S1E2: A True Story of Clusterfuckery
With guest Jeff Verona
This episode of Corporate Underpants tells the story of a major project gone sideways and the hard lessons that emerged from it. Jeff Verona recounts the chaos caused by hidden misalignments and untested assumptions that ultimately derailed an initiative to streamline loan officer workflows. But it’s not all doom and gloom—woven into Jeff's tale are seven actionable "gems" that can help you spot and fix the kind of problems that left his team reeling. Whether it’s aligning goals, addressing overlooked user needs, or navigating internal politics, this episode delivers a relatable, so-messed-up-it's-laughable wake-up call for anyone tired of watching organizational tornadoes flatten their best-laid plans.
00:28 Introduction and Welcome
00:58 What's Corporate Underpants?
01:26 Conway's Law
02:13 Mastering politics to get more senior in the product world
03:38 Introducing Jeff Verona
06:14 Jeff's Career Journey
08:47 Jeff's story of clusterfuckery begins 10 years ago in the loans department...
13:26 Jeff tries to modify the project to fix the problems
16:14 Business Systems Analyst vs Service Designer
19:21 "We just need three additional fields..."
21:44 The snowball that rolls uphill
24:23 Gem 1 from George-the-Boss: focus on positive revenue impacts, not cost savings
26:06 Navigating Nine Screens: The Initial Challenge
26:38 User Feedback Session: First Impressions
28:22 Gem 2: User testing finds 'wrinkles in the carpet'
29:47 Ivan drops the poison pill in front of real customers: "What about mobile?"
32:34 "What abotu mobile" causes a classic tornado.
33:05 Why, Ivan... why??! Ivan's Agenda.
41:51 More gems from Jeff: what he would do differently
42:06 Gem 3: Unearth concerns before the meeting
43:44 Gem 4: Set rules for meetings
45:46 Gem 5: remember that logic doesn't automatically prevail
47:41 So what happened?
51:37 Gem 6: Puzzle Perspective
53:50 Gem 7: There are always at least three conversations going on at once.
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
Tamara Adlin: Hello. everybody. Welcome back to Corporate Underpants season one, episode two the first episode we had back before the end of the year, and then we had a holiday hangout. And now I am here with the first of the year. Welcome into 2025. I'm Tamara Adlin. I am the host and creator of Corporate Underpants, which I'm finally launching after many years of wanting to do and. This is going to be a live show. So then I don't have to do a lot of editing on it because that's something that kept me from doing it before.
What's Corporate Underpants?
Tamara Adlin: And it's going to be a [00:01:00] series of things, including what we're doing today, which is exploring the world of corporate politics by exploring one case of corporate politics in the product world and how a senior professional dealt with that and overcame it to give you some experience by osmosis.
So corporate underpants is when org issues show up in your products, like visible panty lines ruining an entire outfit. The idea of corporate underpants is not new.
Conway's Law
Tamara Adlin: I was having a great conversation this week with Larry Swanson , who's a friend of mine and in the content world and He pointed me to Conway's law, which was in 1967.
Conway's law says that any system, any product or I'm going to get this slightly wrong, but anything that's launched by definition and as a rule will reflect the communication patterns of the team, the organization. That created it. That's corporate underpants. If the communication patterns suck, then, no matter how good the team is, no matter how good the designers are, no matter how [00:02:00] good the process is, then, the product that you end up distributing or launching is going to have problems with it as well.
And I like to call that corporate underpants. The name is new, the idea is not. This is new.
Mastering politics to get more senior in the product world
Tamara Adlin: Idea and this, the audience that I'm trying to get to here, who I think you are is someone who's trying to become more senior in the world of product. You could be a product manager, a program manager. You could be in my field of user experience and you're trying to get more senior.
And you're realizing that learning all the methods, learning all the tools, learning all the stuff in the double diamond Is good, but it's not enough to get you great at your job because somehow things always come in from the sides or from above or from below that ruin your project plans, no matter how solid and great they are.
I call those tornadoes or earthquakes, and they tend to come from misaligned executives. So we are going to talk about how Getting better and better, what we call politics, getting better and better at managing the internal people in our organizations, our own [00:03:00] customers, our own users of the work that we do will make us better and better at launching great products.
And there is no one answer to this because as Tolstoy said, all Happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in unique ways. So there's no sort of one set of stories that's going to get you great at politics. But my idea is, what if we can give you access to a whole bunch of stories that'll get you better and more experienced at politics?
I myself, as a consultant since 2005, have been on over 85 teams, and I'm inviting onto this show people who have been part of senior teams and experienced chaos and clusterfuckery. And the first one of those is today.
Introducing Jeff Verona
Tamara Adlin: I'm really excited that Jeff Verona is joining us before I bring him on. I want to say this is my launch into 2025.
If you have something that you've been meaning to do, I think you should just do it and try it. If you're interested in following along with this, you can go to corporate underpants. com and get on the mailing list because the LinkedIn algorithm isn't always great for showing you things. It's recordings of this is, are also going to [00:04:00] be live on the corporate underpants podcast that I think I launched.
It is free. It's fucking hard to do basic stuff on the internet. Job security, another highlight of this week is one of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn Pavel Samsonov, oh my god, murder your, Pavel, who does great posts and doesn't seem to give a shit. A shit who sees them, which makes me really happy.
Did another post on UX being dead. I love this. Everybody loved this because the point of the post is that the conversation about UX being dead has been happening over and over again since Pavel's cartoon starts in 2016. It happened way before that. Believe me, someone who's long in the tooth like me remembers when it happened in the early two thousands.
Here's my message to all of us. The one thing that we're really great at in user experience and product is people AI. Is never going to solve the problem of people trying to work together. Ever. Personas are never going to solve the [00:05:00] problem of people trying to work together. Ever. What's going to solve the problem of people trying to work together is people who are good at getting other people to work together.
