FROM FASTCO WORKS AND CAPITAL ONE: Empathy and Innovation: Keeping the Customer at the Center
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Welcome to this special bonus episode in partnership with Capital One. As Stephanie Mehta, CEO of Mansueto Ventures, the parent of Fast Company, sits down with Capital One's Emily Roberts to explore how to keep your customers at the center of everything your business does.

Emily, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Emily, tell me a little bit about your approach to building product. My approach to building product is really putting the customer at the center of everything that we're going to do, thinking deeply about what their problems might be, what they most need from us, and then working backwards from that.

And the way that we're going to ultimately enable that is by delivering innovative new features and solutions by investing in platforms and technical capabilities that are going to enable the customer experiences that we might envision. But I think if you start really at the heart of everything you do with thinking about the customer, with thinking about a sort of purpose-driven, mission-oriented vision for what you want to deliver,

At Capital One, we have a mission to change banking for good. When you think about the breadth of that mission statement, there's so much we can do within it, and then you can sort of compartmentalize even more and more and more around things that customers really care about, and then deliver on those as a promise for what we can do as we build our products and our technologies for customers.

You're obviously very passionate about serving customers. Where does that come from? I started my career actually as a marketer. I was an English major in school. I spent a lot of time thinking about what a customer wanted to read and hear, thinking about value propositions. And so it felt very natural to me as my career evolved to move into product, to think about how we can build things on behalf of customers. But I really was rooted in this concept of a customer at its core.

So can you share for our listeners an example of how customer feedback has driven innovation at Capital One? We're thinking about embedding customer feedback in everything that we do every single day. And so I can give you a multitude of examples. One is we use research, and sometimes that is not...

feedback on something that already exists. We use research as a deep part of our product development process where we actually can go out, can show customers different options for how we might approach a problem or a shift that we might make in a digital technology and anything that we might do. Then we are also actually building it into our day to day work. So we're looking at customer reviews and we actually use technology to look

across customer reviews and look for themes that then we can use to change things, to find things that we need to make better on behalf of customers. So without getting too technical, can you share some examples of the kinds of technologies you use to collect and solicit that customer feedback?

Again, you're going to have sort of a range of options. And so there's some that are not technical at all, which is ask customers, right? Find the right customers that use the products and do deep customer empathy interviews to know what they might want. And by the way, that doesn't always just mean an end consumer. Sometimes, you know, I work in a consumer products group. And so a lot of what we focus on is how do we serve the end consumer with something like the Capital One app?

But ultimately, I think about my internal customers and businesses. That's a very one-to-one sort of manual thing that you can do. And then there are sort of increasingly complex technologies now available. One is you can research at greater scale with new tools. But what I think the best way to get customer feedback is through experimentation and test and learn.

There's incredible sort of commoditized, frankly, products in the market today that are going to enable you to test and learn and experiment on behalf of customers in a really iterative process fairly rapidly. And you can do that in a well-managed way so that there is no risk to the process. You're just getting insight and then driving it back into your product development.

We've talked about your passion for customers. Another thing that I believe you're really passionate about is making sure that you get the fundamentals right. Why are fundamentals so important to an innovation practice? As you think about the last 20 years, the last 30 years of technology evolution, you've had these sort of major seismic shifts that we can look back on and say, wow, that actually changed the way we all lived. I always use smartphones as a good one, mostly because it's been so enduring, right?

The smartphone came on the scene with the iPhone and suddenly not only did you have a phone in your pocket, but you could do all sorts of other things too. And it was a big shift in the way that we all lived our lives. As you've looked at these shifts in technology, there are some things that are probably becoming increasingly true as an underlying principle to what we need to accomplish.

So the technology platforms that we need to be able to build on top of technology, the data that we need to get the insight we need to serve customers. The cloud is another example of a major sort of seismic shift in technology that is enabling.

So each of these things individually are really, really important. And at the end of the day, if we invest in better, well-managed data, if we invest in the cloud, if we invest in building the right platforms, it's going to raise all the boats for us. And we're going to be able to do a lot more for customers if we invest in those fundamentals. And I think everybody probably has work to do on investing in those fundamentals to get the results they want in five years and 10 years. And as you think about building out your product

team with an eye toward innovation.

What kind of talent are you looking for? What are the skills and traits that you think make for a good fit inside an organization that values the unbounded thinking that is often associated with innovation with the fundamentals which you've underscored are so important? Every organization is going to differ a little bit from this perspective. There's two qualities that I think are really important in my organization and my team right now. One of them is an understanding of technology, an understanding of the trends.

You don't have to be a technologist. I'm not an engineer. I'm technical, but I'm not an engineer. So you have to be able to understand the technology and its applications. The second is a curiosity that is sort of

of often innate, frankly, to a lot of people and that you're going to actually have a learning mindset. And as you look for talent, I like to sort of assess people on that curiosity, that learning mindset, and also their ability to grasp the technical details and the technology and what we might need to advance. Sounds like the perfect marriage of unbounded thinking and the fundamentals. Emily Roberts, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Thank you.