How to Weigh & Measure Risk when it Comes to your Brand with SaaStr's Head of Design Kyle Baldinger

All right, hello everyone, welcome, welcome, welcome. This is a very great experience for me. I am the head of design here at Saastr, and this is the first time I've actually spoken at a Saastr event, so this is going to be a real treat for me, as well as I hope it is for you. Today we're going to kind of go, go over risk and reward, how to weigh and measure risk when it comes to your brand. Um, let's see here. Awesome. So the first thing we're going to want to go over is just some housekeeping rules because this is a roundtable and SASR's format is a little unique. Um, so one of the things that we try to do is make sure that it's as interactive as possible. So, uh, you've all probably used Zoom at this point. There is a chat feature. We do encourage you to use it so that I can interact with you, take your questions, and all the things that you'll need towards the end of the session. The sessions are also all recorded, so you'll be able to see those afterwards, as well as the slides that you're about to see are going to be published. And that's true for most of our sessions here at SaaStr. Uh, we'll let you know when it's not. If you haven't already, you can go to saastrscale.com and there's a link to network. Uh, there's a great community. There's hundreds of people there making lots of meetings today, tomorrow, all the way through Friday, I believe. Um, so that's going to be something that if you haven't already committed a little bit of time into networking, that it, I would highly recommend it 'cause it definitely enhances your attendee experience. So let's go ahead and get into it. So today we're gonna be talking about risk. And so for me, I always kind of define risk as the possibility that something unknown is going to happen. And so risk can be associated with any number of things from product choices to investments, to hiring decisions. And as you can probably guess with design choices as well. So the way that I try to mitigate risk is to have a better understanding of that risk. And so I can do that by studying the risk at hand. And to better understand that risk, we're going to look at 3 variables that I think commonly make up risk and how to better associate and mitigate that risk. So the first thing that we want to look at is shape. So shape is what, um, I consider to be a topographical view of the situation at hand and to what ends that risk is going to affect us or our goals. So, um, we're never going to be able to fully understand risk, but by better understanding it, we can better be prepared for its outcome on what it's going to affect in terms of our goals. We can get a general shape of risk by kind of poking and prodding around a situation. So this could be several different items for you. Um, if you're a manager, it could be, uh, prodding and poking around into different departments. If you are a marketer, it could be surveying your users, but all of these things in essence are designed to do one thing, which is just generate more research and help you find the bounds and limitations of your risks and what's associated with them. So let's take a look at a couple of just quick ways that I determine the size of a risk, um, or the shape of a risk. And that is, uh, you can look at it being an external change from something like, hey, we're going to, um, kind of switch offices between two people. That's very much an internal change. It can be an external one, which is, hey, we're no longer going to be having our physical offices and we're gonna be going fully remote after this. or it could be something like what SaaS has done over the past couple of months, which is pivoting from physical events to digital events in 2020. And so those have, obviously you can imagine both internal and external changes. So those are just some examples of how, um, when you're trying to define the shape, one of the best questions that I try to, to ask is like, what is being affected? And that I think helps determine where the boundary lines are. And after you determine all the boundary lines, you get an idea of what the shape of a risk can be. So the second variable to consider with risk is the size. Now we have a general understanding of the risk shape. We're going to start to assess the size of that risk. To do this, I usually ask myself or the team, how many people are going to be impacted by this risk or this choice? Um, does the number of people impacted grow or shrink over time? Uh, that's a big one for us. Obviously, if we do something today, we do a lot of legacy contact, content that affect compounds. So if we decide to cut a corner on something, 5 years down the road, that corner cut that we took is actually amplified over the scope of time, you know? So the same thing can happen with your risks. They can grow and they can become riskier, or they can shrink because the circumstances that put a lot of stress on them in the beginning reduced over time. And so one thing I will say is that the more time you spend in this step, the more accurate it's going to be. And like I just said, if you rush this stage, uh, it it does snowball over time in either the positive or the negative direction. So looking at, um, some examples of what are some things that you can do to determine the size of it. We're going back to our previous examples of like switching offices with Jane, a coworker or something like that. It's really only going to affect yourself, the person you're switching the office with. And if you have some people that swing by your physical office or customers that come to your office, it's going to affect them, but that's pretty much nobody besides the two people. Now, if you're selling your physical office and you're going fully remote, that does affect all of your employees, and it does affect only a small amount of your customers if you have customers that come into your office. So it's a medium-sized, um, size risk. And then if you pivot your entire product line to another vertical on a hunch, that's definitely gonna have a really big effect in terms of it's gonna affect all of your employees as well as all of your customers. So next, let's look at weight. Weight is what I consider to be how much of an impact that risk has on each person. So if you have an object or a risk that you're taking, we're basically gonna be asking ourselves, How heavy does that choice weigh on other elements of our brand and company? In addition to how much weight does that impact on each individual person? This is a very personal, um, experience for each person. So the way that it affects me