We're going to explore the problem of corporate underpants, and as some of you who know me know, I also have a solution to that. that I call Align Before design or alignment personas. I'm working on a book on that right now. And if you're interested in being an early reader and giving me feedback, I would love that.
You can send me a note at corporateunderpants. com without further. Oh, and by the way, my name's Tamara Adlin. I live in Seattle. I've been in the user experience world since before it was user experience world. I got my master's in human centered design in 1996. Have been working in startups since worked at Amazon for three years, wrote a couple of books on personas, and then have been consulting mostly in early stage startups ever since.
So I have got some stories to share with you. And I hope that my lens and my perspective is useful to you. Let's bring on another lens. I'm going to bring on Jeff Verona.
Hello, Jeff.
Jeff Verona: Hello. Happy new year.
Tamara Adlin: Happy new year to you. [00:06:00] God, I hope it's a happy one. This whole new year.
thing has just become. Nerve wracking. It used to be like exciting parties and now it's I'm going to stay at home and be nervous.
Jeff Verona: That's called aging.
Tamara Adlin: It's called, Oh, that's what that is. my God.
Jeff's Career Journey
Tamara Adlin: So Jeff, you came to the very first one of these and we hadn't, we didn't know each other before. I think you knew who I was
Jeff Verona: directly. I had seen you on NSA.
Tamara Adlin: yeah, NSA is never search alone, which by the way is a huge free network for job seekers that I highly recommend to anyone who's out there looking that's another, that's some volunteer work that I do.
And Jeff you've been looking
Jeff Verona: I have, I am a senior product manager looking for opportunities and B2B software. companies that typically will provide operational productivity types of tools and solutions. Ideal company profile would be a medium sized business with 50 to 500 employees. It could be a later stage startup as well.
But usually,
I like [00:07:00] to serve small to medium businesses.
And would prefer an organization that's trying to break into a new market and, or,
Trying to launch a new product.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, so for those of you listening who are looking for work, by the way, notice how specific Jeff was able to be about what he's looking for. And this is melding the two worlds of Never Search Alone and Corporate Underpants. It's nerve wracking, but very useful to figure out exactly who you are and exactly what you want to do next, because if you don't do it, somebody else has to figure out what you want to do next.
So I commend you on that specificity, although that must make you nervous in some ways to be that specific.
Jeff Verona: It does. And I still trip over it,
At times.
Tamara Adlin: We all do. How long, what was your, what was the last gig you were, tell us a little bit about your career trajectory.
Jeff Verona: Last gig was with Publisys Sapient as a,
Senior product manager consultant,
Working on behalf of their clients to solve their complex,
Digital transformation issues. I happened to work on a supplier portal for a large US retailer,
[00:08:00] That was serving 17, 000 suppliers and trying to consolidate six applications under a single roof.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. So that's massive internal tools work.
Jeff Verona: Yeah, it was still externally facing because we wanted self service management of the supplier's
Merchandising team to,
Set up their own team on the platform.
Tamara Adlin: Okay.
Jeff Verona: It was supplier facing as well.
Tamara Adlin: So the story that you're going to, so you have been in product for a long time. And you have seen really great teams with really great processes somehow managed to launch products that are not as great as they really could have and should have been.
Jeff Verona: Yes.
Jeff Verona: Absolutely.
Tamara Adlin: Tell me more about that.
Jeff's story of clusterfuckery begins 10 years ago in the loans department...
Jeff Verona: So early, very early in my career I was a business analyst, technically in the role I was in with a customer lending organization or consumer lending organization. I should [00:09:00] say we were looking at the loan officers experience with
Tamara Adlin: So hold on. Let's, I'm going to take this apart in pieces. So consumer lending. Involves an organization, a big parent organization, right? And then a bunch. And then a bunch of loan officers,
Right? Who are then interacting with the general public who want money to buy something.
Jeff Verona: Yes, typically you'll see this most often in automotive and mortgage. Very often. And we're looking at the loan officer's experience with setting up the loan. And looking for ways to improve their experience. And the way that the project came about was there was a desire to reduce the amount of time it took the loan officer to fill out the application on behalf of the consumer and make sure that process of going out to the credit decisioning engine and coming back was a round trip of less than five minutes.
[00:10:00] Yes.
Tamara Adlin: So the situation is, let's pretend. It's a company that sells banana cars and banana cars incorporated has dealerships and in the dealerships, there's loan officers and there's people who come in and want to buy a banana car.
And so the people who come in, sit down with a loan officer and the loan officer helps them fill out an application, which is actually a digital application and then clicks. Send and that digital application goes back to banana corporate or the whoever and it decides whether or not this person is worthy of a loan.
Jeff Verona: Yes.
Tamara Adlin: That was 5 and there was some goal to make that whole loop under 5 minutes.
Jeff Verona: yes, absolutely. A hundred percent.
Tamara Adlin: do you know why? Was is why 5 minutes?
Jeff Verona: It was a desire just to reduce the time and friction for the loan officer overall, because in that business, [00:11:00] capturing more loan opportunities meant more money for the organization. So if we are easier to do business with loan officer would most likely choose. Us first over other financial institutions.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, so my brain just got twisted. So I'm really glad that I'm pulling this apart. There were multiple the loan officer could get that loan serviced by multiple financial
Jeff Verona: Yes,
Tamara Adlin: and banana cars incorporated would prefer it to be with banana cars.
Jeff Verona: Absolutely.
Tamara Adlin: I see, but they could have gone out to Jennifer's credit union,
Jeff Verona: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Tamara Adlin: see. So if the loan officer is sitting there and the easiest thing to do, because the customer is sitting in front of them is to say, let me get this approved. You banana cars wants. The loan officer to know banana cars is going to make this seamless. I'm going to go, I'm going to try them first. I see.
Okay.
Jeff Verona: Absolutely. We wanted to be first and we wanted to be last.
