Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Juniper Networks, joins Phil to discuss why every employee who touches the product impacts the customer experience, the benefits of being a customer of your own company, and how AI can free up employees to offer better customer care.
Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Juniper Networks, joins Phil to discuss why every employee who touches the product impacts the customer experience, the benefits of being a customer of your own company, and how AI can free up employees to offer better customer care.
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Key Quotes:
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Bio:
Sharon Mandell is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer leading Juniper’s global information technology team. In this role, she leads the ongoing enhancement of the company’s IT infrastructure and applications architectures to support the growth objectives of the company. She and her team are also responsible for showcasing Juniper’s use of its technologies to the world.
Sharon Mandell: “No matter what label they put on you, as you climb up the ladder and you get a C in front of your name, you maintain your humility. Be willing to get down in the weeds with anybody because the minute you lose your connection to where the real work is getting done, I think you lose your people.”
Narr: Hello and welcome to The Customer Experience Show! On this episode, we talk with Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Juniper Networks, a leading networking and cybersecurity solutions provider with nearly $5 billion in revenue and over 30,000 enterprise customers worldwide.. Sharon has more than 20 years of experience managing software and technology operations, from startups to large companies with hundred-million-dollar operating budgets. Before joining Juniper Networks in 2020, Sharon was the CIO for TIBCO Software, and held leadership roles at Harmonic, Black Arrow, Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company. On this episode, Sharon talks about the importance of listening to the customer, how to elevate employee engagement, using AI to drive the customer experience, and much more. But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsor.
Phil Dillard: No matter what role you’re in within a company, it’s important to keep your eyes on the prize. For Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Juniper Networks, the prize is a phenomenal customer experience. From software engineers to the CEO, everyone plays a part in what that customer experience looks like. So elevating each person to do their best in their role is in everyone’s interest. Because one person’s success is everyone’s success.
Phil Dillard: Okay. Well, hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the customer experience show. I'm Phil Dillard, your host, and I'm here today with another special, amazing guest and customer experience leader. Like everybody to welcome to the show. Uh, Sharon Mandell chief information officer at Juniper networks. How are you doing today, Sharon?
Sharon Mandell: I’m great, Phil, and thanks for wanting to have a conversation with me. I'm excited about it.
Phil Dillard: Thanks for making the time. It's really great to have you with us. So many interesting questions I have for you. So many, so much ground to cover. I'll start with some of the simple basics. How do you describe your company to people and your role within the company?
Sharon Mandell: I describe Juniper networks as the company who's focused on experience-first networking meaning that we are going to make the end user experience the operator experience and the enterprise it leader experience of either providing or using the network, the best that it can be in every facet that you engage with us. And my role in the company is to enable. Those customer and employee experiences through the use of technology.
Phil Dillard: Outstanding. Okay. So I think there's a lot in there. Now, what I heard was that you have three groups of customers that you deal with, right? The user, the operator and the enterprise it person is that then that's three, three groups of external customers. Am I right?
Sharon Mandell: Yes. Yes. I just happened to look like one or two of them because of the role I have in the company.
Phil Dillard: Sure. Because of that your background and your role, and then there's your internal customers your employees for you that you talk about in terms of the experience for them as well. Cause that matters to how you operate.
Sharon Mandell: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Phil Dillard: If I think about this, what does that mean to lead that mission to you? What's the essence of leading that experience for so many different types of folks?
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. I think for me first it revolves around empathy and listening, right? Whether it's my team delivering a technology or a system to users inside the company my team along with others, providing experiences that our customers touch. Either way it's about understanding the problems that they're trying to solve and using technology to reduce any friction in that experience and make it easier for them to stay focused on the problem at hand and not get techno, not get distracted by the technology that's necessary to solve the problem.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. That makes sense, right? Understanding that the problem, and then using technology to improve the experience, how do you define like the difference between empathy and listening? How do you know that your team is really delivering or really experiencing empathy with its different customers?
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. So when I talked to my team and I'm leading them through it, I often ask them, okay, with this project, are you going through a checklist of features and functionality and saying, yeah, I got that done. Yeah, I got that done. Yeah. I got that done. Or are you imagining yourself sitting in the chair of the various personas who are using that system and asking yourself, would I be happy if I had to use this all day or would I be miserable? And if you're not thinking about that, then all the other things you checked off and got done. Can be somewhat irrelevant because you're not gonna, you're not gonna please your users. You're not going to get the adoption of the system that you want. Perhaps, maybe it even gets thrown away. It really hurts when people complain about it. So I try to get them to shift their attention. Obviously those checklists matter. But they aren't the end in and of themselves. It's the outcome of how that user achieves their goals through that technology you've provided. And I think that's what makes it such an interesting place to be because I see it as the intersection of where technology is envisioned meets people and does it really live up to what that vision was or not?
