Clare Muscutt talks with Airship’s Strategic Services Lead, Jennie Lewis about the challenges faced by women in Customer Experience technology.
Episode #401 Show Notes
Clare Muscutt :
Welcome to the first episode of the fourth series of the women in CX podcast, a series dedicated to real talk conversations between women in customer experience. Listen, in, as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner, of CX subjects.
I'll be your host Clare Muscutt. And in today's episode, I'll be talking to one of our members, a seriously wonderful woman in tech. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest…
Hailing from Brooklyn, New York. She started out in tech marketing before boldly stepping into the male dominated space of solutions architecture, working in a number of senior roles for tech companies, including Epsilon and Crowd Twist. Before joining SaaS company Airship, where she now serves the strategic services lead. She holds a certificate in design thinking from eCornell, a certificate in customer experience innovation from Northwestern and is passionate about CX research, and, making technology more human centered by design. Please. Welcome to the show. CX sister, Jennie Lewis.
Hey Jennie!
Jennie Lewis:
Hey Clare. Good to talk to you.
Clare Muscutt :
Welcome to the inspiring women in CX podcast. How are you doing
Jennie Lewis:
Doing well. How are you? I I'm chugging along here. I'm very, very pregnant. Trying to power through.
Clare Muscutt :
Couldn't get any more pregnant, right?
Jennie Lewis:
6 Weeks to go. Well, apparently I can, there's six more weeks for it to just keep keep growing!
Clare Muscutt :
Oh, wow. I'm gonna come and ask you some more questions about that, that shortly, but I just wanted say welcome to everybody listening along at home as well. It's great to be back after our hiatus. We've been super busy building a community for women in customer experience. The world's first in the background of which Jenny is one of our wonderful members. So welcome. Welcome Jenny and baby on board.
Jennie Lewis:
Yes.
Clare Muscutt :
So let's get us started then. So I, I always ask our guests the same question to begin. It's just a little one to warm us up, make us feel nice and comfortable. An easy one to answer. That's just to tell us a little bit about how you found your way to where you are today.
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, so I started working in, in technology about 14 ish years ago and started out in really hands on tech role, but I was always working directly with customers. I started out with a huge automotive client right out of the gate and found my way through that to do more and more custom technology solutions. And what I realized is that the thing that I loved most was helping customers solve problems and spun this career of solving more and more complex technical problems like doing solution architecture and retail point of sale integrations to a loyalty program and really like really complex juicy problems and realized that there was sort of a niche of being able to understand the technology, but also understanding the customer point of view. Like ‘what are we doing for the end customer’ of the brand?
So I've always kind of be been in the B2B2C space, I guess, because I work with the brands and then, you know, try to help their customers out. So I grew through that and have a great manager now who really challenged me to take on a new role leading strategy team which has been amazing. Part of it I'd done before part of it I haven't, so it's been this, it's been this really nice balance of getting to do something I know, and also some stuff that's brand new.
Clare Muscutt :
Oh, awesome. And, and you do all this from your awesome apartment in New York?
Jennie Lewis:
Yes. From, yes, my very Brooklyn room, the, the combo office cat-suite and music studio, you know?
Clare Muscutt :
Yeah. And, and maybe next time when we speak, there'll be baby toys around there as well. <Laugh>
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, probably so
Clare Muscutt :
<Laugh> so that's super interesting for a number of reasons and just kind of playing back what I heard there. So, being a woman in technology is also a bit of a challenge, right. Because the majority of the workforce and particularly the senior roles are guys, I know you just mentioned, you've got an awesome manager that's challenging you to push yourself at the moment. But what's your experience been of being a woman in the tech space, especially on what sounds like quite a technical side of it with solution architecture.
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, it is. So, most of my prior roles have been in that super tech space. And I mean, there's, it's not easy. I mean for years I'd go into meetings where I was the only woman in the room, like at all, at all, just, it would be a bunch of engineers and me. I think the, the two biggest things I run into folks taking credit for my work, having people just straight up take credit for it, that, and then really getting dismissed during some of those meetings and working through both of those. I approached it differently over the years, you know, at first with the, the taking credit for work. The first time I was shocked that it had happened because I was like, well, why, how could the, how could this have, like, why would somebody do that?
It just blew my mind that somebody would even think to, to do something like that. The second time I got really angry <laugh> cause I was like, wait a second. This is not gonna continue to happen. And so I started getting really loud about what I was doing and promoting what I was doing outside of, you know, my, like my pod of folks that I was working in to make it clear. And it wasn't just me, it wasn't just my work, it was also my teams work too. So I was like, Hey, this is all the stuff that, that we are doing as a group. And starting promoting that more loudly to make sure that it was obvious outside of our internal team.