Tamara Adlin: And so [00:12:00] time sitting there and, small talking or whatever the customer, they'd prefer this to be, to feel like a, Oh, they got me the loan really fast and it was super.
Jeff Verona: And the easier we are to do business with the loan officer, the more likely loan officers to choose us.
Tamara Adlin: I see. So the loan officer is trying to make the customer happy. You're trying to make the loan officer happy.
Jeff Verona: Absolutely.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. So keep going.
Jeff Verona: to extension, we want to make the customer happy as well, the end customer.
Tamara Adlin: Sure.
Jeff Verona: We're looking at the opportunity to modify this workflow and shorten it. And we, I came upon a little bit of a problem, which was once the loan was approved, we have to put it into our accounting system and be able to collect payments against that loan.
And
Tamara Adlin: After it's approved.
Jeff Verona: After it's approved?
Tamara Adlin: So the so hold on a second. The customer isn't sitting there with a loan officer anymore.
Jeff Verona: No, not at this point. Typically they have been approved. They've provided their [00:13:00] necessary documentation that, that was requested in order to prove their identity and whatnot. And they're probably out the door. They're probably They're riding their bike, their their banana car to their house. And they think everything's happy and go lucky and they're just waiting that they're probably not waiting, but they would expect a a bill in the mail asking for payment on their loan.
Tamara Adlin: Okay.
Jeff tries to modify the project to fix the problems
Jeff Verona: But we ran into a little bit problem with the original solution that we came up with, and I found out that it wasn't going to work, right? That we're going to have to make modifications to the solution. And I kicked off a lot of discussion, a lot of internal consternation because it was already a big project.
It was already a large amount of money funded for the effort.
Tamara Adlin: Again, I'm going to pause here. There was already a project underway at Banana Cars Finance. To improve the process of getting the completed loan into [00:14:00] your system to start generating all of the equipment that would manage the payments. So there was somebody, some boss somewhere had already funded we've got to improve this process of getting loans into our financing system. Okay.
Jeff Verona: It was to improve the origination portion of the process, but I found a problem with the servicing port portion of the process as a result. As a result of our proposed solution. So in other words, it worked locally. It didn't work globally.
Tamara Adlin: Say more about that.
Jeff Verona: In finance and manufacturing, often you can optimize changes at one station or one portion of the process. But if you don't pay attention to its impact downstream, you may actually cause more problems. Then you solved
Tamara Adlin: Are you talking about so for example, if you tweak something and suddenly something gets a little bit easier in inputting, let's say this into the financial [00:15:00] software that handles payments, could screw something up later for the buyback process or something or what? I'm making this up cause I don't know about cars, but,
Jeff Verona: Or collectors
Tamara Adlin: oh, collectors, debt collectors
Jeff Verona: Yes
Tamara Adlin: Oh, talk about end to end thinking. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Okay.
Jeff Verona: yeah it's a reality of loan loans. Not everybody pays back their loan So one of the aspects of loan servicing is to make sure that you can contact that
That customer when they don't make a payment And that was the crux of the problem that we ran into which was if I didn't make this change It was going to cause a problem with loan collections
Tamara Adlin: If you didn't make
Jeff Verona: If I didn't make the change, it was
Tamara Adlin: the change that you wanted to, make. So you found a problem with there was project a, it was spun up and Jeff came in and said, hold the phone project a all funded and everything we've got a problem.
Jeff Verona: Houston, we've got a problem.
Tamara Adlin: Houston, we've got a problem.
[00:16:00] because later on when things go to collections, if we don't fix this now, we're going to have a massive issue with collections.
So you were coming in and saying. I object at the wedding ceremony.
Jeff Verona: I object I object
Business Systems Analyst <-> Service Designer
Tamara Adlin: I object. So how did you object? How did you discover this problem and
object?
Jeff Verona: I treated it more like an engineer. We had a requirement with that. We did not.
Tamara Adlin: So it was in the requirements document. It's just somehow.
Jeff Verona: it needed to be added to the requirements document as a change.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. But how did you know, how did you find out that figure out that was
Jeff Verona: Due diligence in, in my business analysis work to understand the systems integrations because a good business systems analyst won't just look at their own system. They'll look at the feeding systems that this system feeds and make sure that you don't create problems for downstream or upstream systems as a result of what you're doing.
Tamara Adlin: This is highly related to, we call it service [00:17:00] design.
In my head, business systems analyst was like the early way of saying, It's actually the problem side, like what you're figuring out and the solution is service design in a way. Okay. So you were an early service designer.
Jeff Verona: so I, I brought it back to the team and I said, Hey, look, what if we just make this small change to our solution and we can move forward and the comment came back, but it would change the definition of our project
Tamara Adlin: What do you mean?
Jeff Verona: because it was data collection oriented. They had defined it based on a presumed solution of how we're going to collect data.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, wait, we
Jeff Verona: not based on the problem, but based on the solution.
Tamara Adlin: All right. That's a gem. They had defined the product based on what they assumed the solution would be. And the solution.
they assumed was what data collection.
Jeff Verona: It's part of the credit application process. So you have to collect data about the consumer asking for [00:18:00] credit.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. And because that was so say more about that. So they assumed the solution was something about collecting and you were saying it's not.
Jeff Verona: It's not enough data.
Tamara Adlin: Oh, it's not enough data.
Jeff Verona: It's not enough. We had to collect more data in order to satisfy collections needs should the loan go bad.
Tamara Adlin: I see. And so how was that not part of their thinking before? How would that have changed the definition of the product?
Jeff Verona: Ironically, it was a matter of just two or three additional fields. It wasn't a significant ask.
Tamara Adlin: Yeah, because it doesn't sound like it would be. It sounds like you're asking for additional contact information.
Jeff Verona: Pretty much.
