy. Before you even get to any sort of presentation, every single person that needs to be bought in should already be bought in. It's really about co-creation and collaboration from the start.
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From the start of the problem was like validating it. Giving the example of the customer problem, my team didn't just go in a silo and go interview people. We brought people along for the ride. We opened that up and then we shared that. People see it. You're not only are you saying it, but you're hearing it, and you're like, "Okay, you're right." Then the same thing with the business problem is you highlight those problems, and you just validate and make sure that those are problems.
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Then what I find happens and what I actually really like is that when we're presenting a problem, let's say we need to get executive buy-in, I'm actually not the one, like my product team is not the one talking. It's all of the other stakeholders that are like aligned on that message and aligned on that problem. Everybody's like, "We have to fix this." We're not even talking about the experience or the design or the pixels. We're just saying this is a problem. Then we need to do something about it.
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The selling is from the beginning to the end and it's sold before you even like start anything. That would be my advice is don't think about it as perfection. It's rough draft, like napkin with people all the time and just get them to be along for it, be part of the product team.
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[00:17:53] Ivana: Yes, as a product person, trying to convince people to build this product or build this feature, I've fallen earlier into the trap of, "I'm just going to put together a beautiful plan. I'm going to work on this. I'm going to tell my team, but I'm going to keep it within a very small bubble and then present it when it's perfect." What ends up happening is you lose out on the incremental feedback. It's much easier for someone to engage with you if you just shoot them over an idea and you start chatting with them. It can be a casual conversation.
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To your point, once you sit there for the formal presentation, the pre-work has been done. When you think about influence and some of the steps that you have to take towards influencing others, it's gathering as much as you can about what their problems are, what their challenges are. Just talking to people without having this ulterior motive. Really getting to understand your stakeholders and your team and what's important to them.
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Then thinking about the next step of framing things from their perspective rather than from your perspective. If you're speaking to your CFO, how do you frame it so that they understand the financial benefits of what you're proposing? Whether it's cost savings or revenue generation. Then if you're speaking to somebody on your team who has to change the way they work, what is going to help them in their day-to-day?
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There was a story about a client that I worked with where leadership was actually bought in, but the team wasn't bought in to a new way of building product. We were trying to establish certain engineering practices and it was really, the resistance was actually on the team side. There's a wide spectrum of people that you have to appeal to when you're trying to change anything or start a new engagement.
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What we ended up doing with this team was we stepped back and we said, what are the problems that they have with their existing engineering practices? Are they seeing a lot of bugs? Are they having trouble delivering on time? Is it unclear what they're supposed to work on? Then we framed the practices through the lens of the problems that they were having. Other steps to influence, as you mentioned, it's priming people. Prime not just your supporters, but also your detractors.
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Because if you know that someone is maybe not supportive, maybe you have a really old system that would have to be replaced in order to implement what you're trying to implement, and the folks who own that system don't have the bandwidth to work on it, talk to them, work with them, and understand what their challenges are so that at least you're prepared to answer their questions and try to mitigate some of those fears or the reservations that they may have. Make sure to do the pre-work. You definitely demonstrated doing a lot of that.
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[00:21:19] Jose: Yes, I would maybe just quickly add to that too, these two projects probably were the most stakeholder management. I air-quote this, because I think it's just around, it's really just working with people. It was a lot, and it was more than the build itself. It was definitely the part that you had to put the most time into. I think you talked about detractors, and there's always going to be these opposing thoughts. You have to be open to that, and you have to figure out ways to quickly validate that, and you have to be okay with being wrong.
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A very quick example for us is when we were deciding what to put on the nav, and that nav is like everybody wants a piece of that nav. Then if you give everyone a piece of that nav, it's like infinite scroll. It became a debate, so we had to back it up with numbers, we had to back it up with research. Then in some cases, that wasn't enough. We had to launch it and test it, and then get data back, and then bring that as proof.
