Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 3)

Steven Aldrich: We started to realize that our view of identity and digital identity needed to be expanded not just around the domain but we also needed to think about the phone number as a part of the identity. We then talked to customers, looked at the existing products in the market, and looked at ways that small businesses use their mobile devices as part of their daily lives.

We saw a real opportunity because we saw these business owners using a singular phone number. Generally, they’re personal cell numbers that they were putting onto their website or business cards. Their personal calls and business calls were getting all intermingled. They were losing control and data from their interaction.

Sramana Mitra: Probably a lot of spam.

Steven Aldrich: Yes, that too. The innovation effort went from one person trying to define that customer’s need to three people trying to say, “How might we solve that need?” to a build by partner, to eventually an acquisition of a company who could bring in some of the technology we needed.

A year later, we launched a product called Smart Line and continued to innovate on that. There’s a real opportunity to use the customer feedback and understand trends to create, what we call, customer-driven innovation. There are a couple of other types but we can talk about this one if you want.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start there with the customer-driven innovation. What is the structure and process of collecting customer-driven innovation in your case if you have a million customer conversations a month? How do you streamline that? How do you synthesize what to focus on?

Steven Aldrich: That comes down to the jobs off the product management organization. We hear it from our customer care team. We get it through online help articles. We get it through feedback and reviews. We are getting feedback in huge volumes. We’ve divided up our world into product teams.

Product teams think about not just the products we have in the market today but the job that that customer is trying to do with the product. Instead of calling the team in the problem the phone number team, we called them the voice and messaging team. We wanted them to think broadly about how might those customer needs be solved not just with what we’ve put in the market today but perhaps other products and services as well.

Those product managers bring that data into, generally, a weekly discussion and they separate the feedback into what in our current product needs to be improved. What bugs or user experience issues are in the way that makes it more challenging to use the product versus ideas to expand the product’s capabilities or perhaps an adjacent need that we don’t solve at all. The usual sprint cycles are two weeks. The bugs will get pushed into an upcoming sprint depending upon the urgency and impact. The expansion of the capabilities within the current product can also flow through the sprint planing cycle.

When there’s a need that’s outside of what that team is currently delivering, we have a discussion once a month amongst the product leaders. We bubble those up and we have a running list of ideas that are customer-framed and have no resources against them. We’ll be tracking that list and we’ll have a discussion if an item goes on a list or not.

Sramana Mitra: What is the lifecycle of that idea? In this case that you’re describing – customer-driven innovation – the product managers are tasked with collecting those ideas. Once a product manager collects an idea, what is the process that you apply to assess the business case against that idea.

Steven Aldrich: The first thing we do is just capture it. We don’t worry about sizing it or about building a spreadsheet. We just capture the idea and use a little bit of judgement to determine if this is a problem that applies to a lot of people or just a few people.

Sramana Mitra: How often is the point coming up?

Steven Aldrich: I believe in the power of decentralized teams, the way it moves off of the list of interesting ideas to exploring it is when one of the product leaders says, “I believe strongly enough to put someone’s time against the next phase of exploration.” It moves from an idea in the future to something to refine now. We go from not staffed to where there is now a Product Manager who has picked that idea up.

At that stage, we do just what you’re starting to suggest, which is interview customers, understand the landscape of this need amongst both competitive offerings and other things that the small business might already be using that aren’t competitive but are alternatives or substitutes. It’s usually what we see most frequently from small business owners where they’re not buying a piece of software or a service to solve the problem. They’re doing it on their own with some hodgepodge of tools.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy
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