Phil Dillard: Yeah. I could totally understand that because there are a lot of times from the user's perspective and maybe even from the operator's perspective that different users are going to have different needs or different expectations. And I think it's a really great thing to say that. Know, imagine yourself in their chair and in their shoes that somebody is going to start thinking outside of themselves. And it seems also though, like the start of the challenge for you as a leader, because you have to get them to think like a user, an operator, an enterprise it person, you have to think about themselves in terms of serving their other employee partners. What do you do when somebody has a bad imagination or they have limited experience to be able to put themselves in real empathy with other folks? Cause I've been on the other, I'm sure you've been on the other side of a line when someone says, I know how you feel, but, and then they go back to the checklist and you want to say, no, there's no way you could know how I feel right now. Or if you do, you're not hearing me like. W, how does that challenge evidence itself in a company like yours? Cause it's, it is one of the opportunities of it, but seems like a real challenge of it.
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. I think in our IT organization, we get to do kind of two sides of the coin because we are the customers of our own products. We actually get to be really the person on the other side of that chair and give that feedback back. So when those same people are doing service to our end users in the company with their tools. I try to get them to think about that experience as they're engaging with maybe our product or engineering organization or support organization. As I mentioned, there are different personas. So there are some people who you are better at that part of delivering technology solutions. You try to have people who are actually really good and understand it in those roles that are really closer to the customer and closer to understanding the requirements and creating the checklists because sometimes the delivery is just delivery, right? Those people may not ever get close to the actual user. The other thing is the people in those roles and I myself, I like to actually learn how do people get their jobs done and why do they do the work. The way they do and also try to understand customers. Now I don't get to talk to as many external customers. I have a small group that I get involved with. But also you can use data to understand, to listen as well. And so instrumenting your systems appropriately to get that feedback. And I think we're much better at doing that with true customer facing systems than most companies are with watching their employee experience. And some of the work I'm trying to do now is to really use data, to tell us the truth about what our users are doing or not doing with the systems we're providing them and have all those requirements we put on paper. Do they really match the reality of how people work and do those gates that you put in approval workflows really solve a problem? Are they just there to make us feel better that we're looking at all the right things? There's a lot you can do today to use the data, to listen to your customers, whether it's in the product or in the tools we deliver.
Phil Dillard: Sure. But it's really important. You mentioned a very important thing. It's critically important to look at the data, but also understand how people are getting their job done so that you can make sense of the right points of the data. Of the right flows or the numbers of the quantities. Because somebody could be using something in a way that's not intended or assumed one way by the data. And if you're not watching them, you're going to miss that. So it sounds like you guys are really doing it right there. And I love when you said using the data to tell you what people are using and what they're using and what they're not, but you watch it to see how that helps with them. Is there some role that you had along the way that helped you figure out the nuances of really how to capture that?
Sharon Mandell: I have a background as a software developer. That's what my undergraduate degree at temple trained me to do. And then I did a stint in customer support, wasn't intended. I was living in Europe and wound up working for three comm and in customer support. I was probably less than perfectly suited for that job because you have to...I struggled with having the patience to really understand what the user's problem was. And maybe on my own side solutioning it. But because I couldn't deliver the solution, I found it a frustrating place to be. But I think I learned a lot from that about users. And when I had my own company, I did a lot of the customer support. That certainly gave me some of the empathy view. When I was at Tribune, I ran a leadership development program that tried to bring tech savvy people from the different functional departments or different businesses are Tribune closer to technology and how you make decisions about technology. And also bring people from the it roles or the product development roles and get them closer to more facets of the business to better understand it. And my boss and the CTO at the time really also helped me think about technology judgment and what that means. And if you have a degree in computer science, you think everything needs to be built and architected to the highest standard. And the reality is not all business problems are equally important and sometimes good enough technology is where you want to stop with one. So you can focus on the things that really deliver competitive advantage. So that role got me while I was helping others go through that program got me thinking about a lot of these things and ultimately, being in business school makes you think about technology differently and the role it plays. All of those things I think contributed to the perspectives I have today.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. It sounds like a great diversity of experiences that helped you learn a little bit to get outside of yourself or away from some of the assumptions or challenges that you've had. And there seem to be essential critical skills of a leader in your environment. So when you got to thinking about that responsibility differently, that understanding differently of technology and business, how do you describe the transition to, to, to where you are today? When did you realize that your responsibility was in the customer experience?
