Strategyzer Webinar: How MasterCard Trained Business Modelling To 1000+ People

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Hi everybody. Welcome to another Strategar webinar session. Today's topic is how MasterCard scale business modeling to 1000 plus people, and it's a unique session for us because we actually have executives from the organization who are here to do a Q and A with Strategizer co founder Alex Osterwalder. We'll be beginning in a couple of minutes, but before we start, one of the things I'd love for everybody who's here and everybody who's trickling in at the moment to do is kind of just think about what you hope to learn from today's session. You can either share that in the chat box within the GoToWebinar control panel, or you could tweet it to us. RateGize. Okay, let's get started. So once again, this is another Strategizer webinar session and today's topic is how MasterCard scaled business modeling to 1000 plus people. If you're just joining us, I had mentioned earlier that in this session we've actually got a unique little experience where two executives from inside the organization are going to be doing a question and answer session with Strategizer co founder Alex Osterwelder at any point throughout the webinar. You can of course ask questions within the chat box as well as post questions to us on Twitter or share your experience on Twitter as Raategizer. You'll also get a chance to have your questions heard towards the end of the webinar session. So like I said before, feel free to add those into the chat box and I'll moderate them later on. You can also find us on blog.stragizer.com I'm sure that some of you are familiar with with our blog page and all the great content that we have there. We actually also have a case study about the mastercard experience with Strategizer on the blog as well, which I'll also make available after the webinar session. And like I've said a few times, if you want to get in touch with us on Twitter, or follow us or create a conversation on Twitter, by all means you can find us at Strategizer for the mention and you can use the hashtag StrategizerWebinar. I'm your moderator. Those of you who remember me, my name is Kavi Gupta. For those of you who don't, hello. I head up the content team at Strategizer and I'm responsible for the Production of articles, webinars, podcasting and social media. Your host today is Strategizor co founder Alex Osterwalder. Alex is also lead author of global best sellers Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. And our guests we've got two guests from MasterCard today. We have Lee Bocchiccio, who is the Global Talent Development at mastercard, and Eric Cliz, VP of Global Learning and Organizational Effectiveness at mastercard. They're going to be our core panelists today and they're the ones that are going to be chatting with Alex about the MasterCard experience in scaling the type of training and program where an entire organization is speaking a shared language around business models, the value propositions, and creating value for the organization and its customers. Before I hand the reins over to Alex and Lee and Eric to start the conversation, I just want to mention that the tools that will be mentioned throughout this webinar session are available for free on the Strategizer platform. All you have to do is create an account. It takes a simple minute and you'll basically have access to 30+ tools, canvases, templates, guides and references that will help you create the type of company that your customers want and the type of company that creates value through its business model as well. I will bring this resource library link up again for you towards the end of the webinar session. And for those of you who have been asking, everyone will get a recording of this session as well within 24 to 48 hours of the broadcast. So I'm just going to pass the reins over to Alex, Lee and Eric. Alex, whenever you're ready, go ahead.

Okay, so I'm going to try to share my screen. That was actually not what I wanted to do. Kavi, maybe you can just change the presenter mode to me. And while we're trying to do that, I will say hi to Lee and Eric. Welcome in our webinar.

Good Morning, Good Afternoon or Good Morning and Good Afternoon, depending upon who's on the phone.

Hello, Alex.

Hi. So I just wanted to kick it off by asking you, tell us a little bit about how this whole thing started out. How did you get interested at MasterCard in the business model Canvas and the value proposition Canvas? What's the beginning of the story here?

Sure.

So I'll take that. I'll take you back to March of 2012. We were doing, and we have continued to do extremely well. Our stock was great. We were entering and expanding into new markets. But during this time, if you remember, there was a pretty significant shift in the payments industry in digital technology. And that was changing the way that people make purchases and how they were making purchases and using different devices and so forth. We had a lot more competition in the marketplace, new competition that was not traditionally there before. Young gentlemen working out of their garages, you know, disintermedia, trying to disintermediate the payments industry. And our leadership at the time recognized that for us to continue to maintain and grow our business, we needed to adapt and become, you know, more proactive in how we approach product innovation, development and management and how we did business modeling and at the time. So as a result, we instituted a program called Product Management Excellence. And at the time, our chief product officer had attended a session where the business model was featured and he loved the tool and just thought this was a very simple way for people to really understand how a product would work and how you could bring it to scale. And typically we're talking about you go to get approval on a product with a 60 page document and people leave the room still not understanding what the value proposition is or how we're going to bring it to scale, or what the costs are, everything behind it. And he really felt like if we use this type of tool and we got much better at really thinking through both the front and the back of the house, that we avoid a lot of those 60 page decks because we probably find out that it either wasn't going to work or, or we find out that we had a real strong model there. So that's really where it started. And he basically came to me and said, I need you to develop a training program for everyone in the product organization across the globe.