Tamara Adlin: But
Jeff Verona: in the business, they call it skip tracing. So you skip a payment, we're going to trace back where you're at. So we can call you and or send, notices in the mail asking for payment. And eventually especially in the automotive business, they can repossess.
You can send out people [00:19:00] to actually take possession of the vehicle because the vehicle typically will secure the loan and therefore the bank has a lien on that vehicle and mortgages. You get foreclosed upon and you get thrown out of your house, but with vehicles, there's actually a repossessor that can go and pick up the vehicle.
So
"We just need three additional fields..."
Tamara Adlin: Okay, So
this just, I'm going to pause here, because It's I'm thinking like, why is this even a story? You're a product person, a business systems analysts. You're working on a loan application where they already know, nobody's taking my banana car away where they already know they're collecting data.
You raise your hand and say, yo, we need three more fields. Like birthday and shoe size, whatever. It's just three more fields. And it's going to solve, and they say, no, that's going to completely change the definition of this project.
Jeff Verona: it was a big pushback. They did not want, they did not want to add additional fields. And [00:20:00] the thought process that I was going through was the same, which is why is this such a big deal? But what I wasn't factoring, and I think this is important to understand about corporate. Environments oftentimes, when you get budgeted for a certain amount of money and you're expected to deliver within a certain amount of time, somebody's being measured against the success of being on time and on budget.
And this was a problem that, we tackled a lot with agile concepts, but from a budgeting and finance perspective, there's still this tendency to want to stay the course. Don't make changes. Changes cost money. Changes cause variance. Finance does not like variance.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, so this is another point. I think that is really big part of becoming more senior in organizations. I think when we're younger. And newer we whine about this and talk about how [00:21:00] stupid it is to be driven by short sighted financial decisions. And it's fine to whine about that, but that's like whining about your parents when you're a teenager.
You're not seeing the bigger picture. The bigger picture of a company is that they have to budget. They have to schedule. And that the, if you follow the money for your boss's boss, they're getting their puzzle looks different.
Jeff Verona: Yes.
Tamara Adlin: And if one puzzle piece shifts a tiny bit and you're like, Oh, we just need an extra 10, 000 in two weeks, the larger the organization, the more impossible that request becomes
Jeff Verona: Because they've already allocated the resources to something else.
Tamara Adlin: to something else.
Jeff Verona: So you are robbing Peter to pay Paul when you're making a change request in that context.
The snowball that rolls uphill
Tamara Adlin: This is like a snowball that rolls uphill. It gets to be a bigger problem as it rolls. So you were there saying, yo, you idiots, we just need three more fields. And this is going to help a lot later on when we try to repossess these cars. And they're like, no, it vast. And so tell [00:22:00] us more, tell us what happened.
Jeff Verona: I talked to my manager we'll call him George, we'll protect the innocent here. And I asked George, I said, look, George, we can't book a loan without these three pieces of information. And I think this current solution is just going to wreck us from a timing, from a project perspective. It's going to overcomplicate the solution if we have to ask to.
Go back and grab more pieces of information after the approval, because typically the customers out the door, they're gone. They're not there physically anymore. So that means the loan officer was going to have to call back the customer and say, Hey, can I have three more pieces of information because you've been approved?
Tamara Adlin: The loan officer is then not going to want to come back to banana car financing, even if it was easy the first time, because now they're pestering their customer,
Jeff Verona: So we came up with a solution and I worked with our outside development team to come up with a solution. And the solution was really [00:23:00] simple. Let's just consolidate all of these data entry screens into a single screen. Number one, but let's use progressive disclosure on that screen to indicate when you need additional information.
And for those in that are not familiar with progressive disclosure, it's just the idea that I only expose it when I need to expose the information to you based on rules. And these are pretty clear and cut rules. And he said, okay, that's great and all, but what's my business incentive for doing this?
And George really pressed me on this and he pushed me and I do thank him as an early mentor in my life. So I went back to the credit decisioning team and I said, Hey, curious, part of this idea was that we wanted to get to 80 percent auto approval rate because automated in this business was just golden.
We didn't want manual.
Tamara Adlin: So this was 10 [00:24:00] years ago,
Jeff Verona: Yeah, this is,
Tamara Adlin: back in the heyday of banana cars.
Jeff Verona: yeah,
Tamara Adlin: And muscle than in cars.
Jeff Verona: over 10 years ago. And automation was really important because the faster you can get it. But the more automated you could do it, the faster you could decision to less time that the
Tamara Adlin: Okay, but so I would think that the ones that were easily, easy to auto decide are the ones that were less likely to end up in collections anyway.
Gem 1 from George-the-Boss: focus on positive revenue impacts, not cost savings
Jeff Verona: True. True. So he went about it from, don't look at it from the negative and risk, look at it from the revenue and positive possibilities. So I went to the credit decision team, I said, Hey, could you rerun your model and see what our decision rate would be if we added these three additional pieces of information?
And lo and behold, it wasn't just collections that would benefit. It was the decision engine that would benefit as well because we went from like 79 percent to 87 percent
Tamara Adlin: Okay, again, to slow down for a second. So this is really interesting. [00:25:00] George, your boss said, find the positive financial impact of doing this versus the negative one. So that's pretty savvy. We have some good bosses in our lives, hopefully over the years. So you went back and were able to say, if we do, not if we don't do this, we'll lose money, but if we do this, we'll end up
Jeff Verona: gaining money.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. Great. Seems like this is going smoothly,
Jeff Verona: So final hurdle, we do have a loan officer relationship management team and they said can we at least run this past a couple of loan officers to make sure that they'll like these new designs?
Tamara Adlin: which had three additional fields if the person was high risk.
Jeff Verona: Yeah. And there's a couple of options here. One was his. We don't reduce it down to anything. We just simplify the interface. Two was because the interface was using nine [00:26:00] screens prior to this solution proposal,
Tamara Adlin: It was using, say that again?