Sharon Mandell: I think when you start to work closely with sales organizations and when you're a customer yourself, you start to see things. So as you have more and more budget responsibility and making bigger and bigger purchase decisions and you're also inundated with people who want your time and attention you, as a customer, I think of that, but also in helping enable sales organizations to be successful, particularly in the tech enterprise technology space. I think about it a lot. I think about at the end of the day, they have to go get people to say yes and write the check. And that's a tough gig. And if I thought I could be good at it, then I might be doing that instead of what I'm doing. So I have tremendous admiration for the people who put themselves out on that frontline every day. And management has tremendous expectations of them and the information we need back to understand what's going on there to help run the rest of the company better. There's tremendous pressure. And so thinking about, what you can do to help them be more successful at making someone like me happy it's through that journey it became very important to me.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, sure. I could see that Wow. The sales side is challenging. And I think lots of people...I've experienced being in sales when there was a disconnect between sales and product between the inside and the outside. And it creates a lot of challenges for everyone. And you don't want it. You want to avoid that as much as possible. Do you think that it made it easier because you guys have you have that program where you are the customer where you are using Juniper, or is that automatically more empathy? Is that something that's unique that you're doing that other folks, the other companies or competitors aren't doing well? Or is it just something that you're doing well because you and your teams really care about it?
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. I think part of what attracted me to the role at Juniper was the message that, that the company had about really changing the experience, not just, making sure the network works, but making it easy to deploy, easy to maintain, easy to support and using AI and, data science to really drive that experience so that you free up it is always a scarce resource and if you can make the mundane part of doing it, go away, then you can take really smart people and apply them to driving other business outcomes. And it was clear that was real in, in these products, that it was the vision to take it through the rest of the product line. And it was something. I really believe in. So I wanted to be that customer who had that voice there and also a person who can share the understanding of that and what that really means with our customers when I have the opportunity.
Phil Dillard: I could see that as being an opportunity that then transforms the role of the it person and allows them to be, as you described more engaged in the business, what sort of things did you see them do? Do you just see them becoming almost like salespeople or advocates or being able to explore things that they didn't explore before? Do you have any interesting stories from that? I guess when I heard you say that we free smart people up to do different things, because we eliminate the mundane. That to me, I felt an it person could come alive. And they would get out of being in the, stuck in a little rut and being able to open and expand themselves into being in being more and doing more for the company and for their customer. I guess that's what I'm getting at.
Sharon Mandell: I have this thing that I talked to my teams about I call it Sharon's hierarchy of it needs, and it's a pyramid much like Maslow's hierarchy. And at the bottom of it is what I call, keep the lights on. And if you're it's the table stakes of running IT. Are your systems up? Are you on an available, are they performing? Are your projects on time and on budget, right? It's the basic stuff that you expect out of an IT organization. If you're constantly chasing problems and having systems go down or the network break and you're having to take those calls well, then it means you don't have time to have the dialogue and listen to your customers about what they need. And you're, you'll find yourself in this reactive posture all the time. So you like to get that. Cleaned up and running pretty smoothly so that you can invest more of your time understanding your internal customers and their customer's needs. And that now you're not just doing work, but you're making sure you're doing the right most important work and you're delivering it at the level of expectation, where that technology meets the people it's relatively on point and then you've really become a partner. And it's only when you get that done that you probably really get to talk about, Hey, let me talk to you about strategy. Let me be part of creating this business and making it work. Trust my opinion on being the voice of the customer. It's hard to have that credibility if you can't do the other two things below it, but for me, that's when the fun really comes. That's not when you're a necessity, that's when you're a value add. I don't like to see my role as providing the necessary. I like to really unlock and enable value that we might not be getting otherwise
Phil Dillard: Absolutely. And because that's when the creativity can come out, that's when the more than just the commodity component of the business comes out. I get it right. Do the basics extremely well. So it becomes common habit, and then more and more time gets to be added to. Doing more and more value addition. Can you talk a little bit about the difference of, Tipco two years, the first year of Juniper the difference in building up to that capacity versus kind of crossing the tipping point and an accelerating and to expanding that capacity what's it feel like what's it look like?