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Then we were, to be honest, in a couple of cases, we were like, our thoughts, like my thoughts were completely wrong. Then we were able to respond to that. A very quick example, this is like on me, and my whole team was like against this, but I was like, no, we're not going to have search, because the navigation is going to solve wayfinding. Biggest complaint when we launched was like, where's the search? I was like, oops.
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[00:23:04] Kimberly: I love that you admitted to that. I think that's an important point.
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[00:23:09] Ivana: You build trust by telling people, by having this vision, but then telling people, look, I was wrong. I'll accept it and let me fix it, because now we have this process in place where we can build quickly. We will go through a regular process, we'll validate, and we'll modify, we'll pivot to what we need.
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[00:23:34] Jose: Yes, it was great. The response time was amazing, because within a week we had search up. That was the only thing. The other thing too, is like the risk is minimal and we can show that we can quickly respond to it very fast.
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[00:23:47] Ivana: Yes. You triggered a thought. There is a great model of asking questions. How do you ask the right questions? It's not who should be on the nav, for example. It's what are we trying, stepping back and saying, what are we trying to achieve? Is it more important that everything is on the nav, or is it more important that wayfinding is easy? Then you get your stakeholders to align on the principles at that level, where you've stepped away from their immediate interests, and they're really thinking as a whole company, wherever you work.
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Once you answer those fundamental questions, they will guide the decisions that you make, and it will become very clear that principle number one, customer experience. We're going to make sure that our nav is very clear, and that we will have search. Then anything else that doesn't get resolved, you can experiment and figure out what's best for your customers.
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[00:24:53] Kimberly: I think that my main takeaway from what you were all just sharing, when it comes to selling the idea and all the upfront pre-work that's involved in that is it sounds like making sure that product isn't something that happens to people. It's something they're actively participating in is a central tenant of success there. You've talked about two of the three levers so far, selecting that right initiative, doing all that upfront heavy lifting of getting folks on board and bought in. Then it comes to assembling the team. Jose, can you talk a little bit about how you approached assembling that right team to bring those products to life?
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[00:25:36] Jose: Yes. I'll flip gears from home to the design system. When that problem came up, I was also building like my brand-new product design team. That really was focused on bringing in new talent. One of the hard parts about bringing new talent is onboarding talent and getting a mix of seniors that can coach juniors. I was really thinking about, "Okay, well, how can I make this easy for us to onboard people and then how can I build a team and then how can I create a design organization with best practices and all that?"
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That wasn't a separate thing. I was like, "Okay, I think I can do this through the design system, but what I need is a partner that already knows how to work the way that I want to work. Then we'll use this as the vehicle to bring that team together. That's when I engaged ºÚÁÏÃÅ and that expertise came in. It wasn't about the design system itself, like that can be built. What I wanted as an outcome of that engagement was that we would build the team. Then this was perfect because we had to bring designers from every single domain together.
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They got to learn about everything, like every single product, and they had to work so closely together, and they had to make decisions. Sometimes those decisions were very difficult to make, but they had to sort it out in order to output that. Yes, I think that was one of the core things about assembling the team. Sometimes you don't have the expertise, so get the expertise to help you accelerate. Then you bring good people in and then you help them create that, help them grow and then help them build something out of that.
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[00:27:38] Ivana: Yes. What I loved about watching your design team grow and develop and really form in the time that we were working together was that you brought everyone from all of these different groups within the company together and they formed this joint identity. It was we are one team. As a result, when you look at the products that are being built, they have a lot more to do with each other now than before. You don't have independent designers who are dropped into a team to fulfill a very specific mission, design a very specific use case. You have designers who talk to each other, who borrow ideas from each other, and who understand the core principles that you're working within.
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You recruited people who were really passionate about not just design, but also learning and growing. People who had this flexible mindset so that when the design system formed in a way that maybe wasn't like what they were used to designing, they could adapt. You had folks who were really passionate. You had folks who were excited about continuous improvement, but you also had a mix of people who were established in the org and who other people trusted and wanted to follow.
