Interview with Julie Larson-Green CXO of Qualtrics #DTS19

When this years speaker line-up was being announced over the past few months it was great to see Julie Larson-Green of Qualtrics in the mix.  As a pioneer of her role as a Chief Experience Officer she has led the way for two major companies.  I caught up with her on Day 1 of this years event and got the low down of what had been happening with her in the past couple of years.

I knew she had moved recently from Microsoft so started initially talking about how the move has been so far with Qualtrics.  She responded “I started a year ago and have been really focused on running both people and product.  I have been really concentrating on getting systems in place to help the company scale.  We have grown about 860 people in 1 year from a base of 1500.  This is a dramatic growth and that has been my most recent primary focus.

I came to the Dublin office last year to meet people and introduce myself and now I’m back again this year as this office has grown a crazy amount and we are really investing a lot more into this European office.”

With such a big change in employment it occurred to me she might need to move offices but she said “We started this office 5 years ago and we went from 5 to 250 in the first 5 years and we are now planning on expanding this office for a further 200 people over the coming year.  There is an office right next door to the one we are currently in and we plan to buy and join the two buildings which will give us a capacity for roughly 600 people.  We anticipate filling that building over the next 3 years!”

Now I had established she seemed well settled in at Qualtrics I did ask if it felt much different from Microsoft.  “It is similar because its another technology focused company trying to be on the cutting-edge of invention and innovation.”

When I did my research about the Chief Experience Officer role I had found that it wasn’t a very long existing one.  I did wonder if it was a role created at Microsoft and asked her. She explained that on the day that Satya Narayana Nadella took over as CEO she was appointed at the very first CXO.  That was a “product” job that Microsoft where trying to create and wanted to find out the importance of work-based culture.  They wanted to change the way people felt about what they were doing.  To make a more cohesive team / company rather than vying teams against each other within their own company.

I had to ask how do you measure an experience in her role as these are obviously quantifiable objectives. She smiled and responded “There are a couple of ways, one is traditional companies have previously always measured operational data like sales numbers, attrition numbers and acquisition numbers, really all the numbers.  However Qualtrics helps you measure the other side like the Human factors.  Like how people feel about what you’re doing, how they think about what you’re doing.  If you take those two things together then you can create a much more detailed picture.  Operational data is usually based on what’s already happened and the “experience data” is often the leading indicator of future success.”

I wanted to break this down even further and asked about whether surveys and focus groups are used as part of the experiential data.  She then told me it starts with surveys both qualitative and quantitative then the analytics from that help to remove (as best as possible) the usual bias that can be evident.  The tools they use helps to establish and resolve any bias using the statistical analysis to do that.

Whilst sitting there I was thinking about the types of businesses they currently supported and asked can the Qualtrics system be applied to every type of business?  “Yes” Julie said, “you don’t just have to do just surveys.  We currently have about 10,000 brands using it today.  It can read social data and can interpret sentiment coming from company channels.  You can add a pop up question on your website or even in product data so it doesn’t have to be the traditional 30 in depth questions away from the website.”

We both stopped to look around the Green room briefly as the murmur of conversation died down for a short time.  I love getting the chance to help my interviewee open up so I then asked a few questions about Julie the person.  After a bit of pondering she said she was curious about everything and she sees relationships between everything that other people don’t usually see.    She also name dropped that she was currently reading a book by Sir Ranulph Fiennes namely because this coming week she will be interviewing him at the X4 Experience Management event in London.

Apparently, she has also done her fair share of Match Making which has happily resulted in 3 marriages so far.

As I clocked how much time I had left to speak with her, I decided to head back on track with the interview and asked about the what kind of “Entrepreneurial Opportunities” had she gone on to after leaving Microsoft?  The last few years at Microsoft she was doing a lot of mentoring of start-ups and also working with the New York Fashion Tech Lab as well.  She did initially have her concerns about the translation from big company to small company but found this was totally unheeded.  She found that the same concerns like changing direction and make choices on what not to do were just as essential in small business.

I was watching Julies talk earlier that same day where she mentioned even when Qualtrics was bought by SAP that the “culture” of the company hadn’t change but I wanted to ask if anything else had since the buyout.  She mentioned that this change had actually helped the company overall accelerate and get through the door faster with their customers.

With time ticking down fast I had to close the conversation there but meeting this CXO pioneer was enlightening.  Thanks for your time Julie.