This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, our guest is Teresa Cain. Teresa is the Director of Product and UX at TreviPay, responsible for the product vision, strategy, and user experience of a B2B financial technology SaaS platform. She is also the founder and chief executive officer of Lucid Startup Consulting, a company that advises start-up businesses on their strategy and vision. Teresa has over 15 years of experience directing worldwide product and user experience teams. Also, she has extensive expertise in leading B2B and B2C product management, product design, research, strategy, and innovation.

[01:24] Background - Teresa describes her journey so far. She also talks about the firm she works for, TreviPay, and what inspired her to start her own company, Lucid Startup Consulting. 

[05:51] Design Sprints- Teresa defines the phrase "design sprint" and shares her ideas on when firms require design sprints and the outstanding results she has witnessed from design sprints. 

[11:11] The Mix of Roles – Teresa mentions, in addition to engineers and others, who else she prefers to include in this process, elaborating on the optimal blend of individuals or jobs where she found the most success with the design sprint model. 

[13:06] Team - Teresa shares the engagement framework she employs and how she leads her team virtually. 

[17:44] Problems – Teresa describes how she addresses a few of the most common team management challenges. 

[25:42] Integration - Teresa explains why more businesses do not adopt the agile process's incorporation of human-centered design and design thinking. 

[28:18] KPI – Teresa discusses the metrics businesses should implement to determine whether or not their design sprint process has been successful. 

[30:12] Roadblocks -  Teresa points out the obstacles that prevent firms and brands from genuinely focusing on the customer and making decisions in their best interest. 

[32:13] Inspiration - Teresa outlines where she finds inspiration.

Be Customer Led - Teresa Cain on running design sprints for impact

Welcome to be customer led where we'll explore, help leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors, employees, and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host bill stagos.

So she is director of product management, user experience design for a company called Tre pay. And we're gonna find out a little bit more about tr. But she's also the founder and CEO of lucid startup consulting. Now what lucid does is really interesting. They coach women led startups to help launch their businesses into success and, and theres will work on ideation, product strategy, road, mapping, research, design, all the stuff.

And Theresa and I connected on this concept of design sprints, where she's doing a. Through lucid there. Welcome to show. Can't wait to get into this topic with you. It's super important. I'm so excited to have you on. Thanks for having me bill.

[00:01:33] Bill Staikos: Yeah. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I think this's gonna be, it's gonna be a really interesting show that our listeners are gonna love before we get into it, though.

I ask every guest, tell us about your journey and what were some of the differentiating factors in your career. And, we'll get into then Trevor pay and, and lose it after

that.

And, for those that are familiar with waterfall versus agile processes, I, I was able to do a lot of waterfall for many years and moving, moving on to agile and as part of that journey, while I am a millennial, I'm an old millennial. And I think a lot of what's gone on the last 15 years in my career journey.

Is this millennial generation trying to solve problems faster, trying to automate more and really bring that into the changes that are happening to technologies and solutions. So, most of the organizations that I've worked for across, fortune 100 and 500 companies has really been on automating processes to, improve that experience

Awesome. Awesome. So you've been at tr pay for a little bit. What does tr pay do just for our listeners who are not familiar with the platform, cuz you guys are in a lot of businesses, frankly, right?

before a year and a half ago we were called MSTs. We rebranded a Tre pay to really, no one really knew what MSTs, had meant. And we were kind of getting outside of our white label solution and, putting the Tre pay brand out there more. And, Tre pay was, the name was named after the Tre fountain in Rome, Italy.

and in fact, growing their programs as well. Awesome.

What was sort of the Genesis for you behind lucid? What was out there in the marketplace that you were seeing? And you're like, I think I need to help people here.

you're always helping others kind of always giving back. So. Ultimately I, decided, what, this would be really interesting to do something a little more focused. And, I've always really been involved in, in helping women and helping, girls get into the industry. I previously had, volunteered for years for, a, a project called the, for a women's organization in, in Kansas city.

that was called the, Alexandra girls grant project. You lend out money to girls that are kind of growing in that, growing in something new that they're trying to explore. And that really got my start into helping to give back to women in the community. And I've kind of taken that into the it side of things.