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When you're starting a team, you may only have a couple of individuals, but as you said, it's really important to have that subject matter expertise from somewhere. Doesn't have to be everybody, but at least one of those team members should have done something similar before and be able to operate in the way that you're thinking. Then if they have the right influence within the company, they will be able to bring people along with them. Then of course they need to be bought into your vision. You would have shared, this is what the experience should feel like. Maybe not exact details, but they should be excited about what you're building. I saw a lot of elements of all of that when we worked on the design system.
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[00:30:04] Jose: One thing that was really interesting for me, very tactically, like every person that comes on the team, like I'll work with them on something. The first week they're there, we'll work on something together. It really helps me understand what motivates them and where they want to grow and what they want to do. We haven't even placed them in a thing yet, or maybe we placed them on something, but then they show that they are really passionate about something else. I'll make that shift.
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Then I think with the design system, it was amazing is because we got to see all the different products, people were just self-selecting, being like, I want to work on that. It was cool because they got exposure to it. That stuff has existed years before, like I was there and I had never seen it. Now they're seeing it for the first time. They're seeing these other opportunities and then we make shifts on the team. That makes the whole team stronger because they're aligned to the thing that they're very passionate about.
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We always talk about like the meadow winds or like the Trojan horse. I always find that, for example, the design system, like it's doing so much stuff for the brand, but at the same time, it's done so much stuff for the team itself.
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[00:31:21] Ivana: Yes, exactly. I also think that sometimes people forget that your team isn't just the immediate team, the product builders, you actually build a team around yourself of supporters and stakeholders. Similarly, when I was at Air Canada, I would hear folks who were in leadership praising the design system, saying, we've never done this before. The design system is something brand new. Hey, could it solve this problem and that problem? Then all of a sudden you find that you're not even in the room and people are speaking about your initiative, whatever it is. I found that you did that really well at Air Canada.
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[00:32:08] Kimberly: What popped in my mind as you're talking about all the dynamics of the teaming is almost a product orchestra. Everyone came with their unique capability, but they're creating the symphony when they're all playing together. It also sounds like at times there was opportunities for them to do some improvisational jazz and break off into smaller groups and riff on things together. I really love the way you both framed that.
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I think to land the plane, sorry, I have to use a little airplane pun there, on today's conversation, it would really be great to hear a little bit about how this way of working of focusing on the initiative, being intentional about selling, being intentional about bringing the team together. What benefits have you seen that bring to Air Canada in the way you bring products to market?
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[00:33:08] Jose: I would say it hasn't been fully codified yet into the way of working, but I've seen pockets of this with some of the teams that they take this kind of approach, maybe their own flavor of it to anything that they work on. What I think has been really good for our team is, and I've worked in a lot of other organizations and what you end up seeing is a lot of split between tech or digital or the business. Even that language to me is like not great. Whenever I hear that, it's telling of how people think of each other.
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What I found is that our team now, whenever we start something new is like this person from maybe this department or just this person, we're working with this person. They're just part of the team. Things just move so much quicker and decision-making is much easier. There's always debate, but things can just like get done faster and there's just less stress. There's less like combat because people are just aligning at that level. It makes software or whatever we're building really easy.
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What I think that these kinds of projects have done is just break down those silos or that older way of working. You don't really have a distinction between the business and digital or tech. It's just like, "Hey, we're trying to solve this problem. Who do we need? Who do we need on this team to solve it?"
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It was just like self-organize and something will pop up in a design. Few weeks later, like I'll open up the website and I'll be like, "Oh, that's cool. I didn't know he did that." Because now it's so much faster. Yes, so I think that was been one of the biggest benefits. I will say, it's not always like that. We have a lot of work to do to spread that, but I've seen it. I've seen the speed, the way that we operate be just much faster just by thinking about how we approach these problems.
