Skill Exchange Event Aug 2023 - Opening Keynote

Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to the Skill Exchange. I’m Benjamin Gaines. I’m a director of product management for customer journey analytics and Adobe Analytics. And I’m thrilled to be here with you talking a little bit about curiosity and our product roadmap in the context of curiosity. Albert Einstein once said, I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. And that was Albert Einstein saying that. So very humble man. Despite having apparently no special talents, his curiosity gave us some of the greatest scientific gifts that the world has ever been given. There are probably some professions where curiosity would not be something that I would want. I don’t especially want my surgeon to be curious. I want him to do his job and get out. I don’t especially necessarily want my accountant to be curious. Again, just file the tax return. We don’t need to explore too much into Ben’s personal finances. But in the world of analytics, curiosity is absolutely essential. In fact, my assertion is that it is the number one most underrated skill and attribute in marketing analytics and product roles. It is the thing that will allow you and your teams to ask deeper questions of your data and better understand your customers. Without curiosity, you’re running reports, you’re pulling data for someone for another team, someone who’s asked you for something. When you have a team of analysts, product managers, marketers who are curious, that’s where the insights really come. That’s where you start to get down deep into data and and understand your customers in a way that you can actually use to affect their experience and improve your business and your product and your marketing efforts. I feel very passionately about curiosity, as you know. I’ve felt this way since I was a child. There are certainly our topics I’ve always been curious about. Some more so than others. Data has always been one for me going back to the time that I would pour over the backs of baseball cards as a 10-year-old and learn all of the stats and compare and contrast them and try to figure out who the best players were in certain situations. Of course, with the internet making all of that far more accessible, it’s only expanded my curiosity in the world of sports analytics. That childlike curiosity is something that we hope at Adobe, I hope my team and I are helping you take advantage of that and expand that within yourselves and within those that you work with in your organizations. I remember when I think about childlike curiosity, I remember coming home from work one day and my daughter who was four years old at the time was playing with one of those little kind of outdoor water table things that have all sorts of little gadgets and spinny things that you can do with the water. I walked outside on to the deck and she said, I think she picked this up from a TV show. I don’t know what show it was, but she said, Daddy, do you have any hypotheses that you want to test? And it was adorable, but also really, I think exemplified that curiosity. She was interested in playing around with the water and seeing what the water would do under different circumstances. And I thought it was awesome. That’s the kind of curiosity that I hope we are capturing and that we’re engendering in you and in your teams with Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics. In order to have real curiosity around your data, there are some things that you need in your organization and in yourselves. Data quality. Of course, if you’re going to be curious about the data, the data has to be sound. It has to be trustworthy, as trustworthy as possible. We know that there’s no such thing as a perfect data set, but you have to be able to at least trust that the trends that you’re exploring, the next question that you’re asking is going to give you something that you can really believe in. Data literacy is another huge one. In order for yourselves or for people that you work with to be able to explore the data, they have to know what that data means. They have to have at least some sense of what does this metric represent? What does this dimension represent? What does this segment represent? And be able to work with those things, work with those tools so that they of course can ask those next questions and be naturally curious. Data literacy is absolutely required for analytics curiosity. Explorability. This is one where I think Adobe Analytics really, really shines. You can ask almost any arbitrary next question of the data without having to go out to another tool or another team to get those questions answered. There’s nothing worse when you’re curious than running into a wall and finding that you simply can’t go any farther with the question that you have and the hypothesis that you want to explore or validate or invalidate. So having the ability to ask that next question is what explorability is all about. Organizational support is a really underrated one. And this might be the area where many of you are thinking that you’re lacking. You need to be surrounded by people who want you to be curious about data. If your organization has a culture of not really asking questions of just kind of, you know, just providing initial answers, surface level answers, and not giving analysts, product managers, marketers, the freedom to explore and to be curious, then curiosity is going to have a hard time getting off the ground in your company. And then the fifth, no less important than the first four is collaboration. So much of curiosity comes from bouncing ideas off of other people or learning the business context that other people in the organization have that you might not have or that you have that they might not have. So having a free flowing exchange of ideas, of questions, of topics that are of interest is essential to analytics curiosity. These five things are critical to the roadmap that we are pursuing in customer journey analytics. And I want to share some of that with you today with the hope that you will see how we are working to unlock passionate curiosity in you and in your organizations. I will say upfront that I am going to share some things that are coming soon. I’m also going to share a couple of things that are already in the product that you may not be aware of that you can take advantage of to begin enhancing your analytical curiosity. The things that I am going to share are not available yet, obviously. And everything of course is subject to change when we talk about roadmap, but I do want to give you a sense of kind of how we’re thinking about going after some of these problems so that you can be more curious. Derived fields is one of the, I think one of the most exciting things that we have ever done. This isn’t customer journey analytics only. So those of you who are in Adobe analytics and don’t yet have customer journey analytics won’t have this yet, but I think you’ll be able to see how it would enhance data quality and enhance your ability to be curious with data if and when you adopt customer journey analytics. So the best way I can describe derived fields is imagine if processing rules were this fully realized, if we had this fully realized vision of processing rules and you could do all of that data manipulation and data correction post implementation. But in addition to what’s in processing rules, if you could also do that retroactively. So imagine that you discover maybe an issue with your data. You want to correct it using some basic logic and derived fields. Well, not only are you correcting it from that point forward, but you’re also going back and historically correcting it in your data set in customer journey analytics so that you’re not confined to being curious about data from that point forward. You can actually go back