Putting Customers First: A DevOps Imperative with Chris Hood

Get ready to discover some of the most actionable DevOps techniques and tooling, including performance and reliability for some of the world's smartest engineers. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the DevOps Toolchain podcast, and my goal is to help you create DevOps toolchain awesomeness. Hey. Today we'll be talking with Chris Hood, all about putting customers first and why it's such a business imperative, especially for developers. If you don't think about it, I think this is an episode for you. If you don't know. Chris is a top keynote speaker and author of Customer Transformations, which merges customer success with digital strategy. He's recognized among the 2024's top 30 customer experience gurus, so he really knows his stuff. His experience spans across Google Digital Strategy, the fox of Disney storytelling innovations. He also has or is he leads a fractional Chief Customer Officer practice which helps shape customer centric cultures across gaming, AI and education. As I mentioned, I think this is a topic a lot of developers may not know about or think enough about. You don't want to miss this episode. Check it out.

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Hey Chris, welcome to the Guild.

Thanks so much. Appreciate being here.

Awesome. So, you know, I think you have a lot of insight around things that I think maybe my audience may not think a lot about. So before we get into it, I always ask authors, why write a book? Because to me it's so time consuming. Even with AI nowadays, I'm sure it's a little easier, but still a little background. Why did you write Customer Transformation?

Yeah, it's funny. I was at Google doing a practice around this concept and a lot of people asked me why didn't I write the book sooner? And my response Was, well, I was at Google and I didn't really want them to take too much ownership away from some of my ideas. And then when I left Google, I felt like this is a great time to do it because not only can I do it on my own, within my own terms, but I can talk about all the juicy gossip stuff that I learned while I was at Google. So I think it was a great time to do it. Maybe I should have done it earlier, but yeah, why not, you know, and time wise, it actually only took me about four months. I was writing a chapter a week and I already knew the content. Right. It was already something that I had in my head. So a little bit of additional research, a couple of great stories that I had to outline. Did some editing along the way, but yeah, nice, quick, easy, and it's a great book.

Love it. So I thought it'd be cool. You have like a seven step strategy, I believe, and I want to see if we can go over each one really quick, give a little teaser. So people should definitely buy the book. We'll have a link for it down below, but we'll go over each one and maybe how it relates to development. You've worked at Google, so I'm sure you have a lot of great insights around here. I guess the first one obviously is the customer. I guess my first question is, you know, Steve Jobs says the customer doesn't know what they want. And so I'm just curious to know at this stage, what do you mean by customer and how do you know what a customer really wants?

Steve Jobs said a lot of contradictory things, even though he said they don't know what they want. And of course, there's a famous thing that a lot of people cite from Ford saying that if I wanted to build a horse, I would have built, you know, whatever that is, which later has actually proven to be false, that there's several people who believe he never actually said this, but in every single situation, and going back to Jobs, he also said, and I quote this in the book somewhere, that you have to always start with your customer first. You have to understand what they want. And for all these people who believe that these inventions, like Uber as an example, just came out of thin air, that the innovation was because there was some magical inclination about what to build. The reality is they all started with a customer and a problem and the result was a solution for that problem. As an example, again, Uber, Uber was because we were all sitting around with these complex problems of trying to find a taxi and different rates and somebody said, well, why don't we just create some sort of platform that solves that problem? Even the iPhone was a direct result of understanding what the challenges and problems of the consumer was and then coming up with some innovative opportunities to fix it. So no matter what anybody is saying, there is still ultimately a problem. And developers love this. Solve this problem. There's a problem that starts with a consumer and then we go into, how are we going to build that?

So, great advice. So when you're a developer, do you think they should be questioning maybe a requirement to say, do our customers actually do this or need this or how much input should they have on maybe, you know, they're told what to do in a sprint, but not necessarily told how to implement or why they should implement it?