And one of the really interesting that's cha interesting things that have changed in the last five years. Getting startup funding is becoming easier too. There are now multiple, web and mobile applications. You can put your bid out in. So the dynamic has really changed in that's really where I got my, my startup creating that program was helping women led startups, but I've also kind of morphed that a bit to go beyond that and help, create workshops for different content that people are needing, training for women and beyond.

Like, how do you define that? Like, what does that mean to you?

And, you're talking about the problem and you're coming up with a solution and sometimes even a very, very great design on how you'll go about solving that solution.

Like, is it just any business problem or like what, what are the right kind of spots in a gr maybe even a growth of an organization where you've seen sort of the biggest impact? Like what types of, and then finally, this is the third question in here. Let's talk about what those impacts are. You talked about sort of saying, okay, we're solving the problem.

We're working backwards from the problem. Essentially you're working backwards from the customer essentially, or maybe even the business. Where do you say, like when you're working with those individuals who want to do this type of work, when do you know that they're ready or at a good point to do that?

And then what kind of benefits do you see outside of even have like a low fidelity or maybe even a high fidelity kind of prototype coming outta those sprints? What kind of great output do you see as a result of design sprints?

Yeah. And so with that, you have a, a different mindset mentality too. So the larger organizations, a lot of, organizations have adopted KPIs and OKRs. and I know, you're familiar life with those as well. So with that, we're setting these large organizational goals, these KPIs, and ultimately the KPIs are what's driving the organizational goal.

The OKRs are feeding into that. Yeah. And often time, what is lost in those definitions is how we go execute. and so a design sprint is a really great use case when you're setting those, OKRs and those KPIs, and you're wanting to problem solve how you'll go create a solution and hit that goal. And even if that goal is something as simple as increasing revenue, you need to be able to solution it, to create a, a goal to get there.

Now, that's kind of an organizational goal just broader for those that aren't as deep in the product and technology and UX. For those in that side of things, design sprints make a really, good case when you're trying to create a new feature in your product. So you're able to again, get that same set of stakeholders together and start to talk about what you know about the customer or the problem that's being talked about.

And I've, in the past year alone at Tribu pay, we have ran over 20 design sprints. And what's really great is I'll talk about it a bit later, but, I've kind of created a concept of a two hour design sprint of which, you no longer need five days, which is like really popular with Jake nap and the team at Google, and also very successful.

I enjoyed, doing both. but there are different problems that you're solving. Yeah. And, but when you're looking at a feature and you're trying to move fast, you need to move pretty quickly. You need to get it scheduled sometime in the next week. Maybe the next three weeks, two hour design sprints allow you to kind of do that, much quicker and be able to come out with a faster outcome.

And, what does that faster outcome mean? You're probably gonna make revenue faster. You're gonna make your customers happier. And that's, what's really fun about design sprints. Yeah.

Right. I mean, and I would assume your throughput goes up as a team. I mean, there's all sorts of benefits associated with that, right?

So that's the benefit. But then I also bring in clients. So I've, I've had a number of clients participate in these design sprints. And, for, for some solutions was able to roll it out in the next sprint cycle. we're on a two week sprint cycle with agile and that's a pretty powerful statement to go from a two hour design sprint to releasing in, in one to two weeks, with that design, we came up together as a team, but yeah,

Oftentimes, and I've been, I've worked with agile teams in the past, oftentimes. Yes. They're kind of releasing kind of these features quickly, but a lot of times that what I've seen is these teams getting stuck in that two week sprint and not doing maybe that work up front and that kind of design, sprint, maybe model.

I'm curious outside of like the engineers and others. Who else do you like to bring into that process? marketing, is it sales? Do you like try to keep those folks out of that? Or like where have you F like, what is the right mix of folks or roles where you found the most success in that design sprint model?

That's too many cooks in the. But around 20 people, 2025, you get a couple stakeholders from every department. That's what makes for a really successful design sprint. And one of the things that's been interesting is, the COVID pandemic has changed the entire landscape of design sprint. So that's actually what really allowed us to shorten it, and make it completely virtual.

So we're actually those 20 designs sprints. I mentioned we have run those, Up to 20 stakeholders, a hundred percent virtual this past year. And so that's something that has really changed the landscape as we don't really need an office anymore. And now that we're virtual participants in Australia and other countries were able to come in and participate, which has never been possible because they weren't here physically.