So what were your first thoughts when you heard that? That's a pretty daunting task to get that to an entire team, a global team, just like that. What were your first thoughts?

I don't know if I can express that on this call. No, I was really very nervous about it, to be perfectly frank. Just because we are in 34 countries globally, right? I mean, we're all over the place. So that to me was pretty challenging. And how was I actually going to execute and get it done for the organization? And that's when I met you and went to your workshop. I immediately signed up for Zurich.

So to do this, actually to scale this across the product organization, you opted for an online course and more specifically this blended learning. When you started out, what were the obstacles that you thought might be difficult along the way to get an online course like this going with people around the world? And we all know that people don't necessarily want to learn per se. Maybe if they're very interested in a topic, small group will learn this. But if you want to get an entire group around the world to follow an online course, how do you even do that? What are some of the secret ingredients to get this going?

Well, I think first off, I think we established a very good partnership with the technology company CORPU and also yourself to help us create a course that was extremely engaging. And I'm going to have Eric talk a little bit about how it actually works, but that is a huge component of it. And we also needed to make sure that we had leadership buy in which I say, before you do anything, that is the most important component of it. And then you need to pilot it. We did a pilot of the program, as you remember, initially, to make sure that what we had created really worked and resonated with our audience. And we used excellent facilitators. So we were pretty passionate about leveraging people from both your team and also from corpu. And we were very specific in the type of people that we wanted to facilitate these and really build in some accountability and commitment.

So, Eric, maybe you can talk a little bit about how this specifically looked like.

Yeah, so we delivered, actually ended up delivering the program across 34 countries, which when I first saw that number, it just shocked me where all our people are located, because our original structure was thinking maybe six regions. And that's how we do in person trainings in our six main regions. But we actually reached 34 countries. How we did that was really breaking up what is a traditional two day in person workshop and delivering it virtually online. And so the term that we use internally and through CORPU is called the Guided learning journey. And what that does is it takes the two day in person content, same amount of time investment, but breaks it down into small chunks. So we're looking at 30 minutes a day. People will log into the site, they'll watch 30 minutes of videos and so on and so forth individually, they'll do that across the week, and then somewhere in midweek, they'll actually meet as a team to work on a particular topic in the business modeling process. So let's say prototyping, they'll get together in a small regional team, let's say about five to six people, and they'll work through something that's challenging them in their local region using the business model canvas. Then they go back online, they continue to do their work, and then on the end of the week, and the course is about five and a half weeks long. They come back and they're challenged to present their five minute business model story of what they came up with during the week. So key ingredients to success, which was the original question I think is this team process that we build in to the virtual class and I think that's really what makes it unique is you know, it's not in person training, it's virtual. But we don't lose that in person touch that they're actually working through content in their local regions, solving problems and challenges that impact their work which gives them chance to practice and embed the behaviors into their day to day work. So the guided learning journey for the business model, canvas art and science and business modeling is about five and a half weeks long. There's I think we have 52 videos for self paced work. There's five or six, six total live events and about 14 meetings. So it's very blended, it's very interactive and it goes across, across time which helps the learning, the participant retain the information and through that practice element. So we've had great success, we've had really good success with the program.

Can I add two more points to that if you don't mind?

Absolutely.

I think the other thing is that we are very flexible in the timing of this. So the course, you know, we've got people in Singapore, Australia, we're based out of New York and so you know, we've had calls at 2am for some of these to make sure that we're doing it on their business time. So that's one. So being flexible to address the needs of the various audiences. The other thing is that we've had success in having cross region or country teams. So where we've run some of these sessions we've been able to get people that are in Asia and Europe working together or people in Latin America and Europe working together or in the US So we've really. And that's been a huge success factor from us, from the participants to say that the ability, ability to work across border with their people has been huge. And the other thing which I think is important and Eric highlighted this, but I want to re emphasize it which is the content is relevant to the work they do. So I like to say they're doing their job while they're learning. It's not just theoretical information and just make something up. It's create a business model on your product today or what you're developing.