Navigating Nine Screens: The Initial Challenge
Tamara Adlin: What
Jeff Verona: nine screens.
Tamara Adlin: nine screens. Oh, nine screens. Okay. Go ahead.
Jeff Verona: So a fair amount of the amount of time spent was simply waiting for the new screen to load.
There
Tamara Adlin: 10 years ago. Yep. And they, and again, they had associated with this with time as if somehow like this magic thing of under five minutes was going to suddenly,
Jeff Verona: Again, it was ease of doing business. So if you had to go through nine screens worth in order to complete the data entry, that's kind of friction. That's pain.
Tamara Adlin: okay, keep going.
Jeff Verona: From pure user experience perspective.
User Feedback Session: First Impressions
Jeff Verona: So we came up with some designs and we were going to do we convinced them that the program team to allow us to go ahead and schedule and call with a couple of loan officers to do a user feedback session, first time I ever did a user feedback session.
Blind, tapping my way, trying to figure it out. Cause we didn't have UX researchers on staff. But I did know [00:27:00] something from a little bit of research that it was very important to ask open ended questions. Not posed any questions. I did know that it was important to try to make sure that you didn't influence the decision of the user as to what their preference was.
I took care during the call to present the three options. One option was 10 screens. Ha.
Tamara Adlin: That's good. You put that one in there like
Jeff Verona: Always put one that is easy to say no to.
Tamara Adlin: 27 screens. Go ahead. Keep going.
Jeff Verona: A second one was just the nine screen or nine screens collapsed into a single screen, but you still had to fill out the same amount of information. And the third was this idea that you were going to fill out just nine pieces of information. And then if the decision came back, need more information, you'd fill out the rest of it because the credit decision engine doesn't say yes, no.
It said yes, no, [00:28:00] and maybe. And the maybe was I need more information in order to make a final decision.
Tamara Adlin: Okay,
Jeff Verona: Now we presented it and I think we had three. Maybe four. It wasn't statistically significant from a quantitative perspective. It was more qualitative.
Gem 2: User testing finds 'wrinkles in the carpet'
Tamara Adlin: so yeah, and I want to throw in one of my little gems here with user testing. And if organizations are new to it and they don't like the fact that it's not statistically significant, the little line I like to use is usability testing finds out if there's a wrinkle in the carpet and if there's a wrinkle in the carpet and one person trips over it, then other people are going to trip over it.
It has nothing to do with the statistical significance of the percentage of the carpet that's wrinkled. Or whether or not the N equals something appropriate of the users if the carpets wrinkled people. So go ahead.
Jeff Verona: And I like to think of it from a product perspective. I [00:29:00] say, I'm just looking for directional.
Tamara Adlin: That's great.
Jeff Verona: Am I going down the wrong path completely? Am I on the right path? But I might need to change direction a little bit. Or did I nail it? 100%. Now, I never expect to nail it a hundred percent as a product manager. What I expect to know is, am I completely out of the, off the path or do, or am I on the path with maybe some slight adjustments?
And that's what I was looking for evidence of. We went through, and I think I got three out of four to say, They liked the progressive disclosure option. I think one of them said they liked the single page full data option and nobody voted for the 10, 10 screens.
Tamara Adlin: Shocking. Shocking.
Ivan drops the poison pill in front of real customers: "What about mobile?"
Jeff Verona: And we're wrapping up and incomes, my program manager, Ivan,
Tamara Adlin: Ivan,
Don't don't
Jeff Verona: not my manager.
Tamara Adlin: manager. So yeah.
Jeff Verona: My manager's on the call with [00:30:00] me. We're both listening at this point and the program manager pipes up and says, would it impact your decision? If this design wasn't going to work on mobile
Tamara Adlin: Okay. Wait. He's okay. Ivan comes in during a user feedback session.
Jeff Verona: during user feedback session, he's
Tamara Adlin: is on the call and the and all the loan officers are on the call and says, what about mobile?
Jeff Verona: What about mobile? Now, Tamara, in this environment, we were solving for somebody sitting at a desk talking to somebody across from them.
Tamara Adlin: Right. 10 years ago.
Jeff Verona: We acknowledge that mobile was emerging. Obviously. Obviously, I think by then it was already, this is about 12 years ago, I think we're on iPhone six by then. So it was emerging, but there wasn't a pressing need for some loan officer to [00:31:00] walk out around with his mobile handset and take applications.
People were on the floor.
Tamara Adlin: No, there's a reason why the loan officers have their own office. There's data to the way like car dealerships are set up. There's a reason why there's the manager to go ask about the discount. There's a reason why you go into the loan officer's office upstairs. It's because it works, right?
Jeff Verona: If we're going,
Tamara Adlin: the phone. Oh my
Jeff Verona: we're going directly to the consumer, I could understand his comments. But the original project was to improve the loan officers experience. It wasn't necessarily to improve the consumer experience because consumer direct consumer applications weren't a significant percentage of our business at that point in time.
Tamara Adlin: And if it was, can you imagine sitting there at a loan officer's desk one, you're in their office, and instead of going to their computer, they pull out their fucking iPhone and they start asking, and then, or you're out on the show floor, let's say, and some bozo loan officer comes up [00:32:00] And in front of all the other people within earshot starts asking you about your yearly income.
Jeff Verona: And so I think part of it could have been there was some validity to his concern from five, three to five years from now at that point in time, but it wasn't an immediate need. And this is where I always think back to it from perspective of what was really going on. I think what was really going on was more to do with the finances and the program delivery timeframe.
Tamara Adlin: Okay.
"What about mobile" causes a classic tornado.
Tamara Adlin: Wait, the first of all, one second. What about mobile, by the way, is a classic example of a tornado. ripping through a project. It comes from out of nowhere and it destroys everything in its past. It has nothing to do with the quality of your work beforehand. It has nothing to do with the project plans, but once it whips through, it's whipped through.