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[00:35:37] Ivana: Yes, I've seen people trying to emulate your team and the way that they work, and nobody went and told them this is how you have to do product. All of a sudden, you peel back that one layer and then people start seeing what's possible and people start talking to other people that they've never talked to before, even though they're working at the same company, but maybe they've never had a reason to interact. I've seen casual conversations popping up between people who I know didn't know each other prior to the start of the design system.
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When we talked earlier about picking the initiative, the initiative you picked was something that was so inspiring to everyone that they forgot about, "Well, I'm supposed to be in this box, and I do this job." It was "How do we all work together?" All of a sudden, one day you're not as focused on the design system but those ways of working that fabric of how everybody interacts and thinks about products and thinks about the customer experience, they're left. Then whatever the next initiative is that happens to be priority for the organization, you have trust already, you have the team already, you have the ability to go a lot faster than you did the very first time you tried that.
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[00:37:11] Jose: One thing that just came to mind was when we did the liftoff here at the office, we brought my product design team, but we also brought the brand studio team together and they're very similar disciplines. Before the interactions they were there, but they were like, "Oh, I need an asset from this person," or like, "Send this over to digital." Then you brought all these humans together and then by the end of it, there was just a mix of people, and they became friends.
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Then at work that just translated into things getting done very quickly. Let me just walk over to, blah, blah, blah's desk and ask them for advice on this thing that I want to do. It's just magic because it's just so much faster and it's so much easier. That connection wouldn't have happened if we didn't have that. Then the way that you guys facilitated this allowed for that to happen because you unified against one common thing, right?
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[00:38:13] Ivana: Yes, one common goal. I see this with product and engineering, design and engineering. It's not always even "business and tech," it's different disciplines who have different sets of skills and maybe see the same problem through different lenses. What we really try with our product thinking approach is how do we get the best of everybody's perspectives? Because we know that ultimately contributes to a better product.
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I think design systems are really great because they do bring all of the disciplines together. A design system cannot be successful unless you bring design and product and engineering and marketing, everybody who supports it together to solve a problem and say, if we build a design system, then our business is going to benefit, our customers are going to benefit.
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End to end, I think the success of this design system was that you touched on all of those points. We went through all of these levers and we were able to get a team. We were able to get all of our stakeholders to see that common challenge and then align on a common solution. You had an amazing team that worked really hard on it.
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[00:39:39] Kimberly: The moral of the story is great things can happen when you bring a lot of people together to rally around a common problem. Thank you both for this conversation today. I think it's been really enjoyable and insightful. Before we finish up, just I think one last question for you both is, based on the opportunities and challenges you've experienced going through these product builds, what advice would you have for other product leaders who might be going through something similar?
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[00:40:17] Jose: Yes, I would say like product is hard if you're doing it alone. If you bring together people and just share the problem, even if it's raw, undefined, you let people in, you're going to see how quickly things accelerate. Yes, just don't let it boil by yourself, you're not alone.
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[00:40:46] Ivana: Yes, I think on that same theme, you don't have to do it all at once. You may have a vision of something that you can get to eventually, but it's okay to take a small first step and build up. What you had mentioned, Jose, about layers, it's taking the first bite out of that apple, getting the first layer and then just keep going and building and you'll realize that once you hit that momentum, once that flywheel starts spinning, it's going to be a lot easier and you will be able to expand your sphere of influence. It's okay to start small, that's in fact how we all started.
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[00:41:34] Jose: Totally.
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[00:41:35] Kimberly: Those are both great suggestions and reminders for folks. Jose and Ivana, thanks so much for joining us today on Pragmatism in Practice. Next time I have the opportunity to fly Air Canada, I will know who to thank for the wonderful customer experience.
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[00:41:52] Ivana: Thank you so much.
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[00:41:53] Jose: Thank you.
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[00:41:54] Kimberly: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Pragmatism in Practice. If you'd like to listen to similar podcasts, please visit us at ºÚÁÏÃÅ.com/podcast or if you enjoyed the show, help spread the word by rating us on your preferred podcast platform.
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[music]
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[00:42:18] [END OF AUDIO]
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