2024-07-19--t04-36-28pm--guest649658--matt-arbesfeld-1
===

Matt: [00:00:00] Hey, Carolyn. Happy Friday.

Carolyne: Hello, Matt. Happy Friday to you as well.

Matt: Awesome. Well, really excited to chat again. Maybe you could start folks off, share your background, what you work on.

Carolyne: Yeah. And first, thank you guys for having me on here. I'm I'm looking forward to this conversation. Hi, I'm Carolyn Moran, VP of product and UX at OneSpan. We work and focus on digital agreements, which really is about e signatures and authentication and, getting workflow and management in place from the paper world to the digital world.

Matt: Awesome. And before that, you were working on essentially the Canadian Yellow Pages app. Is that right?

Carolyne: Yeah. So I've been in product management for over 20 years. I, previously joining this technology driven company, I was at yellow pages, Canada, responsible for the mobile products and user experience as well. So, we were really taking that shift from the book to online. And then my team was responsible for making the ultimate shift to mobile, which was the, the inevitable experience that people are going to be using, actually walking around.

But previously that I was in product management to a company called airborne, which was very different as well. [00:01:00] Many people, I'm probably going to date myself saying this, but back in the day of 2005 to 2010, doing wallpapers and ringtones for the major wireless carriers, which used to be a billion dollar industry, believe it or not.

Matt: one area I'd love to talk about, so you oversee both product management and UX. Awesome. Would, have you been doing that your whole career and just curious about how you see those two disciplines fitting together?

Carolyne: Yeah, so it's not my whole career in product, but I would say probably starting around 2012 the UX team became incorporated with our product management team back at yellow pages. And it really was an eye opener for us because, I think at the time, people were so set and you do this, I do that, then it goes and there's this process.

So, but as the teams came together, you started understanding and I think mobile was really pivotal for us in that, in that sense, because if you think about it, the mobile applications were all coming out back in the day with swipe here, pull up here. What does this do? So it started engaging us and I'm trying to say, like.

Okay, so how do you make the experience easier, simpler, faster for people? And then that's when the two groups started coming together. And [00:02:00] then for me, UX and UX UI and even the research behind it just became something very that I was very passionate about because it really is a game changer. I tend to say, sometimes if you're looking at, trying to be feature parody with other people, sometimes you may have less features, but a better experience.

And that could be the game changer for you as a winning winning that. 

Matt: Definitely, I always felt there's a bit of a too much of a divide between the two groups. So to make sense bring this together and Did you have any background in art or design or did you just have sort of a natural inclination towards UX?

Carolyne: would never say that. I love art, but do not put a paintbrush in my hands. Nothing's going to happen, nor a pencil. Doodler at most, that's as good as I get. No, again, I think it was about Being in mobile such at an early time. And if you remember back in the day when, internet first came out, it was so long and laborious and then I just got, it became a passion to understand and how to see things were evolving and then it became everything, it was, Web 2.

0 using web [00:03:00] experiences and just becoming like, why is this here? Why is that there? And then just taking on my own type of courses. And then within the organizations, they started training us as well. So then that just became something that just showed that, at the end of the day, product management or anybody that's delivering something has to take that into consideration.

So to me, to your point, the organizations belong together.

Matt: Definitely. Yeah, as you said, you could have all the features in the world, but if they're clunky, hard to use, it's like the tree that fell in the forest. No one, no one sees it.

Carolyne: Exactly.

Matt: So what does that look like in practice? Say at one span, do you have separate product managers and designers and they're just paired together?

Do you look for people who can do both of those disciplines? How do you structure your team?

Carolyne: Yeah. So we definitely have people that are specialized in UX and then we have product managers, but they're a tight knit team. , you know, I think there's different roles in product management overall, but I do like to hire teams in the capacity where they're not just technical and they're not just business.