Maybe like, even like a typical engagement, even that would be really helpful for folks who kind of. Just, I wanna try and make it as practical as possible. Hopefully they reach out to you and say, Hey, I need this. Like, can you do this for me? But walk us through that. Like how you would approach maybe something like that.

And so, really, it's kind of looking at the history altogether, how have we been solving design and problem solving for years? And so the number one step of that, methodology is empathy. So you're. That group of stakeholders, we just talked about, you're talking about, well, what is the problem?

what do we know about the customers? If, you're familiar with user personas? I'm sure I know that you are, user personas become a really integral part of that process because you already know who the customers are and the users are that you're trying to solve for. So first, you kind of have this concept of understanding your customers and then you're from there.

Which you're explaining to them before they get there, but they'll usually come up with something that like, well, wait a second. you basically. Came up with an idea we've never thought of before. Yeah. And that's really the goal, right? Is you are, you're getting experiences from different people in different departments that is probably gonna help solve your problem faster.

So, but the ultimate goal is you're usually coming up with a concept. So, and this is actually my most favorite activity is having people kind of sketch what they think the solution. And, even people that aren't designers, I mean, you get some stick figures and then, you always invite your design team in and they always go, overboard and create a high fidelity concept and make everyone feel bad, but that's okay.

You're going out and then you're going in and going out and in et cetera, how does that process work? Like how do you manage that? Even virtually, are you just doing like virtual rooms and then people come back in or like. And like, if you're running, if you're the one running it, like how do you even manage that?

That's gotta be really complex.

but, for the design sprints, I've mentioned that I don't necessarily recommend to having 50 people in a design sprint, but I've, I've definitely done it. And oftentimes I'll pull in, I've got a really fantastic head of UX. John Kelly at Tre pay. I'll pull him a lot of times. He's just as passionate, if not more about design thinking as I am.

And, I've had him help tackle 50 plus, workshops with me where, we're kind of each managing different sections and breaking it out into groups.

One is you might get people saying, to your point, like, why am I here? Or why should I even do this? What, this is not my job. You also get people I've been in. I've been in a sprint where someone said, out loud, well, that's just a stupid. Like out loud and I'm just like, oh, sweet Lord.

Right? Like what it, that's not, let's re revisit sort of the ground rules here. How do you manage that one? The, maybe the more senior person who's saying, this is not a good use of my time. Why would I ever do this? But then number two, like even in the room where you want those free flow of ideas, no matter how off the wall they are happening.

Right. And being. How do you kind of manage that? Cuz those are, I mean, those are two different, very pro very different problems, but like I'm curious just to see how you might manage that.

So from a rule standpoint, first and foremost, Rules are kind of like the number one agreement. So like when, before you even create the problem statement, I skipped over that in the beginning, I should have said you're agreeing to rules, right? Like everyone has an, I has an idea and every everyone's idea is an opportunity.

So you need to come in with an open mind and a positive point of view. So that's rule number one and, respect like at most organizations. Respect and empathy is a huge part of our culture. And so we have not had those types of problems, but we are very, like, we set that expectation really of anyone we hire and all the processes we create.

So that is like a huge part of, making sure that we have that process through anything that we do, the workshops included and it's gone so far, but I mentioned, outside of Tribu pay, meet all, all types of people and I've, I've have definitely had to, manage a few conversations in that way.

Really how you manage that is through validation. Like, okay. Tell me more about why you feel this, this stupid or not important to you, and you understand where they're coming from and in a way you're teaching them about empathy. But you're also hearing where they're coming from and then you're kind of validating, their concerns in a way.

So I've had to do that and that's actually worked pretty well and created some, some engagement out of it. And sometimes what they mean to say is I don't agree with that problem statement and whether you're kind of working them through that situation. but first and foremost, whether or not people wanna attend to it.

So a big part of this two hour design sprint I've been talking about and doing workshops on. People are excited about it because it's only two hours, oftentimes I don't know how many, five day design sprints you participated in or ran, but less than 20% of the people could make all five days.