Right. So it seems like that is really one of the many key ingredients there that they don't Just learn. Actually they immediately apply it in these team exercises. Right. So they see the relevance from what they're learning and how they can apply it in their work. So traditionally the completion rates with online courses are not very great. And often when we talk about this, the first reaction we hear is, yeah, online learning doesn't really work. We have bad experiences with this in companies. So it seems like you're pretty successful. Is there any data you can share in terms of completion rates or so ballpark figures maybe?

Yeah, absolutely. Our completion rate, it does vary depending on region, but I would say anywhere from 83 to 92%. So we average right in the. Right in the high 80s, low 90s, which is. Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's really. And we're talking, you know, there's a serious time commitment. But I think what Lee was talking about, the team component, they're motivated, you know, they're really motivated to get in, dig into the topic. We have great sign up in our new course value proposition design. We have great traction with that. So people are really hungry for the information and the course gets great reviews because of the way it's designed. It's designed very thoughtfully. They do say it takes a lot of time.

They do.

And we've been mindful in that. Maybe putting some things in a toolbox or trying to shave some time down, but they say it takes time, but it's effective and that's the main thing.

So scaling a course like this, the way you say it, sounds really easy, but that's because you have a lot of experience and I'm pretty sure you also had some challenges. Can you maybe talk about some of the challenges you were facing to scale this across 34 countries and with a completion rate that high, that's pretty amazing. What are some of the challenges that you had that you faced and how did you overcome them so others can learn from your journey?

Well, we started off the course where people actually signed up in teams, intact teams. We thought that they had to be intact teams, which I think was great at first and it did build scale, it built some affection for the course later on. We just kept the sign up very general where people could sign up. And then we actually placed them on teams. We actually get the feedback that they like that better is because they're working on teams, cross functional teams in their region, meeting people that they wouldn't have normally met. So that goes to what Lee was talking about a little earlier is it's cross pollinating our organization. So they might be in three product people in with two finance people and someone from technology. So not only are we getting the country spread, we're also getting the positional spread, the discussions occurring real time. So that was, I would say, a great lesson. Just the fact that having I think key moderation support on the calls really helps. So what we have is these discussion threads. So there's a social, online social component to the course which is unique. And what we've learned is having executive presence both on the live events as well as in the moderated threads and having questions being placed socially on the threads keeps the participants more engaged, completing the self paced materials. So I think that has a lot to do with the completion rates that we're not. It's not a set it and forget it type program, it's really a set it and really help it along with moderation with support online live and then also giving them that local regional flavor with the meeting. So it's for five and a half weeks. They really get a lot of attention through a robust communication plan, both through our email as well as on the platform.

So one of the things that I know you did is you did quite a bit of internal marketing also to make people aware of this course. And now you have several courses. Tell us a little bit about what you did there.

Well, really the communication starts about six weeks before the launch of the program. So we built some imagery. We actually treat it like a product. I think that's we take the course and treat it like a product. So we have a whole marketing effort internally. We have key quotes that come out from future programs. We highlight those, we have executive sponsor videos that help highlight the importance and we're continually looking at those. So we just want to let people know this is a real culture shift actually for the organization, not only in how they're learning, but what the topics they're learning about. In business modeling, it's a buzzword within the product organization and people reach out to us now to pull us into the conversation, which is great. So Lee, anything else you want to add on that?

Yeah, no, no, no. I think that that's really it. It's really treating it like it's a product. And every time that we run the course, we have to look at it from like a go to market perspective. How are we going to get it to market so that we can actually get a number of people that are going to sign up for it? And we've been, you know, we've learned a lot throughout the process, but we have a lot of, we have these boards through in all of our major offices where we'll feature it. It's on our website. We'll run a short video on it just to make sure that people know it's coming. An article that talks about it with the quotes, just as Eric said. So there is a lot of marketing that goes involved to it. And I would just say that it is, I think from a learning experience perspective. There is a lot of work in developing this, but the impact that it makes on the organization has been huge. So Eric's been tracking behavioral changes. We assess people's level prior to the course, immediately after the course, and then three months out. And we've definitely increased the learning in like seven key areas that we're measuring along with our satisfaction rates with the way that the course is engaging, like it's over 95%, whether they'd recommend it to a colleague. So we get good results as a result of doing a lot of marketing.

So you addressed one point that's really interesting. You said that you track before and after. So apparently people are able to do something after the course that they weren't able to do before. What would you say are the main aspects of what they take away from this course? What can they do that they weren't able to do before they took this course?