The meetings and getting dismissed in meetings. I, you know, frankly, that never ended in, in when I was in the tech meetings. What I found over the years was I made really great partnerships with especially the account management team guys who were advocates and absolutely recognize what was going on. And we really partnered together to help redirect things. So I had them to help kind of shift things back around and refocus conversations. And, you know, in some cases, one of, one of the guys, and I had a little joke where like, I would say something and then we had a customer who would do just like, ‘oh no, that can't possibly work’. And then he, my, my account management friend would repeat the exact same thing. I said, oh, and it was, I mean, it's, it's mind blowing, but it, you know, it's, I had to kind of get over it myself.
Like, cause at first I was just fighting it. Like, I, I have, I have to do this myself. I have like, I have to be the one. And then at the end of the day, it's like, well, that's not really what this is about. Right. We want to get them to change. We want them to get them to do whatever it is, if it's an integration or a data change or whatever. And if that's a path that I have to take to get there, then, you know, I, I sort of kind of, I guess it just sort of like threw away that the ego side of it, that it, that it had to come from me and then used my other resources to work around it.
Clare Muscutt :
Hey, this is not okay, girlfriend.
Jennie Lewis:
It's not, it's not, but you know, and it's, and it's crazy. Cause I was always on the vendor side. So I wasn't on a brand side. So that makes it complicated as well. Cause there's only so much you can push when you're in that position.
Clare Muscutt :
I guess like kind of the early days of, so somebody taking credit for your work and having to find the courage to kind of speak up and shout about what you and your team are delivering to ensure that that's recognized. So then kind of end up in the same situation again, where somebody is in a more positive way taking credit for your work. Because he's saying the exact same thing you did, but because he's a guy and the male client, I assume trusts the guy…. that's the, kind of the same thing happening twice. But you came to peace with the second of, because you know, that guy was like genuinely trying to help you and be an ally, but it's not fair isn't that women have to modify so much in order to survive in these male dominated environments such as, as technology, because if you'd have been a guy in that situation, like, would you have needed an ally to say the same thing?
Jennie Lewis:
Oh, definitely. Definitely not. It would've just been accepted. What I said would've been accepted. And yeah, I mean, it is very similar. I think the, the big difference is at the end of the day, my job was to help whoever the end client was. Yeah. Improve whatever they are working on. Right. And when I changed my, I just changed my focus. And in that scenario, it's like, what do we need to do to help this client move forward? Right. And that, if that was the only thing that was gonna work, then I just kinda had to accept it.
Clare Muscutt :
I get you, but like, it only happens to women, doesn't it. Having to make the sacrifice to be heard and listened to. We are the only ones to internalise it that way. So, you must really feel the difference then of like the leadership that you're experiencing now?
Jennie Lewis:
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. It it's very, very different environment now. And I'm in a less technical role. So my interactions are not like just all room full of tech folks. So I think that's a big change, but it's also, I think a leadership change and, you know, yeah. It's still something that is still something that I encounter, but it's not, as I think in my new, my new position, that's more, it's just not as frequent, but I agree it's messed up that we have to do that. It's not right, but I, I think, you know, at the end of the day, I'm just very thankful that I had so many great allies to help get through it. Right. Because yeah. You know, those, those guys were, were good partners.
Clare Muscutt :
Yeah. And, I'm intrigued as well. When I have had conversations in particularly product led spaces, pure play digital particularly, the mindset around customer and technology seems to be quite a challenge, especially for the technical arm or the development side of technology to really get the head around where customer can actually become quite an afterthought and the experience can become quite an afterthought when everybody's in the throws of like, just trying to deliver with agility and get the feature shipped. So I'm kind of curious to hear, a little bit more about always coming from this space of wanting to help people solve problems, being the advocate of the customer. How do you help the people on the vendor and tech side to appreciate this dynamic and get more value from what they do through the customer lens?
Jennie Lewis:
Well, it's it, it's definitely not the way most SaaS companies are designed. Right. Because it's very, very segmented out. Like this is the product, and this is the product that we're releasing…
Clare Muscutt :
And it's kinda, even with research, it's like validate what we already think rather than research about the customer
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah. Here's this thing we wanna build. Do we think it's gonna, do we think it's gonna work for for the customer and then you, like, you find a couple yeses and yeah, here we go. Which, you know, in a lot of cases, that's, that's great stuff. Right. But it it starts with the answer instead of with the question and I, and my case study, that's coming up. That's actually one of my <laugh> one of my, one of my first points in the case study is, you know, having that fresh eyes perspective. My number one, favourite design thinking term, you know, fresh eyes is probably the, the most important and the most challenging thing to bring to, to a conversation when you're, when you're doing that kind of research or trying to figure out what to build, or, you know, I, because I've been so solution that oriented and dealing with all the technology, trying to separate that out and coming up with an answer in the first conversation, it was, it was a, it was a painful transition, but I'm, I'm so glad I did it because it, it, I feel you open up more about what you're, what you can actually find because you're, you're not you're not focused on a certain point.