Yeah. And, it was very expensive and there's no way you're gonna pull your engineers off productive time for five days. Same with the executive team. they're not gonna set five days in there. They'll maybe sit in there for a handful of, of hours. so that's really kind of where this concept came in is, no, you can make two hours and you will because you want this solution.

So as the executive sponsor, they're gonna attend because they want the outcome, which is probably gonna be more revenue.

Number. Number two is if we're bringing a lot of smart people together, we should be able to kind of solve for this in some way in a couple of hours. Right. Which we don't often get to do everything. I feel like every meeting is 30 minutes back to back for eight hours straight. Right. And number three, I think it says a lot from an outcome perspective, when you can have even like a, a, an early prototype let's call.

It just signals to the business, like, wow, we can do this, like this isn't that hard to do. And it's like, so, so like time, well invested. That's why I love condensing it. And it just, it, it also like, I, I love the five. I like, obviously I'm familiar with the five day design sprint, but I think that the toolkit that we have as leaders and practitioners should be flexible.

And I think that's also an important. Signal as well to the business. And that's why I love that you're doing, like, you figure it out there. When you say before the top of the show, you said, depending on the problem to solve, you might say, Hey, we gotta do this in five days. Or, you know what? Let's just do this in two hours.

How do you differentiate the problems that deserve two hours versus five days?

So I would consider that something like a, a business KPI where you have a very large problem you're trying to solve, and you might have multiple deliverables out of that. And, even as something that sounds simple, like we're gonna go build a dashboard. Well, a dashboard's actually pretty complex. Okay.

you've got navigation, you've got different cards. You've got the data that's behind the dashboard. so something like building out a brand new concept of a dashboard should probably be a longer design sprint. Doesn't have to be five days. You could have, to your point, any amount of time, two hours, four hours, three days, five days.

And, in our case, we were outgrowing our, our building before the pandemic, to even schedule a room would've been challenging enough. So, it's, it's funny now we have all the rooms we need, but we're not using them.

[00:22:09] Teresa Cain: But both two hour, design sprints are any amount of time.

That's shorter. Again, those are meant for more simple, simple problems, like features that you're gonna go tackle. So, let's say you're gonna go create an alert feature for a mobile app. And, you don't know whether your users are, are going to use it or not. So that's something where you can kind of come in as a group and understand, well, first of all, how many, what percentage of users do you have using mobile versus web?

What devices are they using? Are they signed up for any other alerts today. What's the likelihood. So those are the types of problems that you're basically talking about as a group to understand, okay, let's come up with this solution. so we can release it. And, and usually it, it turns out that way. Now, one thing I didn't touch on, not every design sprint has a successful outcome.

You could have a, what you learn in that design sprint could be that you don't move forward with something. The goal isn't necessarily to have, the output of a design, but is this really something we should go invest in as a business and take to that next level? Or do we just do this exercise to learn that we're not gonna get our return on investment?

And at a, in a prior life, we had talked about this. We had trained every agile person, every agile team, on the, on the design thinking process. We wanted them running their own sprints. It, I mean, we had a team of five, design thinking, folks on the team. You can't scale that obviously, but if we trained everybody, that's different.

Why don't you think more companies are doing that? Like what's holding them back. Cause I mean, even if you think about sort of the agile methodology, there's a lot of design thinking, thinking embedded in that. Right. But why don't more companies pick up on the notion of integrating human center, design and design thinking into that agile process.

Yeah.

and user-centric thinking is falling more and more on the product managers and the design team. So oftentimes you, you have these hybrid roles that are happening and actually I've even implemented that, at Truby pay. So all of my product managers and designers, and are trained on design, sprints and design think.

[00:25:23] Bill Staikos: Totally agree with that. I see your point in some people being trained on it, but like, I'm talking about like, and, and, and I'm going back in, not the role in today, but the prior role, we had like 150 people.

In these product teams and we're like, we're training every one of you. And, and that was a big undertaking decision from leadership to say, yes, we see the value here. And I credit them for actually seeing it and saying, yeah, we need this inside our teams. We, we understand the power of it and, and the impact that it's gonna have, but then getting these teams, doing it and going through the training that they'd be coming out and like calling their friends, like on like the other side of the floor.