Yeah, it's a great question because I'm sure that your audience is very familiar with this and this will be a common theme throughout the entire conversation. The business teams never talk with the technology team and the technology team never talks with the business team. The lack of collaboration during this process is mind blowing to me. And yet what you're asking is, are your developers also customers? Well, yeah, we are all customers. We all have the same problems and challenges. And so why are we not leveraging the expertise of everyone within the organization to really better understand what are those problems we're solving? I would much rather. And look, we get it, you get the ticket, you get a story. You're like, oh, I have to build this and you don't fill in the blanks. So if somebody says, build me a button that says go, you're going to build a button and it's going to say, go, oh, wait, I need that to be a red button that's centered more like we'll add the details and that's how developers think. Yet I would much rather have a developer that is going to challenge this and ask the questions and push back a little bit and say, you know what, I've had experiences where I go in and I try to press that button and it just doesn't work and it doesn't make sense to me. How about if we try fill in the blank? That type of collaboration is needed solely because we are all customers. We all go through the same experiences and when we get too close to software that we are building, we lose sight of that. We just like, oh, yeah, this makes sense to me. Well, yeah, you've used it a thousand times now. Yet if you were to go to a grocery store and try to go through a checkout process and something was sitting there that didn't make sense to you, you'd be the first person who's sitting there analyzing it and trying to solve that problem with some sort of software solution in your mind. We need that collaboration as part of this process to really meet the needs and the demands of the consumers.

Right, That's a great point. And I also assume that once you have an idea of what the customer is, once it goes in the wild, you know your customer may do differently or over time they may start using it in a way that you weren't anticipating. So how much do you keep informed about what's happening when it's in the wild to maybe evolve with the changing behavior of your customer, if that's even a thing.

Once again, your developers are probably going to know this first. The developers are going to know it before the business leaders do. Like, you know, something gets built, it gets hacked, it gets, and when I say hacked, I mean it gets used for something other than its intended purposes. The first people who are going to hear about that is the technologist. They're going to be like, oh my gosh, I didn't even think about that. Oh, that's actually kind of pretty cool. And then it's going to slowly go up the food chain to, you know, your executives, and then they're going to be like, ah, we didn't want that. Change it. So the constant awareness of use cases and implementations and execution on those technologies, you have to stay abreast of them. Same thing with the consumers, because as the consumers start to use it, that cycle of, oh, first adopters used it in a way that we didn't expect. And then as it slowly goes to your mom using that technology, you've gotta solve those problems along the way. You can't just say, well, you know, it's as intended. Let's ignore what the consumers are actually doing with it. It's all still part of the ongoing iteration and development process.

Nice. So just a random question, maybe a dumb question. So in the age of AI now with everyone has AI, they're able to generate applications a lot quicker than before, a lot of code. How much of a competitive advantage is it to actually know your customer? Because there's a lot of apps out there now that may not have focused on the customer first. They're just coming up with, they think a solution, just throw it at the wall, have a, create it for them. Is that something you see as a trend or is my just off base here?

Yeah, no, I, I think it's a great question. I mean, not only are we seeing the use of AI because just for the sake of using AI without actually understanding if the consumer wants it or not, you're just going to throw it at them. The reverse is also true, like, oh cool, I can create applications faster. Let me go create an application. I've got a great idea. Without actually understanding again if your consumer wants it or not. In both cases, if you go through the process of building a business and building technology that does not directly meet a need or a problem that the consumer has, then you don't have a business because you're not actually providing them something that is going to relieve that problem. And so a lot of times I will consult with not just businesses, but technologists that say, oh, I got a great idea. Okay, do consumers care about that idea? Like start there, figure out if there's an actual problem worth solving the technology. I hate to say this, the technology is the easy part. The technology is the part that you should worry about last. Because there are hundreds of ways in different technologies that we can solve a problem. But if you don't know what the problem is, then you're building something backwards.

Absolutely. And I also think the reverse is probably true. Maybe there's a lot of applications that meet customers demands. So it's almost how do you make customers loyal then so that they don't go off to these other applications other. Because there's probably more choices now for them to do so.