The shared language, Alex, is probably one of our highest rated and I think That's a real MasterCard thing, is taking complex business. We're a B2B company. We don't do business directly with consumers. We go through issuers and acquirers and things of that nature to make the business happen. So our business models can get very complex very quickly. So having this shared language, I think between positions, between the countries, between the regions, has always ranked very high, is that they feel that they have a shared language that they can pull up a business model canvas anywhere in mastercard's culture and be able to share it. And it's an intuitive model, certainly, but it helps scale their story down to, let's say, a five minute explanation of what their product does as opposed to previously it was probably 45 to 60 minutes, 60 slides. So it's really scaled their own storytelling presentation. And I think that's been a key result that we've had.

Yeah, we actually just a quick story on one of the first cohorts that we launched about a year or so ago, one of the teams came back on the weekly live presentation and said basically the work that they did that past week and the way that they were planning on approaching launching their product, they learned that the way that they were going to go about doing it is they would never make scale and we wouldn't make money on the product. So they actually had to scratch the idea and really rethink what process they were going to go through to either change that back of the house side of it. They had a really strong good value proposition, had a great idea of partners and what we were going to charge for, but we couldn't get it to, for us to get it to scale, it was just going to cost us way too much money. And so that every, every time we run these cohorts, it's those types of learnings that come out that people just not going through a 60 page deck, but going through and thinking truly about the business model that they're presenting and then learning something about it. Is it going to work or is it not going to work? The other piece of it is it's now embedded in our business process. So it is. You know, people know that if you're going to go in front of the global peer review, in front of the chief product officer and the chief, you know, the key regional leads across the globe that you need to be able to present a business model canvas. And then that's being implemented in the regions also where they do the local level peer reviews or product reviews. The business model can canvas is a key component of that.

So that kind of brings me to the next question. A couple of things that were real takeaways for individuals. How would you say has MasterCard really benefited as an organization? So if you had to convince another organization, they come to you and say, lee, we're in this webinar. It was really interesting, but I didn't really understand yet how the organization as a whole, if I would want to sell this to my chief product officer. How would you say the organization benefits?

A couple things. Eric, did you want to.

Well, I think it gives them a process. Before this, Alex, I don't know if there was a process. We have a PME process, but this really is a strong pillar in our PME process in the create phase of product design. Clearly they have this system now that they can apply and use where not saying before there wasn't processes, but it might have been a patchwork. So I think this is the one, a real key pillar in PME that says these are a couple tools. The business model canvas, the value proposition canvas that you can pull in a meeting anytime, whether it be virtually or in person and structure out an idea. Before that it would happen. But it was, I Think more disjointed. So this is more simple, it's more intuitive and it really gives them a tool that they know that their colleagues have heard about it, they've used it, they might have attended training, not everyone's attended, but a great majority have. And so it really just gives them a system and process. And our behavior results also indicate to that that three months later they feel there was a 31% increase in that. We do feel we have the tools to be able to design and think through new models. So I think having that process is just huge and one process, not several. There's still, I'm sure, other processes out there, but one consistent process for a very diverse and globally diverse dispersed company.

Excellent. Lee, anything you would want to add to this one?

Just in terms of the benefits. So how we've benefited, I mean I'd echo everything that Eric said, but we also from a cost perspective this was, we would never have been able to do in person training in all of our offices around the globe. It was just not cost efficient. And that was one of the things was do it but you don't have a million dollar budget for it. So this platform is much more cost effective and it's proven its value back to us, you know, time and time again. The other thing that I can't share really specifics as a result of it, but because it's embedded in our global peer review process, we now have a gating process of which the business model campus is a key component of it. And we do have, you know, projects are funded or not funded based on it. And so we don't necessarily like to say no, no in that process. So I can't say to you we didn't go to market on X number of products because of it or what have you, but there's much more rigor to making decisions about investments and so investments might be delayed more until people can actually get a stronger. Like the example that I gave you. If that had gone to a peer review, the investment wouldn't have gone through because it was not a scalable business model. And that was when we started pme. That was the biggest thing that the Chief Product officer said is that we need to improve the craft of business modeling. We're great at defining value proposition and key customers, but we need to really think about all the backside of the house and how we're actually going to deliver it and truly make money on it.

So how do you feel the adoption is of these tools in the organization? Because one of the challenges are to really get people to feel natural in using these tools. If you're a doctor or a surgeon, you have to go through training and it's just part of the ongoing process of learning these tools. Applying these tools when you do surgery in business, when it comes to strategy and innovation is slightly different. Did you really see a difference in attitudes of people actually getting excited about using these tools and they feel this is helping them do a better job, or do you have to push a lot with rigorous processes? What are some of the learnings there?