I mean, this is brief pandemic, a lot. And they're like, you gotta do this training. Like it was like, it was mind blowing to a lot of folks and really opened up the aperture in terms of what they can do as a team and the results that they can achieve. Theresa. I wanna talk about metrics, right. You, obviously we, a lot of these teams have OKRs, tied into like broader business strategy and KPIs.

Yeah. How do you measure success of this? Like, what are the types of things that teams or businesses should be looking at to say. We've implemented this process, right? We're doing these design sprints, whether they're two days, three days or five days or two hours, rather we're seeing value, like what are the types of metrics that they should put into place to, to understand if this has been successful or not?

Cuz that that also is critical and it's not necessarily just the OKR, right? There are probably other things that you need to be measuring as part of this overall effort.

Design sprints are really just one part of, our UX process that we're implementing. So, we have user personas, we integrate with lots of behavioral metric tools, such as amplitude, we're collecting NPS or scores and VOC data. So all of the data that we have are data elements that we're bringing in to these design sprint.

In our part of that metric process as well. So perhaps, we release a new feature on a quicker way to reset your password. We're able to immediately see those results after we release it, just through the metrics that we have by the increase of clicks on the website. So metrics really does become a big part of the buy-in as in order to continue doing these design sprints, which I mentioned, we've done over 20 mm-hmm the last year to continue doing them is, the reason why we have that buy-in is because we're able to deliver on the value of the design sprints.

I can't wait to publish it. Her question was what are the roadblocks? And maybe you answer this, even from what you're seeing in the folks that you're you're coaching, right? And you're training on this methodology. What are the roadblocks that keep companies and brands from really centering and making decisions that are, that are in the best interest of the.

So let's say that we get some really extensive feedback on. Feature, but it doesn't align with our company vision. So we pass up on the opportunity because we know that that's not what we're working on this year. Yep. And, we might be losing out on, something that would be really valuable for customers because we're not tying it back to a goal we're not innovating and, and taking that, that time to do something different and inventive for them.

[00:29:27] Teresa Cain: Yeah. so I've talked a lot about stakeholder buy-in mm-hmm . So I think for, my next guess, I would have to say, how do you overcome situations where your stakeholders are not in agreement on a solution to a problem?

but I'll be, I'll be interesting to hear the, and I'll let you know what their response is as well when, when we publish a show. Yeah, I'm excited. Hey Theresa, before we wrap up, I personally love this question. I get a lot of feedback from listeners that they love this question. But where do you go for your inspiration?

Better ideas and improve on them by learning from others that have kind of gone through it and, come up with different ideas.

So like kudos. Do you like, you must be like a fast. Yeah. I mean, you, you

[00:31:15] Bill Staikos: So this is off topic, but like, I find that when I'm listening to a book, I, my, my mind wanders more and I don't kind of get right.

If I'm reading a book, like I'm in it, and I'm not distracted, I'm easily distracted as, as you could probably. It probably have ACD as an adult too, but like, how do you not wander? Like how do you stay focused or do you kind of like have it on the background and you're kind of like bouncing around doing your stuff, just kind of doing life.

No, I,

Yeah. So as I'm hearing or reading, I'm actually visualizing the situation. I always keep a little notebook on my side because I, I always have new ideas that pop up in my head of, well, what if I did this? Or what if we did this? And so I'm always kind of just thinking and writing down ideas, and that's kind of how you learn from, you're learning, it's not necessarily about the content, but what happens while you're listening and learning?

Very

[00:32:35] Teresa Cain: Absolutely, happy to connect on LinkedIn. I also have, you can go to, a website, lucid startup consulting.com. And, as mentioned, I've got, several workshops that are gonna be out the second half of the year.

So lots of signups for August through December and cool. I look forward to connecting with others and thanks so much for this opportunity.

And we'll make sure to put all those details in the show notes as well. so people can, get access, but gosh, thanks for the gift of your time today. It's been awesome to talk to you. Awesome. To get to know you over the last couple months, I'm just, I'm excited to see your continued success. It's just, it's been really fun to just have the conversations that we've been having.

It's just really, thank you for that.

[00:33:26] Bill Staikos: you as well. Cool. Very cool. All right, everybody. Another great show. We're out. We'll see you next week. Talk to you soon, everyone. Thanks

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