Yeah, there's more choices than ever before. We are more empowered than ever before. It's much easier for us to leave a service and go to another service when we have a bad experience. And if we have one bad experience, we're fast to move. I mean, think about the recent cybersecurity problem with cloud crowdstrike. Like how many people do you think the next day said there's an alternative out there? Yes, right. So these problems, you know, they don't have to be as massive, but you have small problems and you're unable to facilitate and continuously improve and evolve. And going back to the book real quickly, customer transformation is not digital transformation which is focused solely on I'm going to evolve the technologies that our company uses. It's the recognition that your customer is the one that is transforming and you have to be able to keep up with their ever evolving expectations. And as they transform, you have to.

Keep up with that 100% agree. So as I mentioned, you have a seven step stage or strategy for us. We'll have a link for this down below. So first one again was customer for stage one. Stage two, I believe it's called interfaces. And you go over things like artificial customer relationships. What did you mean by that in that chapter?

So interfaces really is a play on APIs. Application programming interfaces. APIs, I actually refer to them now as application people interfaces. Because APIs are really about connecting people together. Yeah, we do that through various applications and programs, behind the scenes interfaces, integrations, all of that. But reality is those are experiences for people, for your consumers, or even internally. The integrations that you build make those interfaces that you are able to then communicate from your business back to your consumer, or allowing your consumer to interface back with your business API. And so a lot of what we talk about in this chapter is recognizing that those interfaces and the integrations that power those interfaces are also changing. They are your gas pump, when you go to the gas station, or if you have a Tesla, even if you go to charge your car, that's now a new type of interface for you. And these interfaces are becoming much more complex. And of course APIs are driving all of this. You know, it's funny, for the amount of people who are talking about using AI, they don't realize that you can't use AI without an API behind it. And so your focus is on the wrong things. The focus should be on how APIs are helping you build these unique interfaces for your consumers to create the experiences they're looking for.

All right, so it sounds like what you know, your customer, you should create a robust API that then can gather information, collect information, be able to change along with their customer over the years. Am I hearing that correctly?

That's correct. And also you become more flexible, you're more nimble in being able to achieve whatever change they might experience. So I mentioned the gas pump. You know, my car becomes a smart car. And all of a sudden now as I'm driving and it recognizes that I'm out of gas, it can call ahead to the very next gas station, reserve a pump for me. My credit card information is already stored inside of the car as a wallet. I connect automatically to the pump and on the pump screen it provides me with a coupon based on my personalization interest to say, hey, there's some Hostess cupcakes waiting for you in the gas station because we've pre ordered them and now that's curbside pickup. Like that all sounds like a fantasy. The reality is we're not far away from that type of experience. But it can only be achieved with APIs. And it's focused on understanding who your consumer is in that process.

So it has to be planned up front and it has to be made in such a way that it's extensible. Extensible where you can extend it and it's not so closed off or using technology that can't be.

One of the biggest problems that all technologies have today is they're in the walled garden approach. Yes, I build an application and that application is for my business. And yet, if we think about a typical vacation or business trip that you go on, we are using roughly seven to eight different applications for that one vacation experience. We've got our airline, we've got our Uber, we've got maybe we're making some dinner reservations, our calendars, we've got our hotel reservations, and all of these siloed experiences, you know, we've kind of grown accustomed to. But if we think about, you know, a longer term strategy and if we think about AI assistance in our life, then theoretically all of that should be combined. Because my experience is I'm going on a trip.

Absolutely. So do you think developers or companies are worried about having a well defined API? I know this is a little off topic, but Google SEO's API became exposed a few months ago. People are like, oh my gosh, it's like the holy grail. I know what it's collecting, what it's looking for, and I can kind of gauge it or kind of gamify it now to meet those expectations. Is that a real concern as well?

