The Experience Economy | Oracle Marketing Cloud VP of Product Development Srishti Sofat

It's just 10 years, and now you can't even imagine life without the phones, right? I mean, and so it's just been so rapid. I mean, Uber, I mean, I just came in. You know, Alexa now. I mean, you name it, and we all just get used to all of these things so quickly that it's hard to go back. And so as we build any product, you know, a pulse on the customer is sort of super key. You know, you have to keep that in mind. So let me just quickly start with a little bit background. about myself. 20 years in the technical industry, pretty much 10 years on consumer, 10 years on enterprise. Consumer, I was working in early-stage search and companies, you know, on local search, search portals when that was the in thing. For the last 10 years, I've been working in the enterprise software space with— started out with this company called Responsys. And then that was acquired by Oracle. So I've been part of Oracle for the last 5 years. Another interesting fact, most of my experience pretty much evenly split into 2 continents. I've been working in India as well as in the US. So pretty much 10 years here, 10 years there. So I've had sort of a global exposure with teams pretty much across the world, been managing teams like that. So it's been an interesting journey. I'm hoping to talk to you guys a little bit about my journey. In terms of entrepreneurship, I mean, you know, you guys are kind of going to raise the money and do it all. My entrepreneurship has been interesting because what I did is I set up companies. Actually, I set up 2 of them, but both were captives. So money was not an issue. I had to do everything else, right? So I knew that I was going to get the funds, but I had to create the, you know, create the space, hire people, build the brand, do all of that in a different country. The only thing I really didn't have to worry about was the funding. So I am not going to be talking to you all about funding, but I'm going to be talking to you all about everything else. All right? So let's see if this thing works. All right. So what I'm really going to talk to you about— and some of you may have heard this term— about building product for the experience economy. Now, if we look at— people were extracting commodities way back. And then we were a manufacturing economy. And very soon, we became a service economy. But today, it's beyond service. It's about packages, and it's about servicing and experience. So I'm going to walk through a little bit about the change in dynamics. You all, we all are probably living it, but doesn't hurt to get a quick recap on what's really happening to the customer for whom we are building the product today. How have they changed? And who is your customer today, right? I mean, just, you know, all of us are customers at some level, but sometimes it takes a, you know, it takes, you know, it takes, it makes sense to reflect back and just understand our customer. customer, right? So essentially, you know, with rapidly changing business models, technology, the advent of internet in our daily lives, the customer expectations have drastically changed. I mean, people are— I mean, in the last 10 years, smartphones, I mean, iPhone, it's just 10 years. And now you can't even imagine life without the phones, right? I mean, and so it's just been so rapid. I mean, Uber, I mean, I just came in. Alexa now. I mean, you name it and we all just get used to all of these things so quickly that it's hard to go back. And so as we build any product, a pulse on the customer is sort of super key. I mean, you just, you can't, you have to keep that in mind. It's 5 billion people own a smartwatch in a world of 7 billion people. I mean, that's like anybody, I think, who's from 13 to 90 owns a phone, right? I mean, if you're a baby or what, like I got my son finally, you know, at 13 and a half, finally got him the phone, right? Was resisting it, was resisting it. 13 and a half, bought him the phone. My granddad, quite frankly, it's going to be his 90th birthday this September. He's going to be 90, and I'm going to get him an iOS 10 because he was like, I got this good deal for this iOS 6 on the internet. Should I buy it? And I'm like, No, don't. And I'm like, okay, I'm here, I'll just get him this phone. So everybody who can be on the phone today is on the phone, right? I mean, that's something to sort of step back and think about as you think about product. And, you know, all these smartphones are really connected to the internet, right? And what really happens today is, I was looking at these trends, Netflix, any country that Netflix goes to, you kind of can look at a pattern and people are increasing their data plans. Right, you know, when you're seeing a shift in the economy, if you look at this is, you know, the money spent on data plans, and Netflix went into a country, and look at the money spent on the data plans, you see a spike. I mean, you know, these are small things, but these are now becoming cultural phenomena. It's just affecting many things, right, in a country where a small thing like that is coming in, right? So, so just something to, again, you know, keep in mind. You know, all of you, you know, I don't know if some of you are on it now, but while I was sitting here around, everybody was on their smartphone, right? I mean, all of you were busy doing something, which was, you know, we all just do it. I mean, personally myself, right? I mean, I look at that Screen Time app that Apple has now, and unfortunately, I'm guilty of having a lot of screen time. I say, okay, it's all about productivity. I'm doing all this email. But, you know, July 4th weekend, it was as high, and maybe it was on Instagram, right? So it doesn't matter, right? I mean, we all are spending a lot of our waking time on these devices. Frankly, the only, you know, just in terms of stats, probably TV is still higher than phone in terms of screen time. But TV no longer is an active engagement. I mean, people are on their cell phone while they're on TV, right? So it's really sort of your only active engagement device. And, you know, this is— I'm preaching to the choir, really. But, you know, we all are just doing many things and you've discovered new and new ways to use our devices today, right? And it's just become part and parcel of our life. So, and everything, I mean, as I talk about experience economy, right? I mean, everything matters, right? I mean, a 1-second, this is a stat, that a 1-second drop in page load adds 20% drop of people leave it, right? I mean, people just don't go to that page. I know just in my own, recent, you know, like we do marketing and we are doing, you know, a lot of click tracking and different things like that. How much engineering time and energy goes into saying how fast is that click? So when you, when you get an email and, you know, you're getting a promotion, people want you to go to that page, right? And, and, and it's a small little click for a consumer, but from an engineering resource, we really need to spend a lot of time to make sure that that's fast because otherwise people will drop off. I mean, and that's what it is. It's all about the experience. So really, it is no longer about just time and making things better. It's really about the experience, right? I mean, everybody when they're doing anything wants to make sure that it is a perfect experience for them. And and products, whether they're consumer, quite frankly, and whether they're enterprise, because it's the same people who go and work in enterprises. You're a consumer who's used to all these different products, and then you go and become a person working in a bank or an investment banker or, you know, a marketeer. Whatever job you do, it's still you. So whether you're building consumer software or enterprise software, the experience economy is very, very relevant today. You cannot say that, you know, let's just build this really monolithic app on the enterprise side and everybody is used to doing everything with voice on consumer. It's not gonna add up, right? So we really have to look at it on both aspects and that's really important. So, and you know, it's really to me, and especially as we are into, you know, I'm Oracle Marketing Cloud, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to build software that marketeers build to target audience. And really what we are realizing is, as we are talking to a lot of our customers, that everybody is realizing that it's a segment of one, right? I mean, gone are the days saying that the same message for all men who are below 25 and like shorts, you know, send them this message of the t-shirt, are gone, right? I mean, it is really now about Really, I know what I want, so the message needs to be just for me, and I'm expecting that more or less, right? So that's something that you need to keep in mind. And the other thing is customers are in charge. I mean, there is just a plethora of information on our fingertips. So people can research, people can do whatever they want, so they know what they want. So you can't push things that they're not ready for. So you need to keep that in mind, that customers are in charge of their own journey. As you build product, you need to just really keep some of these things in mind. So I guess the point really here is that especially when you think of an experience economy, hyper-personalization has to be a key component of your product design, right? I mean, otherwise, because the experiences we need to keep in mind are going to be personalized, people are not looking at one fit that suits all. So that's sort of one key message as you look at the experience economy or building product for the experience economy. Thank you.