They have to have some sort of level of understanding what the user experience. I think [00:04:00] workflow management. You can't just rely on one source. And I don't think the UX team feel they feel the same way they need feedback. So when you just put people in little corners, I don't believe that's the best way to be successful.

So, no. So what we do, and I think, it's pretty much standard practice. What we call the product trio is, the UX and the PMs work together as well as maybe one of their main stakeholders in the R and D organization. And you work together when you're developing things, the concept can come from different groups.

But definitely, you work together, you understand the requirements, the use cases, the personas that we're trying to build for. Then you might go in your little corner, work a little bit separately, then you're automatically working back together to describe and walk people through these processes and the thought process behind it.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Do you look for the product managers who have more design inclinations or is that something you teach your own product managers to try to, um, get them more UX focused.

Carolyne: I would say, throughout an [00:05:00] organization, I don't want everybody to have the same skill set. So that's something that's really important. I do have some people that are more technical, I have some people that are less technical. But at the same time, we do have training programs, but I do, I do like to make sure that they, they have.

They understand the importance. I'm not saying they have to know the UX design principles behind the scene, but I would say that it's important that they care about the experience. 

Matt: One, one thing I've seen is product folks, especially maybe those who come from technical backgrounds or more pure business. Don't necessarily have that natural UX sense. Do you have any ways you've sort of helped them grow or courses or any recommendation for product people who want to strengthen their UX skills?

Carolyne: a hundred percent, there are so many programs out there. Like I will call out, I don't know. I'm not doing an ad for them, but like a Udemy and all these guys, they have so many free courses behind the scenes. But what I like to do with our groups is the UX team does lead some of these initiatives for us.

They do product workshops and they do, we don't invite just product people. It's a, it's across department effort across the [00:06:00] board. So we'll have engineers come, we'll do little workshops on why certain things are important or, you know, why, when a designer hands off , the final file. And it's in the Jira requirements and the development of the process.

Why pixel perfect is important. It's about why we did the took the time to look at it. What's what it means for that user experience. But again, we do do workshops. We have quarterly meetings as a product group with our counterparts. , I can't call it a special meeting.

Specific type of program that we train, but we do keep up to date with UX principles that come out there, product schools and all that always call out a lot of these as well. So, like I said, with the two programs or two product organizations being one, we work and collaborate together.

Matt: Yeah, that, that makes sense. One thing we talked about a few months ago is this obsession with UX. And I think you've just mentioned something about pixel perfect sort of how, yeah, how would you describe like what being obsessed means with UX? Sends. What the difference between like good and great looks like for you, for, for us.

Carolyne: Yeah, I like to say this, and I've said this on many occasions. [00:07:00] UX is subjective. We've all used websites. You have an opinion. I have an opinion. Someone else has an opinion on how something should work, but what we've determined internally is as a group, we need to have product councils, customer councils.

We need to make sure that we are obsessed. So it's not just internal, you're validating externally. So it's. Not only what the competition is doing, but it's what are our clients doing? And what are, what, what are their needs? So it's also taking in that information research, we have on our UX team as well, we have research people.

So it encompasses UI, UX and research. You can do all the deep diving you want to do, but unless you're hands on and talking to people, you can't be UX obsessed. You need to be talking to people. And even looking at different experiences, within our, our industry, we're e signatures. I, I think most of us will know who our biggest competition is out there for sure.

We're on their website. They're, they're most likely likely on ours, but I encourage people to also look at the Ubers of the world, the Sephora website, go look at great experiences. How does Amazon get us to do a one click buy? How do we get people to [00:08:00] one click sign? That is so seamless. So not only in your own industry, but go look at what's happening and why some of these top, rated UX sites are important.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. The people expect consumer like experiences, even when they're, they're signing a document. And so you don't want to be the SAP of of your, of your area. And yeah, so when you think about obsessed, it's really going, getting a lot of customer feedback about your designs and, and, Kind of not just shipping something, but making sure you have validation

Carolyne: customer customer feedback there, there's enough information on the internet on who are the top rated websites why they're there, inclinations of working with other people as well. And I think that's user obsessed to also comes from the mindset of your own organization. I like to say it's not just product and UX as I was mentioning.