Well, yeah, sure. I mean, security as part of that API infrastructure is a huge, you know, part of this. You've got to know how to protect the data, make things continuously private, but also expose just the right amount of information so that we know how to personalize. So it becomes a huge consideration. But again, it goes back to what are we protecting? Are we protecting the integrity of our company? Are we integrating the privacy of our. I think when we think of our customers, I think when we look at things like cookies and the flow of privacy online, we're going to see a lot more opting in for stuff for convenience. So if I said, look, would you like, you know, personalized recommendations for your shopping experience? Right. We might all say yes versus you know, do you want us to target you with advertising, you know, more related to, you know, somebody's going to say no. Right. So that balance of where somebody can actually opt into that personal information changes how we secure that data through those APIs as well.

Right. So we know our customers, we have a really Robust API. I think stage three is Journeys. And you've mentioned a few examples of how maybe if your API is set up correctly, you can adjust to new interfaces that you may not have anticipated when you first created the, the experience. And you have two chapters on this, I think outside in and experiences in the moment. So maybe go over really high level what these two chapters might go over.

Yeah, so Journeys gets into some of the marketing strategy. Like we think about the customer journey and so again as an example, we use travel as an example where I'm going to go on a vacation and so I book my travel and then I, you know, get to the airport and. Right. And we can map through that. Today, traditional marketing journeys are all based on again these siloed experiences, what happens from the moment they come into my environment and how they navigate through the funnel system and then end up into making a purchase. And what we are actually seeing is that is expanding, it's expanding beyond the traditional confines of a business. We get into the ecosystem conversation, which is actually the next chapter. But as we start to bridge that connection, we see that we as consumers are engaged with multiple different types of devices, multiple different types of channels, multiple different types of, of mechanisms. And the outside in perspective shows us that we again are starting outside of our organization with the customer first and then building those journeys inward to the business. It's a specific order. And when we get done with this, I'll kind of highlight this. We're going through my framework which starts from the customer on the outside. The Last 1 is 7 is the business which is on the inside. And I'll demonstrate how this is wrong if you go backwards through that process. That's the inside out perspective. And so as we think about all of this from a development perspective, it returns us to what is the problem that we're trying to solve? What is the interfaces that we want to build to support that and then what's the journey, that experience that that consumer is going to go on to get to the end result that business. The other thing that's in this particular chapter is this concept around touch points. Because if we think about traditional marketing touch points, that is a phrase that has been used for decades and yet today we are starting to not touch anything. We have our Google Alexa devices and Google Home devices, smart homes, smart cars, you know, we can say okay, Google, tell us the weather and it's going to share. I'm not touching anything even if I go to the gas station in the example that I shared earlier. Well, imagine if I Didn't have to actually touch the gas pump. And my car just automatically synced. Right. These types of thoughts about how we develop multisensory exploration sight with VR, sound, audio. We're even getting into the point of smell and taste. You know, back to the movie theaters. There's like, you know, the scent gets blasted into the auditorium. You know, imagine virtual reality that had little scent canisters there, that as I was on a tropical oasis, I had the smell of coconuts and you know, pina coladas coming in. Like that type of experience is becoming more real. There's a scientist in Japan that invented a taste TV that you could go and lick the TV and what was on the screen. And so if there was pizza on the screen, you could lick it and you could taste the pizza on the screen. Like these multi sensory types of approaches are changing that journey that consumers are on.

All right, so how do you know you're not too early? Like you have some innovations there? How do you know, like, okay, I could see a customer journey maybe going here might be too soon. You've seen a lot of technologies that came out too soon and then years later similar comes out and all of a sudden it's, it's a hit.

Yeah, it goes back to step number one, the customer.