Sharon Mandell: For me personally , it means I'm getting a lot, few fewer people feeling. They need to come talk to me to solve problems. And they're generally more relying on the team. Certainly when you look every organization, when you go in, I have it you mentioned you, you went to Booth, right? And they teach us about frameworks and models. And to think about the world through, a model. And I really like that, but we all know that the world doesn't meet the model. Exactly. So when I have my hierarchy framework, some parts of the organization in it, its a fairly broad function and itself and covers, a lot of surface area. So certain parts of an organization maybe stronger or further up the pyramid, certain elements than others. When you walk into a new role , it's never the same. And I try to be very careful because I, prior in a previous life I was a ballet dancer. And I spent many years looking in the mirror and saying, wow, that doesn't look quite right yet. So I'm very much that I'm focused on the things that have room for improvement and you have to make sure you're giving people all the recognition for all the things they do really well already. Not just, what's not where you think it could be. But the way it feels , When it turns around is I'm further away from the details of delivery and execution and I'm spending , way more, more time talking about the future than the current or the past that's, the transition it makes. And, invariably I say the first 18 months of these jobs are really tough because you come in and there's a context that's there and there's a table that's said. And , You have your view of where things could be used, you understand your organization and the company's goals and Juniper's goals are very lofty, right? So there's, you roll up your sleeves and you get to work moving in and shifting it. But , I, I view, I think if you're a great CIO, you work your way out of a job in many ways, because you get your team to the level where they're really doing all the work.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, sure. And they're owning outcomes and they're seeking out problems and they're on the same page with the, with great philosophy. So for you, what do you think are the. Are the key enablers, the key leverage points are force multipliers that actually allow that your team, your direct reports to get to the point where they're, where they have moved to the, to that point. Is there some. Secrets. I don't want to say secret sauce because you never wanna give away your secret sauce. But if you were trying to guide people who are in the audience to say, here's some things you should look at, or, here's a framework for how to consider what will get you to the next level? What would you recommend to people?
Sharon Mandell: First of all, technology itself, and particularly today, the use of data, AI and ML, I think can be forced multipliers. And again , that's why I was attracted to coming and making this mission of Jennifer's of experience first networking and using the machine, you use the machine to do what the machine can do. And I think people can get very comfortable with what they're doing as their job versus the outcomes and the value they're creating. Often you'll come into an organization and you'll hear tussles over who owns the system, does it on the system? Does the function on the system? I'm like Juniper owns the system. We don't, no department owns anything. And. If somebody new comes in here tomorrow, they might decide that system's not valuable and want to put in a different one. So if your self-worth comes from the tool itself or the particular deployment, or exactly how something gets done, you're probably focused on the wrong area. How do you use, how do you get out of that and what the. The what and how, of what you're doing to the outcome and the value it's creating. How do you get, how do you elevate people to do that? And then how do you allow the machine to do it and not be afraid of that? As we've been surveying , recently Juniper , did a survey of a fairly broad set of executives. And, there's a lot of trepidation about using AI and some of that's very justified, but , there are some problems where it's just so obvious to point the machine at doing things and free people up to use that creativity. I do a lot of talking with my teams about those issues. And it's hard. It's hard for people to do that because they're very caught up in the 10 steps that they do is where their value is delivered. So that's why I think , AI and data can be such force multipliers. The other thing is the world is moving really fast and it is increasingly complex and human beings don't deal with complexity and speed at the same time. Very well. That's not how our brains are built. Letting the machine scale us to , to handle those things so we can be engaging with others and in. Our lives are simpler so that we can solve hard problems that usually involve how to people engage with each other and get along with each other. How do I better understand your expectations and deliver on them? Those are things machines can't necessarily answer , or solve for. I really wanna, I really see that as where AI can bring a ton of value to the world.
Phil Dillard: Sure. That's there's so much in that too , these your points serves as so much detail and nuance in them, right? Because experiences, critical innovation is critical to be able to move at speed and, humans. Need to innovate, machines have a little difficulty innovating at this point. But if the humans can actually do the things I love, when you say, let the machines scale us, if they do the things that take away some of the heavy work, then it allows us to think about how to respond to that fast change and how to respond to that, how to respond. And then. Change themselves so that the people know that they're not the 10 steps in the process, that they are the ones, the architects of the process, and they embrace it. But when you're talking really about growing your people and driving an innovative mindset in those people, but there is that fear there. How do you get those people comfortable with that, with the change? Cause that's, that is the tricky thing. How do you get them past that fear of the AI immunity? We spend a lot of time on that.