Classic tornado. Okay. And you just said a whole bunch of nouns in a row. [00:33:00] You said it has more to do with what? Like the financial,
Why, Ivan... why??! Ivan's Agenda.
Jeff Verona: I was trying to understand his motivation for interjecting with that comment. To see if there's some validity, I had talked to the engineering team and I had said specifically to them, we're not designing for mobile right now. We can make sure from a break point perspective in New York design that we allow for tablets and desktops, but we explicitly excluded mobile from the requirements upfront, even before I found the problem with the solution with collection.
Tamara Adlin: okay, but you did that with The engineering team, George. Was not part of that discussion, right? No, George,
Jeff Verona: Oh he was aware of it. We talked about it a little bit.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. All right. Fair
Jeff Verona: We had what was curious to me was where Ivan was getting his information that it was going to be [00:34:00] a problem with mobile. Because I hadn't had any discussions with the engineering team about the feasibility of mobile to begin with.
So either he had back channeled my engineering team and had discussions with them that I wasn't aware of. Or, he was making a statement not based in actual technical reality at the time that had been confirmed by our engineering team.
Tamara Adlin: If he was making a statement not based in technical reality. The question becomes, what was he making a statement based in? She says, setting it up for you
Jeff Verona: I think he was concerned about delivery timeframes and whether or not he was going to look bad or good based on the success of this project in terms of on time and on budget.
Tamara Adlin: And future work. So he was a contractor,
Jeff Verona: the other factor is he was technically a consultant and not a full time employee. He [00:35:00] was on a contract with the organization. And I think he was trying to set himself to look good for either Extending his contract and or coming in permanent.
Tamara Adlin: extending his contract or coming in permanent.
There's a really, first of all, that's it's so annoying because it's so true. And there's probably people are nodding their heads out there. Like it's just so obvious. Also, it just points, there's something that happens. And over and over again, pattern matching is part of becoming more senior too.
It's really easy to come in and be the devil's advocate and look smart. There's always a what about mobile, right? And it's a cheap tactic to throw a wrench into the work other people are doing
Jeff Verona: But not only that tomorrow, he never mentioned it directly to me or George, my boss, which told me that he had a different goal. I won't call it a full agenda. I'll call it a goal. And that [00:36:00] goal was in not indirect violation or direct competition with our goal, but there was some friction between his goals and our goals.
Tamara Adlin: Yeah, because just like we just said before, I'm just taking notes for we said before that as you got higher and higher in organization, this, the financial puzzle makes things stickier. But also if there's a financial motivation, like for a consultant, consultants, I'm a consultant. You're always conscious of how you're coming off and it's especially tricky in the world of product or project or program.
Because part of your job is to stop things when they're going sideways, or to be the smart person in noticing that there is a hurdle coming up.
There is a way to use that for evil. An old friend of mine, Chris Nodder, wrote a book on usability for evil. I forget the actual, anyway, but there's a way to use it for evil. And,
that's let me make myself look indispensable in the moment by presenting an unsolvable problem that nobody's thought of.
Jeff Verona: and, to be fair, if we [00:37:00] had the conversation ahead of time, and he said, Jeff, I have these concerns about the feasibility of mobile, then I would have reminded him that we agreed that we weren't going to solve for mobile as part of any solution regardless. Then there wouldn't have been any reason for him to make that comment to begin with, because we had made a business decision as an organization that we were not going to solve for mobile at this point in time.
And whether or not that made it more difficult later, there's always the argument about technical debt when you ignore some aspect of the solution, but at the end of the day, and I hate that phrase sometimes. You, as a product, have to make trade off decisions. And sometimes, yes, you are kicking the can down the road.
And you recognize that this may cost the organization more money down the road later than it would today. [00:38:00]
Tamara Adlin: why, George was on the call, your boss, Ivan was on the call, a bunch of loan officers were on the call. You said that George was aware, at least parenthetically aware, that mobile wasn't a priority. Why didn't George just say, Ivan, shut it.
Jeff Verona: Because you're in front of customers.
Remember, this is a user feedback session with loan officers, and technically they are our customer. So it's a customer feedback session.
Tamara Adlin: oh my God. And Ivan pulled it out during a customer feedback session.
Jeff Verona: customer user feedback session.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. Keep
Jeff Verona: Remember, loan officers are, we don't employ loan officers. They are third parties. They are independent of us. And that's why it was extremely uncomfortable for me because I knew the minute that he made the statement that he was manipulating the perceptions of the people's choices.
Tamara Adlin: The perception of the people's choices, the perception, say
Jeff Verona: they had [00:39:00] made their choice earlier, we'd done a round of voting on which ones they liked. Ah, maybe that wasn't even appropriate, because typically you'd want to do it blind voting, right? But, ultimately, it was pretty clear that the solution that I favored won. Three out of the four selections,
Tamara Adlin: But he, then he put a shadow on all of that. He said,
Jeff Verona: right? And so there's if it's going to affect mobile, we wouldn't choose that option because they knew the future was mobile for consumer applications. They knew that they wanted that to be enabled sooner rather than later.
Tamara Adlin: yeah, but anybody in product knows, knew 10 years ago that there would be 17 iterations of the pages anyway, before mobile. It's not like they were making, it's not like you were designing the system to last for the next five years.
Jeff Verona: And even in, at that [00:40:00] time, 10 or 12 years ago, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that iOS and and Android were going to be the
Tamara Adlin: the standards.
Jeff Verona: the standards. They were still emerging there was still some risk and financial institutions, by and large, are low risk averse organizations to begin with.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. So Jill and Jillian. Hi, Jillian. I'm so glad you're here. Not a tornado, a nuclear one fucking sentence, right? So what happened right after he said that
Jeff Verona: We re voted and not surprisingly, they did not vote for my solution.
Tamara Adlin: you revoted?
Jeff Verona: And that's what got recorded as the results of the user feedback session.