Because like, let's use virtual reality as a great example of this. Yeah, Virtual reality is a technology that has been out for over 40 years. This is not new. And yet now all of a sudden people are spending a thousand dollars for like Apple Vision to explore virtual reality. What's the difference between 40 years ago and today really, when you sort through it? Not much. You know, a little better graphics, a little faster processors, but the technology and the implementation of it is the same. And so then you start to say, well, wait a second, why wasn't it successful 40 years ago and why isn't it still successful today? And anybody out there who is thinking like virtual reality is successful right now, it's not. Why? Well, because my mom, who's 75 plus years old is downstairs in the kitchen. She's not going to be wrapping something around her head to go experience virtual reality the average day. Common user or customer is not right for that type of product. It still goes back to, well, who's it for? What is the problem they're solving, why are they using it? And most people who are using virtual reality today are probably using it for the cool off factor, not because it actually really solves a problem in their daily active use.

That's a good point. It goes back to the customer again, because I know a lot of people, like, they don't want to wear a headset. I think Apple killed their product or they're about to kill it. So it's a good point. If you know you're a customer, you don't get that first stage one. The rest of the stages seem like they all crumble. Yeah.

We can still explore and come up with ideas. You know, that's what innovation is. You can play with it, but you don't have a business model unless you can say, does the customer want this? Same thing with AI. Right now, there's a lot of people jumping on that AI bandwagon, and yet we see that consumers are getting rather annoyed with it. And there is now differentiation in the marketplace. You can speak with a real human when you call us. Right. So those insights show you that you're probably a little early with implementation of AI in the marketplace.

Absolutely. All right, so we still have four stages to go. Let's go through them really quick. And people could definitely take a deeper dive. Once again, I'll have a link for the book down below. All right, stage four is ecosystem. You touched on this a little bit, but maybe a little teaser for what this chapter is all about.

Yeah, we'll make ecosystem pretty fast. This is about building your communities, and we love communities, especially in the development arenas, talking with other developers. So it's both the communities outside of your organization and inside of your organization. Because even internally, you should be able to build these communities of practice so that you can be a little bit more successful. It also recognizes that you should be looking at how to interface with other entities. So a traditional ecosystem, including your competitors. And that's the hard one, is a lot of times I don't want to develop like this is my thing. I don't want to develop something. Well, no. There's a reason why Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all working together because they recognize that in a multi cloud facility, they make more sales. There's a reason why Zoom is on Google Home devices, Google Nest devices. It's because they realize they can sell more Nest devices. They can sell more of the hardware by making software available on it. So you have to think strategically about how you can align in that ecosystem with your competitors.

Yeah, I love this point. I think this is like you said, a lot of times, people get so caught up into their. They're trying to keep everything for themselves. And it's better if you kind of share or kind of get the ecosystem going because it will Grow the business, obviously, where it's kind of counterintuitive. All right, so stage five is culture. This, to me, seems probably one of the hottest things from working in technology. If the culture's off, then, like you said, the technology is usually the easiest piece. So what's culture all about here?

Yep. Culture is all about how you function within your business and your organization. And are you happy while you're working? You know, it's a little cliche, but I'll give you something specifically for the developers that evolves the culture, and it also involves alignment with your hr, your hiring practices, and it's this. Think about when you are doing interviews, and we could probably come up with all of the traditional questions that you would ask a developer during the interview process, and maybe you have some sort of test that you want to determine if they're, you know, accurate in their coding practices or something along those lines. How many of them do you think ask the question in your daily work load, how often would you think about the customer, like, as a interview question? Like, when you start to actually introduce the concepts of the customer into the hiring practices of your development team? It starts from day zero. The expectation is that your mentality and the way you think about development needs to start with the customer. And this could include everything like, how critical is it? Do you think that QA is for your customer? You know, and you just inject that perspective into the questions. And now you are hiring people who already come in with the expectation that that is a critical component of their job.

You know, that's a great point. It sounds so simple, but usually when you see a new innovation, you're like, how come I didn't think of this? That, to me, is a great hack that anyone could put into place right now and improve the culture right off the bat. So I love that. All right, so we have culture in place. Stage six, I think, is technology.

Look at that. We got all the way to stage six before we even talked about technology.

