Interactions - May/June 2010

with design budget growth of
flat to plus- 5 percent. The key
lesson here was, don’t build a
larger team, but rather build
tools, systems, and processes
that will make the team you
have wildly more productive.
This applied to many parts of
PayPal, which to this day con-
tinues to grow handsomely. In
order to grow profitably, more
investments are being made in
architecture, systems, and tools
to make existing employees
more productive versus hiring
more people and hoping they
scale productively.

we rolled them out. Anyone in the company could subscribe to a daily email that highlighted the top 10 most positive and 10 most negative customer comments in the past 24 hours. In early 2009 we rolled out improvements to the account-overview page, which is the first page that PayPal customers see when they log in to paypal.com. We read the customer comments every day as we ramped the changes and addressed the customer feedback. We were getting customer reaction and insight in almost real time, whereas in the past, much of this precise feedback either would have never been received or the issues would have shown up later in the form of phone calls to customer service, where issues tend to be more difficult and costly to analyze to root cause.

this approach by trying to know everyone’s first name on the team—more than 180 folks globally. Getting those names right was a bar I did not always clear, but the global team made a hell of a lot of progress in a couple years, learning to “move as one.”

customer as true north With many of the aforementioned improvements in process, we still often struggled with different people in different functions across PayPal having different priorities when it came to what to fix next for the customer. Getting our Web analytics in place was good, and we already had a rock-solid user-research competency, but neither was helping us to fully understand what issues and frustrations customers were having with the actual PayPal experience, in some type of companywide priority order. This lack of aligned priorities changed as a result of two things. First, we established a standard to put a site-feedback link at the bottom of every webpage. And second, an eBay–wide commitment was made to measuring and improving NPS (net promoter score), which measures the likelihood that your customers would recommend your stuff to friends and family. Site feedback was particularly powerful for understanding shortcomings in new or improved products/pages as

Final word

To conclude, I hope I’ve been able to effectively communicate at least some of the key aspects of the role of executive leadership and interdisciplinary collaboration across a company, helping accelerate “good to great” design and business progress. Additionally, I hope this article furthers the reality that design isn’t an important thing; in its truest form, it is the only thing.

approachability and conversations As I reflect on the design ( customer and business) accomplishments at PayPal and the bumps along the way, I mostly recall time and again saying, “The quality of our customer experience will reflect the quality of our conversations as designers, writers, researchers, and product managers—with each other and with our company colleagues in marketing, engineering, and customer service.” I tried to consistently reinforce the importance of collaboration, healthy confrontation, and approachability as foundational to great teamwork/relationships that would in turn yield great design work, great customer experiences. As the design executive, I made a conscious effort to live

About the Author
Don Fotsch is a senior
product executive with gen-
eral-manager experience.
He’s an entrepreneur
whose obsession is blend-
ing firsthand customer insights with the lim-
itless potential of technology and the
Internet to create phenomenal customer
experiences worth paying for and talking
about. Fotsch is currently chief product offi-
cer for and adviser to Green House Energy
Management, a green startup in stealth
mode. He has spent more than 20 years
defining and delivering breakthrough prod-
ucts to global audiences, including PayPal’s
category-creating Mobile Student Account,
PayPal’s industry-leading checkout and
payments experience, AOL for Broadband,
Comcast.com online sales channel
Redesign, the award-winning 3Com Audrey,
the industry’s first 56k modem at
USRobotics, and the Apple Power
Macintosh line. At PayPal, he was most
recently vice president of product manage-
ment and design. Fotsch has an under-
graduate mechanical-engineering degree
with honors from Marquette University and
a master’s in management from the Kellogg
School at Northwestern University.