I think part of it, and this might seem a little silly, but I think the excitement of getting these kits. So when we launched this program, everyone got a book, everyone gets a kit, or the team leader gets a kit and they literally get the big kit. If anyone's familiar with it, it's a business model canvas. It's huge. It's another value proposition canvas. They get a package of statis. They get all the tools that they need to successfully run it along with the little instruction books. So people love it. These things are coveted in our offices. People say, oh, are your business models? No. So there's that excitement of being able to use the tool. And I think because the learning is over time, I mean there's all kinds of science about the brain and that you learn overnight and everything. People definitely at the end of the course are much more comfortable with the tools themselves. And Eric's worked with many, many tools and expand on that.

Yeah, I mean we get requests, I would say, I mean several requests per week. Whether it's like, can you look at this model? Can you discuss it? Can you join our team meeting? Might be a group of five people. Might be a group of 35 people. We've done custom sessions where Alex, let's say there's a group of 34 people in London and four of the people attended the program. Well, they found the value in it and they brought it back to their larger team. And then we run the whole group through a two day in person where we're prototyping, we're learning, we're applying the concepts from the class, which is great. So it's really grassroots impact where they're pulling us into the conversation. So that's one thing I think you walk through the offices, we send out these certificates too of completion and we have different levels of completion, this mastery level. When we send out these certificates, they're so proudly displayed along with the business model in every office you walk through and there's just evidence around the globe and in the different offices plus and back to the marketing aspect. But I think it ties into the affection for this process. We ran some open sessions where we just do a one hour awareness session in our two hours actually here in Purchase and one hours in the regions and we'll sell out. I mean, we'll have 150, 200 people, you know, sign up. We can barely fit them into the room. They're interested in the topic, they ask great questions and then we promote the class afterwards. It signs up. I think Value Prop signed up in 24 hours from when we released about 100 seats. So this isn't changing. This isn't a buzzword. This isn't the business modeling process. Thinking is not a buzzword. It is really a cultural shift not only for MasterCard but how industries are changing. So people recognize that and so they're drawn to the topic, into the course, into the learning. They're pulling us in the conversation and we feel like it's been a great, challenging road. Yes, A lot of work. However, I think we're on the right path and we're headed in the right direction. Are we done? No. But we feel like we're on the correct path and we're moving in the right direction.

Yeah. And just one other thing that I want to add to that is that our chief Product officer who originally brought this in has now moved on. We now have a third chief Product officer. All have embraced this tool. Nothing has changed. Even though that leadership has changed, they are still backing and behind this tool as something within MasterCard that we need to continue to leverage. That said, as the organization shifts, we're constantly, you know, we will always be offering this program. We will. The care and feeding of this is important. You just don't put a training program out there and say, oh, yep, we got to 85%, that's great. Well, we have a lot of new people that are coming on board all the time. So as you're a new hire, they go through the videos about the business model canvas, whether you're in product or someplace else. And then when they come in the product organization, they get a welcome letter that goes out introducing them to PME and all the learning programs and the business model canvas. So the care and feeding of this type of a thing when it does get the sponsorship behind it is huge. It doesn't live by itself.

Yeah. And just one quick point, we've been pulled into marketing. So I'm doing a session this week for marketing teams. I did a session for a legal team. So this Isn't just product. It really is. It really submerge into the culture. So that's where I think these behavioral changes and these results, we're proud of it. From a cultural change initiative.

Yeah. I'm trying to keep up with drawing a little bit what you guys are saying, but I think I need to get a visual sketcher next time to do some better work than I do. But before we go to the next steps, because you were already addressing that a little bit, I think this Keep Caring is pretty fascinating. One of the things I'm also curious about is just if we can dig into the details for a second. Because you did a business model course and you did a value proposition course. So how does this really work? Does everybody take both or do they take one or the other or. It would be interesting for some of the participants in the webinar to hear how you manage this and who you channeled into which course.

We keep completion results not only on business modeling, but the whole product management process. So we're tracking who's going through what courses they're taking. We have some that have taken both. Certainly. We even asked the question which one did you like better? And all of that. So we definitely have repeat customers. I would say 50%. I'm just broad strokes here. 50% come back and have taken the second course. And then as Tali says, we have new hires, transfers in the product. It's a constant evolving team. But we have a lot of people that it's their first introduction. But the return customers is a great thing. And I recognize names. I'll recognize half the names on our virtual sessions. And it's great to see that they've come back for more in the Value Prop canvas. Having both components is really helpful. Earlier you.

Yes.