Right, right.

And this is the point. Like, technology is the thing that helps us do all the stuff that we've talked about before, right? We. We get through the customer, we figure out how they're going to interface with us. We figure out what the journey is. We build that ecosystem. We build the culture of people who are going to support that ecosystem, and then we figure out the technology that we need in order to make that all happen. That's it. I mean, there's other components into it. You know, we. Data is a huge part of it. We look at the data. We analyze the data to make sure that the decisions that we're making are correct. We leverage the data as part of the fundamental aspects of what the customer wants. All of that is part of the technology. But ultimately this really boils down to technology decisions. They're not last, but they're second to last.

Absolutely. All right, and stage seven is business. I think you go over like the value of obsessed leadership, customer value alignment. Let's wrap it all up. What's this last stage all about?

Yeah, so business is the end result. If you do all of this successfully, you get to business and that allows you to generate your business value. This is where you determine if you are directly aligned with your customers and you have the leadership that is in place to be obsessed with their customers, to recognize that the customer has to be first. And as I mentioned earlier, if we were to do this in reverse, if we were to say, I've got a great idea for a business and this is the business product that I want to build, and then figure out the technology to build that product and then figure out the team that I want to help me build that product, and then I have to figure out how to execute that across an ecosystem, then figure out, well, what might that journey be? And then, oh, I haven't even thought about the interfaces yet. Oh, I just figured mobile phone, even though no one's using mobile phones anymore. And then who is my customer? And then I got to figure out how to sell it. Right. That's the inside out perspective. And when we go backwards, we literally get into a problem where we've done all of this work only to get to the consumer and then figure out I'm not aligned with them, I don't have the right people in place and I don't know what their problem is that I'm trying to solve. And that's it.

Love it. All right, Chris, we went over a lot really quick. I know you have a website and you offer coaching. Is this something you help? Would you help a developer team or a culture to say, hey, here are the seven steps. We can create fantastic software that's going to help increase the bottom line by helping our customers. Is that something you would. That you offer?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You can find all that information on my website, chrishood.com c h r I s h o o d.com and I can do that for businesses, I can do it for technology teams. I can do it for both sides. A lot of times people will look at this and I think this is the key takeaway as we started customer transformation. That sounds like a business initiative. That sounds like a marketing initiative. It sounds like, well, I don't work with the customers direct and a lot of times we get like, I don't work with the customer. So how does this apply? You all should be working with the customers. And so definitely I am more than happy to sit down with any type of development team or technology team and talk about the benefits of doing this.

Awesome. And Chris, this is the last question I asked, but you may have already answered it just now. But just in case, before we go, one piece of actual advice you can give to someone to help them with their customer first. DevOps efforts and the best way to find a contact obviously sounds like chrishood.com yep.

Website chris hood.com you can find all of my stuff there, but I always leave with the stuff that we started with. You have to think about your customer first. Your technology, your data, your business goals, your leadership, your culture. All of that comes after your customers. Your customer is your number one priority. And if you can't wrap that around a little pretty bow, then yeah, reach out to me and I'll help you.

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And for links of everything of value we covered in this DevOps toolchain show, head on over to test guild.com P160 and while you're there, make sure to click on the SmartBear link and learn all about SmartBear's awesome solutions to give you the visibility you need to deliver great software. That's smartbear.com so that's it for this episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed, creating end to end full stack DevOps toolchain awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thank you for tuning in. It's incredible to connect with close to 400,000 followers across all our platforms and over 40,000 email subscribers who are at the forefront of automation testing and DevOps. If you haven't and yet, join our vibrant community@testguild.com where you become part of our elite circle driving innovation in software testing and automation. And if you're a tool provider or have a service Looking to empower our guild with solutions that elevate skills and tackle real world challenges. We're excited to collaborate. Visit test guild.info to explore how we can create transformative experiences together. Let's push the boundaries of what we can achieve.

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