versus the way that it affects a customer versus the way that it affects a potential customer is going to be very different all across the board. So that's one thing to consider is that even though you might have a really good understanding of how it affects your users, how they actually experience that weight, um, could be very different from what you're estimating or what even you're going to be aware of as somebody on the company side. Just a quick important distinction here is that size and weight aren't always going to be the same. Sometimes they're related, sometimes they're not, and we can kind of look at that in this next graphic. So if we look at these items here, you can see that there's quite a few ways that size and weight can be different. So that top one, even though it is a very, um, large risk in terms of impact— it impacts a lot of people— um, if you update your terms and service, everyone is going to be impacted. However, we all know from the terms of service emails that we get in our own inboxes, we're not always reading them. And especially on, uh, do I fully understand them, we're definitely not reading them. So most customers won't notice. Uh, there will be some that are impacted, but the, even though it impacts all customers, the weight of that impact isn't quite correlating to the size. So, uh, one of the things that a lot of people look at when they're talking about risk in their brand is rebranding. It's a, it's a big step. It does affect all of your customers and your employees. And as much as it kind of pains me as a designer to say it, not a lot of people are making huge decisions on the graphical representation of your brand. They do it based on a lot of other aspects of your brand, but rebranding in itself isn't going to change a lot out of the core values of your brand. And so it's not likely to deter existing customers. However, it is a risk because new customers might be deterred by either the aesthetics or anything like that. So to look at the last example, which is removing FAQs from your site or a specific FAQ, it actually, even though it affects a small number of users. So if you imagine somebody going to sastrescale.com and they're like, hey, I want to know how to get in contact with someone because my ticket isn't working. That's something that we develop specific FAQs for because in that time of need, you don't have the option to email back and forth. So we try to make it as clear and as concise as possible. And that's a lot through trial and error, but you can imagine that if we removed it, although most, we would probably say 95% of people that attend our events, they do find their ticket IDs and they are able to access everything, that 5% that can't, Um, it impacts them very heavily and deeply because they're now wanting to attend something that they can't attend to. And on the day of, because we're a small team, we can't always get to every single customer-related issue as promptly as we would when we're not running an event. So that's going to impact not only the individual, but also our team. And so customers now have to reach out directly for every question as a result of a small thing of not including or purposely excluding something out of an FAQ. Another example is something like, like removing metadata from photos. Most people would probably never notice, but to those visually impaired, it affects them very deeply. So that is, again, an example of something that is small in size in terms of how many people it impacts, but in terms of how it affects those users specifically, it's very deep. So just a couple of key takeaways here as we go into the final stretch of this, uh, presentation is that we need to look at— to— or in order to perf— to define risk in a more purposeful way, we need to look at exactly what is affected, and that helps define the shape of our risk. So asking what is going to be the big ways to start your process of defining risk. Next, we're going to ask how many, or how many are going to be affected by the risk, and that helps determine the size of it. And then the next thing we're going to say is how deeply are those impacted by this risk, and that helps determine the weight of your risk. So all in all, that is just a quick example of how you can look at risk, and hopefully a little bit of a new perspective, and I think that will also help guide you on your journey to assessing what to do once you have that risk, is you're able to look at it, measure it, and understand the variables and the outcomes a little bit more concisely and a little bit more thoroughly. So with that, I'll kind of open it up. Don't forget to use that, uh, Q&A feature at the bottom of your, um, Zoom screen, and we'll, uh, or you can use the raise hand function. We'll bring any of you guys on screen and we'll, we'll answer any of the questions you guys may have. Although I'm not entirely sure I see any of them. Let's see. Amelia, I see you are on this line. I cannot get the Q&A screen up for some reason. Oh, there we are. There's the chat window. Good morning, everyone from Australia. Oh my gosh. I hope we have some people from some of our favorite countries, and it looks like Australia is there. So congratulations on making it. I don't know the time equivalent to Australia, but it is certainly glad to see that you made some time out of your day to hop on today's session. Awesome. Well, it doesn't look like we have too many— 3:44 AM. Ooh, that is very early in the morning. We've definitely been pulling some all-nighters in our quest to get SAS to scale off the, off the ground. But we are excited to see that somebody was just as huge fan of SAS to stay up that early or late, depending on how you perceive time. But, um, we are looking like— let's see, not too many questions coming into the chat, but that's totally okay. So with that, I'll just kind of give you guys the final charge. Don't forget to check out our Brella networking. It's where you can go to network with, um, other colleagues as well as, um, CEOs and founders. A lot of people are going to be over there in those windows. So check that out. That you can find the link to that at sastrescale.com, as well as the agenda for the rest of the event. It's going to be a lot of fun. Um, I'll be there and don't forget to connect with me. You can find me, um, online at, uh, kb.fyi is my personal website. It's also my Twitter handle. Um, and you can find me on LinkedIn with Kyle.Baldinger. Thank you guys so much for your time, and I hope I gave a little bit of clarity on how you can measure and find risk moving into 2021. Have a great evening, afternoon, and enjoy the rest of SasterScale.