Tamara Adlin: Oh, my God.
Jeff Verona: When I read the notes as the replay of the, I immediately blew my lid because I was like, that's not the results. That's not reflecting what actually happened during the user [00:41:00] feedback session. Now you're selectively picking a portion of the user feedback session to now Justify your positioning statement.
And I know I, at the time I wasn't thinking in terms of politics, I was still an engineer minded person and I just drove me nuts because it didn't make any sense.
Tamara Adlin: See, that's the thing. I think That we, as we're in the middle of our careers, think that data is going to solve these arguments, Right.
And that people listen to it. We think that logic is going to prevail. We just think that there's no way something this dumb Could make it through. And we don't respond in a political way at the moment that we need to respond.
More gems from Jeff: what he would do differently
Tamara Adlin: So okay, so I want to go with the rest of the story, but I want to pause here, the Jeff that's sitting in front of me today with 10 years, more gray hairs, the director of product [00:42:00] camp in Dallas, like somebody who really knows product, what, if that happened to you in a meeting today, what would you have done
Gem 3: Unearth concerns before the meeting
Jeff Verona: First of all, I would have had a conversation with Ivan, a deep conversation with Ivan about what his concerns are. It wouldn't have been stating what the solution needed to be, wouldn't have been stating my position, it would have been understanding what his position is.
Tamara Adlin: During the call?
Jeff Verona: No, ahead of the call,
Tamara Adlin: before
Jeff Verona: before the call.
Yes.
Tamara Adlin: What yeah, go ahead
Jeff Verona: making sure I,
Tamara Adlin: you didn't know he was gonna say that
Jeff Verona: I think what I should have done is rather than trying to push my agenda of the solution, find out what other people's concerns really were. Get to the root of what I suspect was the situation he's concerned about being on time and on budget, and this could blow his budget as a product manager.
Now it's my responsibility to dig in and get that understanding of what their concern is and a leadership [00:43:00] position over me. So that,
Tamara Adlin: yeah, that's I think that's the bigger solution Of course the one I push for all the time and i'm writing about which is The shorthand is executive alignment. It's not just executives It's i've an alignment too because if these issues exist The way to keep them from turning into tornadoes is to identify them a lot earlier in the process You And not in front of fucking loan officers.
And if Ivan had a conversation with you separately a month before and said, dude, I need this contract to extend because I'm sending my llama to private school. It would have been like, okay, fine. Then let's make you look good, whatever it is.
It wouldn't have come up
Gem 4: Set rules for meetings
Jeff Verona: but I also learned something later in my career from an actual UX researcher, and one of the things that they did ahead of every user feedback session was. Here's what we're going to talk about. Here's what we're not going to talk about. Here's [00:44:00] what we're trying to learn. Here's what we're not trying to learn.
And lay out an actual strategy or tactics for the session itself. And lay ground rules for the session.
Tamara Adlin: Ground rules. And I think we all talk about how like more and more people should get some fluency in getting user feedback. The problem is that they don't know what not to do. But if you weren't Jeff, if we were on this, if this meeting happened this afternoon and you had an Ivan did exactly the same scenario and you had not talked to Ivan in advance because some of the people listening to, they are going to have that meeting happen tomorrow. And there, what would you, is there anything you think you could do at that moment that would be helpful?
Jeff Verona: I think what I could have done and maybe should have done is simply interjected to say, Ivan I think we should talk about mobile as a separate discussion with a separate user feedback session. Today, I just wanted to understand perspectives on desktop. [00:45:00] And cut it off at that point, allowing for a future discussion without directly, verbating, berating him or chastising him in any
Tamara Adlin: And in
Jeff Verona: front of the customers.
Tamara Adlin: you could push it even farther some, so I do a lot of complimenting to get my own way and the way I would take that one step farther and say, Ivan, that is such an awesome point and it's such a big point and such a important point that I'd really like to take that offline and have a whole separate feedback.
It's like killing with kindness.
Jeff Verona: right. And obviously, I can look at this with 20, 20 hindsight, right? Because I can see it from future experiences that hadn't happened yet.
Gem 5: remember that logic doesn't automatically prevail
Jeff Verona: But at the end of the day, I really, I look at it and I say there's things that I did learn from the experience that were positive. One was, is how to conduct a user feedback session now, not to two, to always [00:46:00] remember that.
Even though you logically see the solution as the best solution, you still have to influence the belief that it is the best solution
Tamara Adlin: Okay wait, okay, that is say that again. Even though you see it as logically the right.
solution, you have to influence the belief. Say more about that.
Jeff Verona: The fact is that reality is what we believe is true. Not what is true.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, say more.
Jeff Verona: Our perception of what is the truth is rooted in our belief that it is true to begin with.
Tamara Adlin: Okay, so how would you apply that to this situation?
Jeff Verona: I think I would have gone back at it from a perspective of what are the concerns that need to be addressed with the solution, not just from a loan officer perspective, but internally and not just from our perspective as well. Credit operations [00:47:00] team or loan officer relationship team, but from our IT team, information technology team, there's multiple stakeholders.
Each one has concerns from their frame of reference. And what I would do today that I didn't do then is I would try to understand the concerns from their frame of reference specifically and
Tamara Adlin: not what it's not logic. It's not.
data. It's what are their concerns, including Ivan needs money for a lot. Llama private school, whatever they are, knowing them in advance.
So what happened?
Tamara Adlin: What, what ended up, let me ask you now, what ended up happening, because I want to, what ended up happening,
Jeff Verona: We really modified the workflow to allow for them to re enter data after that screen. And when I called back about a year later, I
Tamara Adlin: wait a second, wait no, wait, that's not enough, wait, okay, we went from a [00:48:00] system, you were trying to fix a
Jeff Verona: essentially created two screens instead of one.