What we changed through the pilot or through the evolution, we actually taught value proposition canvas design in the business model canvas. We're actually extracting that out. And that was the separate course. So that was probably one of the largest changes. We distinctly think through business modeling and Value Proposition as they're connected, but the courses are separate. And so we really think having both is really the best way to go and that's the best way to prepare you for success.

And business model is now four week guided learning journey as opposed to five weeks.

Yeah, we extract the one week out of the Value Prop. Also we got the feedback. The course is a little bit long. So the Value Prop design is now three and a half weeks. I think anywhere between three and four weeks is a sweet spot for these Guided learning journeys. And that's not just from these courses, but from other courses we've run.

Right.

So before we get to the questions of the webinar presentation participants, what are some of the next steps that you're planning, some of the challenges maybe that you see ahead now that you have some really amazing results from these two courses?

Well, I think one challenge that we've run up against is we'll teach people for four and a half, five weeks. It's really, it's a small team. It's Lee and myself. We're looking at 1200 people, 34 countries. I think it's capturing these ideas. Our system, our corpus system does have the submissions from the classroom. But having a system that could help capture these ideas across the globe I think would be a great next step. Maybe building more case studies from the work that we've done. We have some, but more of those are always welcome. So I think it's just trying to get these meetings happen all the time. These real time canvas meetings happen, happens all the time. We're not always included. It's impossible to be based on the size and scope. So having some tools to help capture the information, the meetings in a central place I think would be a great next step.

I think the other thing too is that as much as we recognize the value and I think we haven't just used this technology platform for just business model, we run value proposition design a number of other programs off of it. As great as that system is, it doesn't always replace in person. So having the knowledge on site, you know, we're never going to be as good as you, Alex, but oh my goodness. But being able to, you know, for example, I was just talking to Eric. Our Singapore office wants us to come out and do this for their finance team. So, you know, do an overview on PME and run some business model canvas sessions. So, you know, just being flexible but also recognizing we can't be everywhere. So we try and make the right choices, you know, to support the business where it makes the most sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fast rules.

You've done an amazing job with that, you know, very small team. That's unbelievable. But I do think that scaling also the internal knowledge is something that we see at other organizations that they're not taking this step yet, but they're moving more towards that. We're actually going to launch a train, the trainer pretty soon, which might be interesting for some of the people listening.

We talk about these canvases and people seeing them. That's a huge conversation Starter. So that's part of. We didn't make it that way, but it's almost kind of part of our marketing strategy. You go into someone's office and you see this huge business model and you're like, hey, what the heck is this? Or as much as people are talking about online learning and badging systems online, these certificates that are all over the company make a huge difference. We're in an open space environment and people see these, they, they put these certificates around their desk. So it clearly means something to them. And it's another marketing for us in terms of people being aware of product management excellence and the various different tools like business model or value proposition that are out there.

Excellent, Kavi. Maybe I'll hand it over back to you. Except if maybe Lee and Eric, you want to mention something that I haven't addressed in my questions, otherwise we'd see if there are any questions from the listeners.

There's quite a few from our audience, so I'm just going to open them up. Yeah, I think so. One of the first ones I saw that was a killer one to you. Lee and Eric, you very much shared how important it was for leadership to buy in. And a lot of organizations, you need that context, you need that right space with the leadership that engages and embraces methodologies and programs like this. What would you say is your killer argument for some of our audience members to go back to their leadership to say, to encourage them to consider programs like this?

Well, I know in our kickoff of the custom in person, a lot of times we'll use other company examples of companies that have failed, products that have failed to show that this is an urgent topic and it's not something to take lightly. There's hundreds of these examples now as we move through. And then not only showing the failure, I think it's showing new, innovative business models such as Airbnb or Uber and things that people have actually used and say, wow, do you see how this is changing? It's the business model that's really making the difference. It's how they're capturing the value. It's how they're delivering their value proposition. So you play both ends. You might start with a disaster scenario and. Or you might start with a positive scenario, but that kind of gets the attention and gets their creative juices flowing to say, hey, oh, there's a tool. Oh, and by the way, we have a tool and a process to help you through this.

So one of the other things that you guys mentioned was this was scaled across countries 34 countries, some more than 1,000 people across the global workforce. Were these cross country collaborations asynchronous or live or what were some kind of the little nuances that took place from region to region?