Clare Muscutt :
Yeah, I totally agree. And it's, it's a lot of kinda like solution bias. Isn't there, out there. And just trying to validate a product idea. So if I see it a lot in startups as well, actually, where the founder is, so where to their idea of what they think people or the world needs. And, you know, they Blu around for years, not finding product market fit because they never actually listened in the first place. And just so listeners heard Jenny mention that she's gonna be presenting a case study. She's actually presenting our first member led case study in the community on a applied customer understanding in the B2B context. So Jenny, why don't you tell the listeners at home a little bit more about this and what you're gonna be talking about in your case today?
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, I, so I'm so excited about this. I was working with a customer last year who had service some changes in, in what they were seeing from sales results. So some shifts in the market that I, another, my other favorite design thinking term Diagio, it's like things that are like, like, like there's like, there's something off here, right? There's, <laugh>, there's like, say again, the test AIO, it's an Italian word. I, I had this amazing design thinking professor from Cornell who that was the term that she used in class, but in essence it's it's like something that makes you think like, well, like something is not right. Like there, like I have a question, I can't quite put my finger on it, but something is off of course, like there's, there's you like sense something is off the situation. Yeah. Yeah.
Jennie Lewis:
And, and so they brought me in to help kind of understand, well, what changes have happened and where, where should did we start to focus? Like what's, what's working, what's not, is our way that we're targeting folks today from a go go market perspective. That is that what we should do going forward, or do we need to make some modifications? And so it was this massive research project going through details on their exist customer base on their potential market, looking at the total addressable market and getting an understanding of well, where, where should they focus to have the most potential benefit for the company?
Clare Muscutt :
Fascinating. So that design thinking and customer understandings, let's talk a little bit more about at that and the relationship there. So, so so I'm a, well, I'm a customer experience designer, but very much coming from a service design background, haven't personally studied design thinking to the extent of having works with a Cornell professor to do it. But in, in terms of like, you know, that, where these ideas originate in design thinking in comparison to product led design <laugh> is like basically night and day. Right. so that Diagio, oh, totally. What's the word <laugh>, you know, having a, having a hunch, having a feeling like, like kind of this curiosity there that we wanna explore this further. But the next step being to go and do discovery and to listen and to learn and to understand it and pick in order to, you know, the next part of your double diamond refine, like, what is the actual problem we're trying to solve is exactly the missing step, right? Because a lot of or companies or C, and they're trying to develop a product it's about, we have this product now, how do we get it to market and how do we
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah. Make, how do we market this thing that we already built <laugh>.
Clare Muscutt :
So we already know, because the fascination around like the ability for this thing to make a difference to cost saving or to remove humans, therefore make it cheaper to do something like the commercial benefits that have been established for a feature or a piece of technology. But what we end up seeing then is all of these like ideas and even entire digital pro platforms, let's say like an example of companies go brushing their way through digital transformation, where they purchase a load of off the shelf solutions, targeted it, removing human contact that then nobody uses because
Jennie Lewis:
Actually, or they don't work together or, or they're like, so they're so separated it out that they're not actually integrated. And then it makes it worse than it was before. Yeah. So,
Clare Muscutt :
So, so what's the answer in this space then? Like how can we get better applying design thinking to technology and products led decisions?
Jennie Lewis:
I, I mean, I, I feel like it's something you can use anywhere. Right? So the first off, the coolest thing about the, the courses that I took is that the professor is like a civil engineer, right. It, she's not a, she's not a product, a SaaS product person. Right. So it, it really is taking the, the technique and the methodology to then apply it to whatever, whatever your question is. Right. Whatever the thing is that you wanna investigate, which I think is what is so cool about is that you can, like, it doesn't really matter what the question is or where you're trying to go. You can still take the same methodology through. And even if it's only, you know, I don't often get to do the full, like end to end, like build a prototype and all, like all the, you know, all of those fun things, fun things, but yeah.