We are everyday users. My engine, the engineers are everyday users. I want to get their feedback as well. What they like, what they don't like. Cause sometimes the UX part, the, the, the nice and bubbly looking screen in [00:09:00] front of you is good, but we also need to understand the technical feasibility behind it.

So it's, it's, it's, everybody takes a part in it, but again, I do believe you have to be, you have to be customer obsessed while also being able to come back and be subjective enough to say what's actually better for the market. So we always have to, there's a fine balance in between them.

Cause once you start working with clients, then they get that notion of, Oh, they're going to build me what I want. You've got to build something that's market driven. And that's why the most amount of feedback is really key here.

Matt: Yeah, that makes sense. And sometimes you're better off working on a new product area, then continuing to iterate. You've reached sort of a, the best you can do with an area and knowing that is important. Awesome. Maybe shifting gears a bit. You went from working on. more consumer app in the yellow pages to now this, highly regulated space.

How has that changed the way you think about products? Does it longer iteration cycles or any other changes you've noticed through that transition?

Carolyne: I would say [00:10:00] personally at the beginning was kind of like, Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into? Cause I think the keyword you just said there is regulated, right? When you work at yellow pages, obviously we had advertisers that we had to adhere to, but we had a lot more flexibility. Nobody was determining what you could and couldn't do.

Yeah. Whereas where you work in a highly regulated industry, especially in the signature world, where documents actually have financial value to them. That is something gets spoofed of some story. Somebody could be in really some financial liabilities here. But luckily in this in this industry, you mean you've got the you eat, you've got the not the sign act that really dictated I think because.

The, the, the part that has a lot of regulation behind it is actually the end point of what that digital signature looks like. There's a lot more flexibility in the workflow. And at first you're kind of like, I don't, I don't understand like how, like how tight we have to be. But eventually once you understand really what we're trying to do is safeguard that signature at the end.

There's hundreds of things that happen way before that signature gets signed. And that's where that flexibility comes in. And we really try to look at how do you [00:11:00] improve the paper roll today to digital? And sometimes it's not always easy. Right. You got to be careful as well. It's like sometimes there's too, it's too easy to click on something when it's digital.

How do you safeguard that? So, I think I was talking to someone recently where, on our mobile, our mobile product, we make you click twice on a signature. That's there's no regulation behind that, but could you imagine I'm just scrolling through the page and I accidentally click all of a sudden I've signed a document.

So there's certain things you put in there, but there's a lot of flexibility. And over the years, when I first started in this, in this industry was around 2014, a lot of our big clients, so, we would deal with banking, financial services, and insurance. We're so opposed to many things where I've seen in the last 10 years, it's been great working with a lot of these clients that are like, how do I make this better?

How do I simplify it? And even seeing their legal and their security or their CISO teams being a lot more flexible, as long as you're protecting that digital signature at the end,

Matt: That brings up a good, so I, I recently switched from my hardware YubiKey to the passkey on device and I was like, well, I can't believe I haven't been doing this for years. It's such a better [00:12:00] experience. What's that? Are you starting to adopt more ways to authenticate who the user is and validate better who's actually signing the documents or what's that look like?

Carolyne: I would say that's probably the one thing in our industry that has been increasing in importance the most across the board when it comes to signature and authentication. Really, the cyber attacks are just. They're never ending and they just keep growing, with remote, remote workforces, digital transformations, people logging left, right, and center.

Unsecure network. Hey, the opportunity for credential theft is, is ever, ever increasing. And, our goal really as a company is protecting the client. And their consumer. Now, in terms of authentication, passwords and passwords aren't enough anymore. They're, they're, they're not there. And as we've recently launched some, a new hardware token, and we have some software.