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. So two things. One is , the reality is not every person will be brought along. And. The way you determine, you have to see, I feel you have to give people the opportunity to come along. And so the way to get them , less afraid is to actually give them some higher order thing to do and make them realize they can't continue to do everything else that they used to do. And take on that more exciting challenge. And look, this is a general, we can be sitting here talking about. AI and machine scaling people, but it's a general leadership principle. If you are going to get yourself promoted into a higher role, it means you have to get other people. To do the day-to-day work you were doing, or you have to make sure that there's someone there behind you on your team who can come fill it. I, I don't think it's that different than other principals we have. It's just that machines are a little scarier and, we create the machines and we make mistakes sometimes. So we've got to put other processes around, making sure we do the right things around that technology.
Phil Dillard: Sure. Yeah. I don't think it's, I don't think it's that different, but it does speak, it speaks so much to leadership. It speaks so much to the significance of the CIO. In customer experience where we, that I want to circle back to a little bit, because I think, a lot of our, a lot of our folks are in a lot of different industries, people who listen to the podcast and if I want them to. Get out of this, the value of thinking about the CEO's role in that experience and thinking about how to leverage technology to, to drive that experience and to actually how to leverage technology, to get more out of people. And, you get that as a great leader, as it seems as obviously a great systems thinker. So it's not necessarily so obvious to a lot of people and I just really wanna, try and call that out because I think it's a really. Really interesting point and hopefully a really helpful point. Can D can you, are you able to share like a story of a project or a, or an implementation where you saw some of this come to light? You saw it on an unexpected person's shine, or you saw an unexpected situation And unexpected relationship, unexpected situation reveal like how far someone could go or how much they could do for a customer. Maybe it may be a teachable moment that you've seen in a project or something like that.
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. I think, when I think about some of the projects I've worked on that have had the most impact and one that comes to mind had to do with collaboration tools, which we all take for granted, in our life, we, in our home life, our personal lives, we pick our own , Even when people come to work, there may be standards at the office, but they're, because these tools are so easy to gain access to people are all using different things that they think enable them personally, versus kind of the greater good. And I've been in an organization where there wasn't that consensus and there were haves and have-nots, people who had , a really powerful tool when people who were making do with other things. And it, it was surprising is, it showed up in, in the , survey employee survey results that this was a problem for the organization and was impeding the speed with which work was getting done. And I think. Because it was a tool, people look solely to my role to solve it. But it really was a much more cross-functional collaborative effort. And , when I think of the person who was my best partner in that it was the person who ran , learning and development in HR. It wasn't, which you know, is not necessarily, you might think of that as the person who provides courses, but. The vision of that individual on how, on the impact that this tool could have. And then the team we put together around that, that ranged again from UI and UX experience, people that we borrowed from the product side of the house , to, we , what we're calling inside junior Bernauers, the cultural ambassadors, the people who were spread out throughout the organization who jumped in and got behind that effort and really championed it across a company, the change in the culture of the company, it was months. And usually you think about culture changes, something taking much more time. So it was really this place where the combination of the right technology and I'm not even sure which technology mattered. Technology, people were believed in the right team, coordinating on what it should look like and how we were going to measure those outcomes and what we were going to do to drive those outcomes. And how broad based that was. But yet a couple of key leaders really , partnering with someone like myself and in the end, it wasn't a hard technology problem. It was really more of a people problem. It was really exciting to work on it because of , how many people it touched and in the first day of go live, you had. Hundreds of people communicating with each other in real time where we could all watch each other, doing it with parts of the world and parts of the company. You might never talk to if it hadn't been for that project. So that was pretty exciting. And those are really fun when they happen.
Phil Dillard: Oh, that sounds like it sounds amazing. And it sounds like a super win at multiple levels. If I'm hearing you right first I'm like you and the , the. The head of learning development and HR must have a super high five at the end of it being done. Cause that's, that is an incredible collaboration, right? That empowers employees changes culture and then gives the organization more capacity to please customers. That's just, that's a win at that level. But then there's the other connections and an unexpected outcomes. So I want to come back to what you said before about sales didn't any of that then ripple into the, to the sales story afterwards?
Sharon Mandell: Sure, because getting the , entire company on that tool enabled sales to use that tool with its customers and the parts of the organization, it needed to connect the customers, big, important customers to whether it was on the sales journey itself or being a long time customer needing new things out of the product. And ha how are we going to collaborate to make that happen? It unlocked that where before there was a wall between the product side of the house and the sales side of the house in terms of that kind of collaborative tool.
