Culture Becomes Experience: Julie Larson-Green

Julie talks about her first career aspiration to become a waitress to pay for college and how the lessons she learned at waiting tables taught her career-defining skills of empathy and creating a positive customer experience. Julie talks about her first job in tech--as a customer service rep--and learning to code so she could resolve user experience problems at the source and the product impact she had in that role. Julie the female mentors who helped her define herself as a woman in tech. Julie shares her career path from customer service at Aldus to managing UX for Office and running XBox at Microsoft and her eventual Chief Experience Officer roles at Microsoft and Qualtrics.

Julie shares her insights on how team culture and employee experience impact the user experience and how she works to develop the right kind of culture. She shares her perspective on working toward great outcomes in the face of distrust and how to build high-performing product and customer teams.

How do you build a team culture which creates world-class products? How do you overcome organizational and engineering barriers to create an incredible product experience? How do you look at the end-to-end user experience and build products that compete based on a powerful, productive user experience? Julie shares her stories and experiences about how to build a creative culture centered around the user’s experience.

Guest Bio:

Julie is passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so users can focus on what matters most. Her mantra is “People first, technology second.” As a leader, she believes her door should always ber open to listen and embrace everyone’s individual personality, perspective, style, and abilities--making teams stronger and more creative. Julie believes great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.

She has over 30 years of customer and product management experience. Her career focus has been re-imagining platforms for intelligent work. She has lead product management for SharePoint, the Microsoft Office Suite, Windows, and XBox. She oversaw the successful launch of Windows 7 and Office 365. She currently serves as the Chief Experience Officer for Qualtrics.

Linkedin
Twitter: @Julie_LGreen

Building Blocks:
Put yourself into the role of the Customer Experience Officer for any organization you're a part of. It can be your company, your neighborhood association, your church group, your school board, anything. Pick one organization you're a part of - and you're the CXO.

Identify two specific experiences you would Build.

#1, As the new CXO, what's the biggest “experience gap” you have to close? What's that part of the experience of the product your company sells, or the service your group provides, or the culture of the organization you're a part of, that just needs to be improved? And what specific steps, what specific actions, would you take, to improve it?

#2, What's an experience your organization doesn’t provide today that could be an incredible Breakthrough? Where you're missing a huge opportunity to do something great for customers, for employees, or an even broader group of people? And what specific steps would it take to pull that off?

I think you'll find if you work on this Building Block, you'll get to some really pragmatic and doable things. Stuff you and the people around you can go pull off. And do YOUR part to make the world just a little bit of a better place by serving up THAT much better of an experience to people.

If you’d like to share, get it out there on social with the Hashtag #BreakthroughBuilders. Or, if you’d prefer to not share it publicly, go ahead and email it to me at producer@breakthrough-builders.com. I’d love hearing from you and learning from what you built.

Helpful Links:

Harvard Business Review on Why Every Company Needs a Chief Experience Officer
Forbes reporting on the Chief Experience Officer role
 

Qualtrics thought leadership on the state of the Chief Experience Officer in high tech here.

FastCompany’s coverage of the reaction to Julie’s promotion to Head of XBox here
The Atlantic’s perspective on Julie’s promotion at Microsoft here
Fortune’s reporting on Julie’s move from Microsoft to Qualtrics here
 

Christine Thach’s TED Talk on how businesses can learn how to build culture from refugee communities
A deep dive into Tech Company Culture on Medium here
Qualtrics’s The Global State of XM 2020
Julie at the Dublin Tech Summit
Wired Magazine spread on Julie Larson-Green as the new head of XBox