Yeah, so it is a blended program in the purest sense. Blended learning, meaning we used almost everything possible we could from sending them books to kits to having team meetings in their local regions that we're not a part of. So those are, you know, one hour team meetings. We have the live webinars with Strategizer and myself or Lee on the call and that's groups of 30 people. They take 52 videos. We also have these online discussion threads built in our platform. So it's a little bit of a social, we call it a two way conversation that can occur real time with our moderators, myself and the participants. So throughout the five and a half weeks, there's a lot of care taken in this blended process process which is very engaging and it keeps them always motivated into the content, into the information, which I think helps gain our larger completion rate.

Awesome. So we had talked a bit about some of the kind of skills that the organization now has under its belt. It's now stronger in doing certain elements of business modeling and value proposition design. How else is the organization that you may not be able to share specifics, of course, but how else is the organization tracking the outputs or the outcomes that occur from doing this type of learning?

Well, we track the behavioral impact which Eric can share with you, some of the percentages, but it's also built into our business process. So everyone that comes into the product organization, if you are asked to present at a peer review process, whether that's at the regional level or at the global level, you have to have a business model canvas with that. So it's built into the business process and that's carried forward since the original chief Product officer. So that continues with our newest leader.

One of the other things you had mentioned, I think you had touched on Lee, was the idea of new hires. How early is is this kind of information encouraged upon new members of the MasterCard workforce?

Yeah, I mean day one, I mean as soon as they come on board that triggers in our system, our workday system, which triggers to us that we've got a new person in the product organization. And pretty a standard letter that you know we wrote goes out to them and makes them aware of all the learning assets, introduces them to the learning community, which is the platform that we run this program off of. And they are automatically, they would show that up on their feed that they'd be eligible for any one of those product courses that we run off of it.

Yeah, we established a clear mailbox for PME and it gets recognized. So we say whenever we talk to new hires or in new groups. And I was actually invited into college hire programs even before they were hires or they were just hired through the college program. And we had two of those that was around 60 people in total that went through the business modeling process before they were even hired. So even before hired, they go through a business model experience.

And so, yeah, we also leveraged the six videos. Alex, the six videos on the cartoon videos.

Beth and Carl.

Beth and Carl. Yeah, we, you know, we run that. We also. Yeah, so that's really for new hire. I was just thinking of something that we also did that we didn't mention that I think is huge. So it goes to the marketing of this. But we do these lunch and learns in the various offices. So if I'm traveling and I'm going to an office, I'll set up these lunch and learns that just maybe educate people on the business model canvas. We give them a little packet with a small laminate business model. We give them a little thing of studies. We talk about it, we demonstrate Google or something else. We get them engaged in it. And then in our main headquarter location, we did a program called Breakfast in the business model campus. And we had hundreds of people that came over. We have, you know, two big offices here. We gave breakfast and then we ran off some of the Beth and Carl videos. We had four different stations that talked about how you can use the business model. And we had people running those stations to educate people on different aspects of it. And then we had another location where there was a best practice, where our prepaid team presented how they used the business model in creating a new product. And then Eric had a station where he was talking about the business model environment. That. That's another area that you need to look at. And it was fantastic. And we had people tweeting about it. We had priceless surprises for employees if they answered certain questions at the end of it. So I just thought it was a really great event that we did just to really market it. And it really got as a result of that, we had other business units that were saying, hey, I've got this new product that we're going to introduce to leadership of an internal product. And they wanted to do a business model canvas session on it, like Eric said. We had the legal team that came in and said, we're trying to figure this out. We need a business model session. So there's a lot of. It got a lot of momentum, not just in the product organization, because it was open to anyone. So we had all kinds of people from the company that came to the session to learn about the tool.

Would you say there was a critical mass? I mean, you did a lot of things. It's really amazing to listen to all of the little and larger things that you did to promote this. Would you say there was a moment where there was a critical mass and this ball started to roll also a little bit on its own? After you've done all of these marketing activities.

I really think there's two levels. We have the people that need to know it because they're dealing with product innovation every single day. And then there's this awareness level that Lee was talking about. I would say we don't run the business model canvas as often now as we do the value proposition canvas because we've scaled to 1,000 people and now we are running business model later this fall. Yeah, twice a year. But the value proposition campus is now taking over some of that. So we're not retraining others. But we're, like I said, we have. Half the people have already taken it. So something new, it's something different. And it's the latest from Alex's series. And we also encourage people sign up to the Strategizer blog because Alex team pushes out great articles and great information all the time, which serves into that reinforcement factor. So that's available. We totally promote the blog and Strategizer. Overall.

I'm pretty sure Kavi is going to be happy to hear that, since he's responsible for the content going out there. Any more questions, Kavi, from the audience?

