Crushing complexity and keeping customer outcomes front and centre – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega

April 30, 2021

Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems. Don joins me today to talk about customer experience and digital transformation, what sort of grade he would give us for our performance through the pandemic, the need for more fluidity, the response to the need for greater empathy in customer and employee interactions, the collapse of the gap between rhetoric and activity, not losing the lessons of 2020, crushing complexity, what we have leaned about leadership and technology that we can carry forward and lastly the upcoming Pegaworld (www.pegaworld.com).

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customers are like chameleons – Interview with Professor Michael R. Solomon — and is number 386 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast this month.

It’s almost time for PegaWorld iNspire, the annual conference from Pegasystems. Join them online for free on May 4 from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time (that’s 2 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. UK time) to learn how the world’s most impactful companies are driving digital transformation. They’ll have compelling keynotes, demos, and case studies in a highly interactive virtual format and a few surprises as well. Go to www.pegaworld.com to register for free and check out the full agenda. I’ve attended the last several PegaWorlds in person, and virtually, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, so go register today! That’s www.pegaworld.com

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Don:

Pega research stats:
- 74% said the crisis exposed more IT gaps than expected
- 54% admit they should have done more to help their customers
- 71% are accelerating their DX plans as a result
Don’s grade for our overall performance so far: B.
I think we were not very well prepared for this test. But, we did some incredible cramming the night before and through some some pretty impressive heroics we we got ourselves to the point that we did pretty well.
We need to be thinking about our technology and the organizational structure we build around how we use technology, the people, the teams, the methods, etc in such a way that we’re building a much stronger foundation. We need to build for change.
Many companies haven’t truly built their technology around their customers.
We talk about being customer centric. But, if you look historically at the systems that we’ve built, they tend to be very channel centric.
The way that you get better in touch or better serve your customers is to adopt an architecture that’s really are architected around the outcomes that customers are trying to achieve. Which is really simple to say but can be very hard to do in large organizations.
A lot of times we talk about business agility and it quickly becomes quite reductive.
We need to get to the point where we have more fluidity in or organizations which might mean getting people comfortable with the idea that they may be working in the marketing department, but we may need to spin them over to answering customer requests for a couple of days.
Gartner has been using the term fusion teams and that’s all part of this idea of fluidity.
Traditional roles in organizations need to become much more fluid if the whole organization is going to become agile.
I don’t think software is empathetic. But, it does help test scenarios to gauge their impact and that does help organizations understand the decisions that they’re making about their customers and how empathetic they are.
When you have to have a solution in market in two or three days then you start to understand what a minimal viable product really means.
In the coming period, leaders need to balance maintaining urgency and not exhausting their people.
One of the things that crisis does is it cuts through complexity. It forces us to.
To manage complexity we need to continuously keep customers and customer outcomes front and center.
Start with the micro journey – an element of a longer customer journey that’s tied to a specific outcome that a customer wants.
Don’s new Punk CX words: Stripped down.
Don’s new Punk CX brand: Google home page.

About Don

Don Schuerman is CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems, responsible for Pega’s industry-leading platform and CRM applications. He has 20 years of experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process management, cloud and CRM. Don has led enterprise software implementations and provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives from Fortune 500 organizations, including American Express, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and BP. Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.