and do your analysis on historical data without needing to kind of restrain yourself without having those the boundary of good data starting at a certain point. All of the underlying data in customer journey analytics is unaffected. So you can make changes to those corrections at any time. You can add to them, you can change them. If you want to concatenate two dimensions together into one or split a dimension apart into two, you can do all of that here and then undo it with no change to the underlying data and all of that being retroactive. So you can see some of the use cases that are possible here with derived fields. And this is something that is available now. And we’re going to continue to build on this and add more and more use cases into derived fields so that, again, so that data quality becomes something that you can manage without having to go back and re ETL things and make expensive queries outside of customer journey analytics. You can control all of that directly from here in the category of data literacy. This is another one that’s in the product today was released earlier this year, data dictionary. I have been blown away by how well received this has been by Adobe analytics users. This one is actually in both Adobe analytics and in customer journey analytics. And this attacks the problem of data literacy enables more data literacy by allowing you not only to describe the dimensions and metrics and segments that are part of your Adobe analytics or CJA implementation, but it also, this is my very favorite part of this has been on my wishlist, my personal wishlist for years and years. It tells you for a given dimension or a metric, what is it most commonly used with by your by other users in your organization? So in the screenshot, you can see internal search term frequently used with device name application, step one page time. Those are, those are metrics. And what is it similar to, which also might, so also might suggest to users how they can use this dimension alongside other dimensions. You know, if you’re, if you’re new to this data set, or if you’re, if you feel overwhelmed by all of the data that’s in Adobe analytics, having a tool that will tell you, you know, you should consider breaking this down by this dimension or that dimension can make all the difference in, in data literacy. Explorability. So in, in customer journey analytics, we want to give you the ability to explore the customer journey in new ways that you haven’t been able to do before. So this is coming soon. I should, I should add, but giving you the ability to, to not only, you know, explode and expand journeys, to see movement in new ways, to dig into those in new ways, but also to be able to see the, the time between steps in a customer’s journey, and to be able to turn any of these into further analysis into segments to be applied elsewhere, really to, you know, to be able to ask that next question about the customer journey at any point in time in your analysis and based on any, any set of dimensions or metrics. So you know, huge improvement. I’m, I’m, I’m really excited about this. I think this is something that in particular with all of the channels of data that customers are bringing into customer journey analytics, with it being not limited just to digital channels, this is going to allow you to understand how people move from the real world, from, from offline to online, to offline and back and forth. And and really be able to, to play around with that in ways that, that hopefully will foment curiosity in, in you and your teams. Organizational support. If you are finding that your organization maybe doesn’t, doesn’t support or doesn’t promote curiosity around data and analytics, you know, often that will come from the top, often that will come from executives. And so we have this mobile app that is award-winning and we’re continuing to build more functionality into this mobile app. Some of the things that we’re building in, by the way, if you don’t have it already, it’s called Adobe analytics dashboards. You can download it from the App Store or Google play. And once you log in, you’re logged in. So you, you know, get your, get your leaders logging into this once, and then you’ll be able to provide them with scorecards, dashboards, essentially that they can work with and that they can use to understand you, you can kind of promote curiosity even at that level, or, or sort of suggest that curiosity around data and analytics is something that we should you know, that we should be focusing on by providing your leaders with not just charts and graphs, but also insights themselves, whether it’s new visualizations that we’re adding, or as you can see in these screenshots, the ability to annotate and describe the insights that you’ve generated. That’s all available and will be available in the analytics dashboards mobile app. And that is available in both customer journey analytics and Adobe analytics. The last improvement that I want to share that’s, that’s coming around collaboration is the ability to comment in analysis workspace and in Adobe product analytics, which is, is part of customer journey analytics. It’s a, it’s an add on to customer journey analytics. So anywhere in analysis workspace, the ability to have a conversation around the data. As I mentioned, when we were talking about what’s required for curiosity, being able to have a discussion about what you’re learning and to be able to ask questions and get answers from others who may have business context that you don’t have others who maybe have done similar analysis and learned things being able to bring them into the conversation. As well as just of course, get answers to your questions. You know, particularly if you’re newer to the product, or if you’re newer to the data set and you have questions, all of those comments can be done can be made right here. And you can specifically point to data points. As you can see there in the little, the little icon in the mockup, you can point to a data point to focus, you know, to let people know that that is what your question is about, or that’s what we’re discussing in these conversations. Of course, our goal here with commenting is to allow you to have those conversations that will enhance and enable curiosity around data in your organization. In conclusion, Michael Dell said with curiosity comes new learning and new ideas. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to have a real problem in the increasingly competitive industries in which we all compete. Curiosity is one of those things that sets companies apart, that sets that that creates innovators out of certain companies and stagnates. The lack of curiosity stagnates other companies. The Adobe Analytics team believes firmly that in this new economy, in this increasingly competitive space in which we all compete for people’s attention, and for people’s dollars and mindshare, data curiosity and this ability to explore and ask the next question and really understand your customers is going to be the thing that sets winners and innovators apart from laggards and stagnant competitors who will fall away. So we hope and really strive to deliver tools that enable you to be curious and enhance and foment curiosity in yourselves and in the organizations that you work with. You’ll see that throughout the presentations today as part of the Skill Exchange. And of course, we always want your feedback. If you come across anything that you feel would make you more curious that we can put in the product, we would love to consider that. So please share that on Experience League or share that here today. And we do read all of those and we will do our best to make sure that we’re igniting that childlike curiosity in you around your customers. Thank you so much for having me and have a wonderful Skill Exchange.