I think that it's going to be important in the future. I think even as a consumer, how many websites are we signed up to that? I don't even know my passwords. I have to go to password manager. I have to do all this. I log in sometimes to a website and [00:13:00] they're like, Oh, your password has been compromised.

Change it. I don't even know what my password is. Original password was I don't know how to move forward. And I think that it's getting a lot easier. I think for the, the, the consumer themselves, if you're not using something on a regular basis. The past keys might be a little bit difficult because it's a bit of a setup So if i'm signing a document once a year once every two years, what am I going to do?

But if i'm high if i'm an employee of a large bank And I want to make sure that i'm safeguarding all the content in the work that i'm doing These hardware tokens and software tokens are perfect for this type of industry without having to do two factor You know some of us some of 20 30 lines It gets a little bit crazy in that sense, but I do believe that there's still huge room for, for this to grow.

And I think that's the way to go with, passwordless one click.

Matt: absolutely. And, and it sounds like on the consumer side, there's still some room, to make the process more seamless for for past keys for them. But it makes sense why the business would want that for, for their signers. Are there [00:14:00] opportunities for AI impacting e signatures and digital compliance?

Or is that more, is it, is it more the crypto past key stuff, the more interesting

Carolyne: I really believe AI is going to touch every industry. It's not just in any signatures as a good. And I think, one of the, the common questions that I receive from many people is what's your AI strategy. And I really personally don't think that's the right question. The right question is what are you trying to solve?

Right. Obviously in digital agreements, it's a very cumbersome task to set up documents, especially as a new customer, you're onboarding, how do you get doc preparation set up? We've done things in the past, template management, of course, but there's still someone going to set up 150 documents.

I think that's where AI will play a big part for us in the digital agreements world. It will be about task automation, removing all those manual, manual pieces behind the scene. I think also, extracting data, pulling in data will be very key in helping the automation. On the other hand, I do think AI will play a huge part in fraud prevention.

I think it'll learn with Gen AI how my documents are prepared if there's [00:15:00] something that's not the same across the board. How can it validate signatures? It could actually look at a database of my previous signatures and see if anything is off. I think that that's where it's going to play a really key component and not just doing AI to do AI.

Matt: Right. Yeah. And I think the task automation is a really interesting one because it's, little less, if you're slightly wrong there, you're not going to, it's not a disaster, but if you could help say, Oh, I noticed you've been doing, you did this five times, click this button and we can automate that process that can save a lot of time for folks.

So that's great.

Carolyne: have clients that sometimes have 100 to 250 different document types. You've got armies of people back there. When you went from, paper to, to, to digital, it's something we call NIGO, not in good order. We were helping save millions of dollars, sending, signed documents back and forth because something was missing.

There's still some, there's still room for some errors in there, but I think, again, to your point, it's the task automation. And the simplifying of this process is moving forward that will really help change [00:16:00] the game.

Matt: Make sense. Are, would you say most organizations have adopted digital signatures at this point, or is it still very new? What's, what are you seeing in the market in terms of adoption of products

Carolyne: I would say that a good portion have, but the difference is that it's not every single line of business within an organization. So when you work for these large enterprises, you may have a really big name, but only one out of their 50 departments is using it. There's still a lot of room to grow. There's still a lot of legalities behind and a lot of regulations that a lot of departments are looking at.

One of our largest industries is, is government. The shift that I've seen in government over the last six, seven years is, it's impressive to see how much they're opening the doors because they're starting to see, workforces being able to, to duplicate, triplicate the amount of time that they're saving in order to do things.

So it's ever changing. There's still a lot of opportunity.

Matt: Wow. Yeah. Amazing to think there's still big swaths of organizations using paper, paper documents and paper signature when they don't need to. So, [00:17:00] awesome. And then, yeah, maybe final area I wanted to cover. You mentioned this word I don't think I've ever heard before, customer primacy. Would just love to hear what that means to you and how that, how you came up with that and, and

Carolyne: I won't take credit for that. That's actually a comment that came from one of our customers and then we actually started looking it up. I think it's just about the evolution of working with customers. So you, used to have customer led where the customer tell you what they want, you walk away and then you do it.