Phil Dillard: That sounds amazing. Did, were you able to use , traditional metrics for , Customer experience and results to measure the results of that, or were they internal metrics? Like I get the sentiment, I get the feeling like how can you measure something
Sharon Mandell: I'd say we used adoption and engagement internally as the proxy for , because it wasn't, it was an employee experience initiative that, and we say this here at Juniper , you can't be on the outside. Something that's wildly different from what you are on the insight. You might be able to hide and cover it up for awhile. But the reality is if you are brutal, slow, Cumbersome on the inside. It's going to be very hat, very difficult to look nimble fast, and, sleek to your customers for very long. It, especially in this world of SAS, right? The insides, the product, isn't just something you build and you send to somebody else and they run and operate it. Now the company's operations have a direct impact on , delivery of , of that product and service. So I wanted it didn't start as a customer experience project. I think it had customer experience outcomes , but the , we measured it as an employee experience
Phil Dillard: Yeah. It sounds critically important and I wish, gosh, I wish we had more time to keep drilling down into this because one of the things we hear of is. It matters more for the millennial and gen Z employee, the younger or more passionate they are, the more that matters for them to be believing this at work. And then to communicate to that customer, that consumer and the pace of the change in business is going to make sure that a business needs to be designed to be. Antifragile and needs to be able to change on the inside so that it can reflect the face on the outside, because at some point it's going to break and when it breaks, it's broken and it's not an easy fix. It's a bigger fix to come back. That sounds like an amazing win and a heck of a project. But at this point , unfortunately we are, we're running low on time and I got to let you get back to doing your day job. But so I try to wrap. With , three , questions at the end there, my like my little, my mini lightning round, if you will. So you got about four, four minutes. I'm super questions, but I ask everybody at the same three questions at the end. So if you're ready for the writing, I hit you with them. Okay.
Sharon Mandell: Okay,
Phil Dillard: All right. Question number one, as a customer, can you share an example of one of your favorite customer experiences? That impressed you.
Sharon Mandell: Yeah. So look as a CIO. My, my favorite customer experiences when , again , my vendors are listening and empathizing with me. They're getting out of the way. If they're. They don't really have a credible solution for the problems I'm currently trying to solve. And when they're successful in selling me, they actually deliver on , on, on the promise. Often the account executive is the proxy for that outcome and the ongoing relationships I have, because just like when you have employees who help make you successful, you try to bring them along with you to different places. You go, it's the same with your vendors. And the account executives that work with you, Got it. Okay. There's like good. Be good. Be brief, be gone. But you'll keep them around. They can come back, but do what you do, what you say you're going to do. And we'll have a long relationship.
Phil Dillard: Great. That's great. That's clear. Okay. So second question. If there is one thing you could change about people's perception of the CXO or the role of the customer experience at a company, what would it be?
Sharon Mandell: It's not just the product, it's everything that surrounds the product at that, that's visible to the customer. That's the customer experience. And so if you're weak in any aspect , it might become a thorn in your side.
Phil Dillard: Yeah. You know what, one thing I heard someone say recently that stuck with me that was similar to what you just said. She said, how you do one thing is how you do everything and to those people who want you to put a framework around it. Yeah. You're like, wow. Millie makes you think about how you practice, how you play, how you where you cut corners or how you make sure that everything you do is excellent, which I, it sounds like there's a passion for you in this, which is awesome. All right. Last question. For our listeners, is there a single lesson you would want someone to take away from your experience, a personal experience with CXL that you think might be helpful for them?
Sharon Mandell: I, I think that the one thing I try to keep in mind is bo matter what label they put on you, as you climb up the ladder and you get a C in front of your name, You maintain your humility , be willing to get down in the weeds with anybody because the minute you lose your connection to where the real work is getting done, I think you lose your people. And that doesn't mean you should be down there doing their job for them, but you sure better have some clarity on what they're doing to help make you successful. And , and sometimes that means hanging out with them And whether it's the people on your team, or again, as I spoke about before really understanding how other people in the organization do their work , I think it's, don't forget where you came from.
Phil Dillard: Sharon’s last point was a crucial one - everything that goes into making a great product is reflected in the customer experience. That means connecting with each employee that touches it, and optimizing the process from start to finish. Her message of humility and teamwork has helped her not only earn success as a CIO, but has enabled her to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience to thousands of customers around the world.