Tamara Adlin: oh, two screens instead of one.
but it was still during the initial conversation,
Jeff Verona: They were separated in time from a
Tamara Adlin: so it wasn't two screens, it was two separate interactions,
Jeff Verona: It ended up being two separate interactions. From the loan officer's perspective, which they did not like to begin with, and later after I left the organization, I called back a friend and I asked him, how is the new solution working?
And they said one saving grace. We had to allow for a single screen full entry of all data regardless. And we gave them the choice of doing the shortened form to do the rapid decisioning or do the long form with a more extended decisioning. Almost all of the dealerships were just using the long form, but it was still a win for them because they didn't have to click [00:49:00] through nine screens anymore.
They can just go through a single screen, but we did get a partial win out of this process, which was. We gave them the option to go expedited. Or standard decisioning and standard decisioning. They could use a single screen expedited. They risked having to fill out two screens separated in time
Tamara Adlin: right, if the person like failed the initial,
Jeff Verona: they failed the initial credit
Tamara Adlin: What should have been launched if Ivan hadn't done that?
Jeff Verona: Honestly, I was looking at, and I learned more later about what capabilities that we could have leveraged was been a single screen just with highlighted fields of the bare minimum to get any kind of decision. And then the rest of the fields would be optional if you wanted an extended decision.
Tamara Adlin: Because probably also loan officers in filling out those five critical answers probably would know in their heads because of their experience, I need to [00:50:00] get that additional information now because this person makes 17 a year and it's going to kick back.
Jeff Verona: These guys figure it out, we do have secrecy in our credit decisioning engines, but over time you figure it out just like a SEO and
Tamara Adlin: Okay.
Jeff Verona: search, you're going to eventually figure out the rules just through trial and error. And not surprisingly, though, they did. The problem still was, is they didn't like having to go to a second screen after the fact.
After the initial decision came back, maybe they just wanted to know yes or no. They never wanted a, maybe they never wanted a, maybe
Tamara Adlin: never wanted a maybe. Yeah, because it was
Jeff Verona: no. And I think that was also part of the learning because ultimately we set out to reduce the amount of time for them to fill out an application, but that wasn't the primary concern that they had.
It was more about. I just need to know [00:51:00] yes or no based on the information that you need in order to get to a full yes or no. They didn't care how much information it was. It was a matter of seconds for them.
Tamara Adlin: okay.
Jeff Verona: literally a matter of 30 to 60 seconds difference for them.
Tamara Adlin: we've got about five minutes left and here's what I want to do. First of all, we got comments like, for example, so wonderful to hear someone share these horror stories and helping people embrace the realities. So that's exactly what this is. So I'm glad it's you're liking it. If you do like this, let one another person know or leave a comment on the podcast or, sign up to get notified at corporateunderpants.
com.
Gem 6: Puzzle Perspective
Tamara Adlin: But in the last five minutes, I want to talk about lessons that you got, anybody can take away from this conversation with Jeff. So one of the ones we talked about was, let's call it puzzle perspective, right? As you get higher up in an organization, the puzzles are different than our puzzles. So applying our own logic. And our assumption that [00:52:00] sanity will prevail or that data will change people's minds isn't useful to us anymore. And then bitching about that isn't useful to us anymore. It's people problems, which luckily we're good at. Another thing you said George, your boss, said look for the positive money, not the negative money. To start building those arguments
Jeff Verona: Revenue, revenue influences better than cost savings.
Tamara Adlin: Revenue influences better than costs. Okay, great. And then we also. A big theme of Align Before Design and the work that I do in solving this is that the earlier you have these conversations and you force these conversations and you force people's assumptions out into the light, the better off you'll be.
The assumptions are there. The pressures are there. The desire to extend the contract is there. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is there. So the best way to fight it is to drag it out into the light. Way earlier so that [00:53:00] this can't happen and that's what I'm all about. And this alignment persona process that I'm trying to get out there is all about too.
Speaker: here on Corporate Underpants. La la la la la la la.
Tamara Adlin: And there's one other thing that I want to say that I've been modeling annoyingly in this, but for, if you're a newer practitioner in the beginning of this, I stopped every two seconds to clarify and articulate. Exactly what Jeff was talking about and even found a place where I didn't understand where I thought it was direct to consumer software, but it was to the loan officer and it was a separate and they were choosing be annoying and slow down the conversations with stakeholders because you never know where language is going to trip you up.
And where the obvious isn't obvious at all. So that's my message. Jeff, what do you want to tell people?
Gem 8: There are always at least three conversations going on at once.
Jeff Verona: That the conversation in your head and the conversation in their head and their real conversation are three different conversations.
Tamara Adlin: I'd say that again.
Jeff Verona: The conversation that you [00:54:00] thought you had in your head versus the conversation I thought I had in my head versus the conversation that actually occurred can be three different conversations.
Tamara Adlin: Totally. The, one of the best things you can do as you're starting out in your career in the middle, if you're confused, first of all, trust it, second of all, create a glossary, which is going to feel like the dumbest thing in the world, but you would be shocked how many product problems come back to people defining the same word in two different ways. Astounding. Okay, so I just want to, I just want to note that there as my dear friend Doon said, there's always money in the banana car, which is a good reminder for all of us. In reference to oh shit, now I can't even remember the name of the show. Arrested Development!
Jeff Verona: Oh, yep.
Tamara Adlin: Okay. Jeff, thank you so much for being willing to share this story.
It's a vulnerable thing to do. I think the more that we share these stories, the more we can get experienced by osmosis and try to stop corporate underpants before it starts. [00:55:00] So thank you so much. And thank everyone who joined us today and follow Jeff. If you know of any different Any roles that are fit in his candidate market fit statement, let him know.
And thank you. And I'll see you next time on corporate underpants, go to corporate underpants. com to sign up for notifications and tell me your story. And maybe you can be a guest and show your underpants on LinkedIn. Bye everybody.