Then you had customer centric that came in, you have a couple conversations, you meet with them twice a year, look at the roadmap. Customer primacy for me really means the relationship you're building with those clients. It's not just a one off. I'm not just reading you the roadmap twice a year. What we actually do is you become inter department partners.

So, often, customer centric, who am I talking to? The sales people, the internal people that want to get things done. What we've created with some of our clients is a relationship where actually product to product speak, customer experience managers to managers speak. And we get in rooms and we sit down together.

On top of that, what we do with [00:18:00] many of our customers is every six to eight months, We have an executive call and it's not, what your typical call, like, Hey, the renewal is coming. It's what's working. What's not working. Give it to a straight for the next 30 minutes. And hopefully when we get back, we can help solve those issues.

And I think that that's the difference in a digital world when you're just walking away, you're taking the sale. Customer primacy is where it's key at this point, the relationship behind it.

Matt: Yeah, that's really interesting because I think probably Amazon coins customer centric or maybe it was Zappos before. But, and there was more of a consumer concept where. Your consumer customers are not so bought in to be meeting with you every single week about your product, but, but in business, it makes sense.

You're, you're an extension of their team in a lot of ways. So having that, that mindset have you found, are there certain things you need to do to have customers adopt that mindset? We have customers who, They're happy to buy the product, but they don't want to be bothered to talk to us or it's, it takes time out of their day.

Is there a certain, any sort [00:19:00] of techniques you've used to help build that relationship with your customers?

Carolyne: Well, and that comes out through to the different organizations within the company. Right? So we have CSMs, customer service managers that that advocate for us to get on calls because often I will say I'm often brought on calls when there's a problem. So when I get on there, I'm trying to ease it out. But at the same time, trying to take that conversation to the next level.

We do have a great set of executives that work with us. Closely with them and we build relationships. We care about what they're doing. So if something does come in, if we see numbers are down or something's not working, we do get on the phone with them. We build those relationships. A lot of time it's face to face.

And then you, you build that rapport, but if not, it's, sending off an email. You know, it's, Hey, this is Carolyn, VP of product. I'm grateful to be working with you guys. I thought we could just have a conversation. And this is why I say it's not weekly. It's weekly. Six to eight months that we do these types of calls.

And at the same time, I'll take the time to say, Hey, let's have a vision strategy talk so we can do that. And then I'll let you know what's going on on our side, but it's, it's relationship building one on one across the board and, I can send sometimes some people to your [00:20:00] point, just like, thank you, I got the product.

See you later. And I know when to back off on those ones.

Matt: But yeah, you can't do build those relationships unless you try. And so, that's where it starts. And when you said face to face, are you doing mostly virtual or are you actually going to the offices and? And doing sort of sessions like that at all.

Carolyne: I'd say today it's a lot more virtual I think we've all learned obviously over the last three years how to do be a little bit more efficient on that previously a lot more face to face. But you know if there's companies and clients that we have that are in the surrounding area. Not we will have lunches, we'll have a meetup, go see them a hundred percent.

And we also at the, we have one client that's pretty close to the office and we gave them a moment to come and have a talk with our teams to say, what they're looking at. So when we can be face to face really, we try to do it, but you know, virtual has always been, has been very helpful. And I think everyone's adapted to it anyways now.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. And I also find it's so rare now that when you do set, set up something in person with a client, everyone's just shocked at, Oh, wow, this is so, [00:21:00] so productive. And, and because it's, it's different than what we've been spending like almost three, over three years now in our little shells here.

So, it's nice to get out. Awesome. Well, yeah, super interesting conversation covered a lot. UX highly regulated products, customer privacy. So thanks so much for, for sharing your wisdom, Carolyn.

Carolyne: Perfect. Well, thank you for having me.