Yeah, I've got one last one, and this is really interesting. We've talked about challenges an organization can face as they try to implement this type of program. But let's talk a bit about the skeptics and the pushback, because every organization is going to have folks who just don't buy in immediately. How did you handle that pushback and how did you learn to rework or reshape the program so that it could fit the feedback that you were getting from the organization or the workforce?

I'll say this. Our classes are voluntary in the sense that we don't force teams to go through our process. I have to say we haven't really gotten much pushback. People that take it, they get it, it's pretty intuitive, and they run with it. We can't control if teams take it and love it and embrace it. But you're always going to have some people and we have people that drop out of the class. It happens. But the completions of the 80s and 90s I think is where we're at those 10% that doesn't resonate with them. For whatever reason, we can't control that. But learning that voluntary and we fill classes, we have no problems filling our classes. And that's a good problem to have from a learning perspective. So not great amount of pushback. Some people will question a model in a workshop or things like that, but I think once they get their hands on it and start working and using it, it's pretty common sense.

Yeah. And we don't get a lot of dropouts out of courses.

Very steep.

And if they drop out within a few period of time, that's too close for us to fill the seat. We charge them for it. So all the pro yeah, it might.

Be a scheduling issue too, since it is four or five weeks long. There might be some schedule conflicts that come up or business come up, but honestly, really not that much pushback at all.

Awesome.

Thank goodness.

Any last thoughts before we end the session? Anything else you'd like to add?

I was just going to say that I felt very fortunate that we had the flexibility, Alex, that you were with us in helping develop and deliver the course. The way that this type of learning, which is over time, I feel very strongly about that. People need time to absorb and learn and so as much as we still do some in person training, we don't get the results that we get from this, the guided learning journey on this technology platform and the ability for us to just get to people across the globe because you can't be there in person all the time. So it's really been huge for us and for us to make an impact on the product organization specifically with this tool, because we couldn't have done it any other way.

Awesome. So that is. That essentially wraps up our MasterCard Q&A for this webinar session. I'm just going to run through quickly through some key pointers to think about as you kind of marinate on the information that you've been shared today. I had mentioned at the top of the broadcast that the resource library is available to you to to access 30 plus tools from the canvases that have been mentioned, both business model and value proposition canvases as well as other testing tools and templates, references and guides. If you're new to a lot of the concepts that we talked about today. Everything that you need is in there and it's available for you to kind of start testing and playing around with your team. Simply visit that link and as well as talking about some of the training programs and the pilot programs that were happening at MasterCard, this is actually something we do for organizations. And Alex has mentioned we're currently in progress with a number of different companies around the world that are trying to take this element of learning with immediate application. In MasterCard's context, that was about shared language. And if you're interested in learning more about how your enterprise teams inside your organization can speak the language of business models and value propositions, as well as to get everyone in the organization to create value for the company and customers, I encourage you to visit strategizer.com training enterprisecourse. You can also get in touch with salestrategizer.com or you can call the number below. I will share these links with you again because I know it's not enough for me to just kind of blurt them out and display them for you on the screen, but to quickly talk through what some of Eric and Lee covered in today's session. It essentially is a guided learning program that involves a 3 by 30 minute each week online training modules as well as a team exercise work session that takes about one hour within the end of the week as well as online video facilitated coaching session at the end of the week as well. And the coach is available to participants throughout the week as they take the various modules and just to quickly run through some of the elements of how it works. You may have heard Lee, Eric as well as Alex talk about the small learning teams, the bite sized modules, the frequent check ins both from within the organization as well as from the team at Strategizer, and that constant on call access to an expert coach from Strategizer who helps to guide through certain challenge areas. Lastly, just going to give a shout out to our social media and blog channels again, you can follow us as Rategizer, you can mention us, you can tweet us. If you have any thoughts, comments, feedback about the webinar session, feel free to hit us up and also use the hashtag strategizerwebinar. And for those of you who are new to our content, by all means Visit us at blog.stragizer.com where as Eric very graciously said, there's all kinds of jam packed insights on what we've discussed today as well as digging deeper into the elements of business models, value proposition design and building companies that customers love.

That's it.

Alex, anything else you want to add before we sign off?

I just want to say thank you to Lee and Eric for taking the time to share their journey and a lot of their learnings. I think they've done an outstanding job scaling this across the world, 34 countries. That's just simply amazing. And listening to the different things that you have done, it's always a pleasure to hear what you've done to really make this work. So thank you very much for joining us. Great session, I think.

Thank you.

Thank you.