Jennie Lewis:
But the, the invest methodology I do get to use really frequently. So I think it's kind of trying to find where you can put those, those pieces of it into whatever context you have with the customer that you're working with. You know, my, I, my job is basically I run like an in-house agency that at a, at a SaaS company. So you know, we've got very different types of projects that we work on, right? Some are, you've got small, medium, large, right? Sometimes we have really long term retainers or engagements with a customer. And in those cases, I get to really dive more deeply into getting an understanding from them and, and really like squeeze more, squeeze, more juice out of it before we get to any answers. But when we're doing the small, more tactical based sessions, there's just, there's not a lot of space for it, unfortunately. You's just from an operations perspective, but I think it's applying small pieces of the process, wherever you can, would be the first place set start. Cuz if you tried to do like an org re redesign on that, it its
Clare Muscutt :
Never gonna
Jennie Lewis:
Yeah. It's I think what I found is it's really hard to to convince people to, to not bring the assumption in. Yeah. And that by, by releasing the assumptions by releasing the work that had been done prior some, some folks take offense to that because they, they had worked hard on whatever got created before. And it's not that, you know, having like removing those assumptions is saying like, oh no, that was bad work. Nobody's saying it's bad work. We're just saying, we're looking at it from a new context. But that mindset I found is very like some people are all in on it and then some people get very, very prickly about it <laugh> mm
Clare Muscutt :
Mm. Yeah, no, I totally totally get what you mean. Awesome. Well, it's been super fun chatting with you today. Yeah. I, I, I really, you know, respect and admire the fact that, you know, you kind of came up against those barriers and challenges, but you didn't let it change you. I, I'm still super fascinated to understand that dynamic about actually two similar situations, but how much you must have grown during that time to be able to handle it with such grace. <Laugh> when being faced with, with that ch with that challenge. And yeah, just like hearing that there's women, like you pioneering the strategy from and decide to support clients with more customer centered thinking and really hot. And that actually there's a demand, a growing demand for that kind of service from vendors. So that signals to me, there's a shift in the, the, the wider world where vendors are taking more responsibility of trying to, to help their clients do the right thing and develop the right product services solutions slash integrations slash <laugh> ways of making these things work better for the end users than, than previously the approach being more about how do we sell this thing and get it in <laugh>, which has been the, then them assist for many, a customer experience in the past.
Clare Muscutt :
So so just to finish off then just to round off our, our little half hour together what would you give as your piece of advice to fellow women in CX listening along at home,
Jennie Lewis:
Me and listen to everyone you possibly can to understand what they do within their role, what their, what their frustrations are, what their goals are, you know, what any type of, any type of listening exercise that you can do to understand what people in very different roles than you are doing. It'll give you more perspective to bring to, to any conversation, right? Because when we're, when we're talking about customer experience, we have to think about all the, all the different types of customers, right? And you, you're only one person. So you have to, you have to start opening yourself up and getting a, getting a stronger understanding of, of things that are different. And, and I found just especially being on, on the vendor side all these years, that the more folks that I can get to know and talk to, I, I have some amazing friends who were worked in technical support were, you know, worked in, in engineering you know, with, you know, that's part of how I were into code. It was, you know, talking with these folks, but the hang on a minute, you
Clare Muscutt :
Let you just getting
Jennie Lewis:
<Laugh>. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. My first, yeah, my first, yeah, my first, very first role in tech, I, it was back when, like, there was no wizzy wig for email and we, I was like writing Pearl code, the personalized automotive emails to show like, oh, well this wheel type, if you pick this or this different vehicle type. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Oh God. So that's my, I already
Clare Muscutt :
I knew you were cool, but you're like, you're even cooler now I know that as well, but yeah, that's a great piece of advice and, and hundred percent, you know, agree that you know, as customer experience professionals and leaders we spend a lot of time thinking about the customer and trying to understand them, but actually when it comes to delivering the work that we need to do to drive change through leadership, we have to treat our stakeholders like customers too, and really listen to and understand them in order for a space, a hundred percent that agenda. So I think that's a wonderful little takeout. So that's it from us best of luck with the impending six week challenge. That's coming up. Thank you.
Jennie Lewis:
<Laugh> yeah, I'll keep you posted.
Clare Muscutt :
Yeah. And yeah, can't wait to see you in the community and see your case study next week. <Laugh>
Jennie Lewis:
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jenny.
Clare Muscutt :
Bye for now. Bye
Jennie Lewis:
Everyone. Bye.
Clare Muscutt :
Thanks for listening to the women in CX podcast with me Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please drop us a like. Subscribe , leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on. And if you want to know more about joining the world's first online community for women in customer experience, please check out womenincx.community and follow the Women in CX page on LinkedIn. Join us again next time, where I'll be talking to another amazing community member this time from Saudi Arabia about getting closer to customers on any budget. See you all soon.