When was the last time you stepped completely out of your comfort zone and joined a department and position that are not in line with your CV? It might feel intimidating for some, a waste of time for others.

Now, let me ask this way: When was the last time you decided to explore something new and ended up gaining a lot of new insights and learnings? I suspect many will recall multiple instances of such situations.

For me, the journey started around one-and-half years ago. Well, to be honest, it actually started earlier, when I decided to join a rotational program within Philips: three different positions in three years. It sounded like a great learning opportunity.

After working on CT detector technology in our Research lab in Hamburg, I joined the advanced development department of Mother and Childcare in the Netherlands, working as both a functional and firmware developer.

I guess by now we see a pattern – yes, I have a background in engineering and I love working on digital solutions that improve people’s lives. Digital signal processing, computer vision, algorithms, and software in general – those are the things that make me tick. So I decided to join the Human Resources (HR) department for Innovation and Strategy to continue my journey within Philips. Wait a second…

An engineer in HR?

“Lena, WHERE are you going to work?” was one of the standard questions I had to answer many times. My friends know me as a true TechWoman: enthusiastic about medical technology, a bit nerdy, and a software enthusiast as software provides me with the short feedback loops which fit well with my actionist character.

Aside diverse reasons, most importantly, I was sure that I would be able to learn a lot in that position. This was proven true for sure. It also turned out that, on the one hand, my engineering and software background helped me to add value and bring about change in the HR department, while on the other, I was able to bring back a diverse set of skills from HR to engineering.

Bringing the engineering view to HR

There is a lot of negative discussion around stereotypes. However, I like stereotypes because they help to explain an archetype (variations for sure possible). So please don’t take my descriptions as universal givens.

Below I would like to focus on four more-or-less concrete examples where the software engineering background helped to bring about change to the HR group I was working in:

Agile WoW

Most properly, HR is not the first term that comes to mind when thinking about agility. So let’s see if that proves true and how to address some of the growth opportunities towards a more agile WoW.

Excel is for sure one of the preferred tools not only in HR, but in many other fields as well: it is used for high-level project planning, data analysis, and a lot more. However, using Excel to track progress on action items related to a specific project is not very practical.

Being a true believer in visualizing current work items, their progress as well as backlog items in the form of a team Kanban, I felt strongly about taking action on that front.

We introduced a team board using Planner and as we were now anyhow in the flow of change, we also tried the approach of stand-ups to replace the weekly one-hour project team meetings. Overall responses in the team were positive about these changes, but I also must admit that sticking to a 15-minutes duration for the stand-ups seldom worked out.

Waste patterns

Waste plays a big role not exclusively but also in product development. The majority of the software engineers I worked with so far enjoy detecting waste patterns in their own work as well as in their team or the value stream they are contributing to. Once waste is detected, solutions will be found or created and as much as possible, e.g., automating recurring tasks.

I was lucky enough to start in the HR department when Microsoft Teams was introduced as the main collaboration tool throughout the company. This gave me a great discussion base for an alternative to sharing a lot of the information via email. So just to be clear, I for sure don’t see emails as waste per se.

However, labeling and archiving each email in my inbox at the end of the day based on the project it relates to and downloading a document that was attached to an email to then, in a next step, upload it to an internal document management system, such as SharePoint, are two of many examples where a different collaboration tool and culture can help to reduce some of the non-value adding activities.

The Agile Manifesto principle “Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential” adds another interesting dimension to this discussion. Maximizing the amount of unnecessary work not done fits in perfectly with Lean principles and the idea of reducing process waste.

In order to be able to deliver the highest value with the fewest ‘lines of code’, I started asking myself and my colleagues every time a decision needs to be taken the question: “Are we really adding value by doing this?”.

Dead ‘code’

There exist multiple definitions of dead code. The term can refer to code that is never executed at run-time or a section in the source code of a program that is executed but whose result is never used in any other computation .

Consequently, the execution of dead code wastes computation time and memory. In software craftsmanship, dead code needs to be carefully taken care of as there are clear risks in leaving dead code in the code base such as that it can be an obstacle to programmer understanding and action as well as the risk that the code is awakened and consequently cause problems. Kelvin Henney once said : “Deleting dead code is not a technical problem; it is a problem of mindset and culture”.

Following this line of thought, we can find equivalents to dead code in diverse working environments and the ability to detect and change it can have a significant impact. Do you take the time to clean-up file repositories from information that is not of use anymore? Do you leave Teams that are inactive and don’t add value to your work, or do you just hide them? Do you know the costs of a culture of duplication?

Sometimes it helps to have a fresh pair of eyes to have a look at your project. Will a new colleague be able to navigate in this environment from Day 1? Will he or she be able to bring the work to the next level by adding the next ‘lines of code’? If the answer to one of the questions above is no, it is time to react upon and start detecting and eliminating the dead ‘code’.

CI/CD pipeline

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment practices form the backbone of DevOps operations. In software engineering, our goal is to work in a way that allows us to release value to the customer on a continuous base. As opposed to phase-gated development, every milestone involves a portion of each step: requirement, design, development, testing, which together produce an increment of value.

Approaching the end goal by an iterative development and release approach and the integration of customer feedback from earlier releases to optimize the solution over time seems to be a bit far-fetched for some projects executed within the HR domain. However, it turned out to be very well possible. Deep dives with the target audience and ‘product demos’ helped us to continuously improve on the final solution in order to best serve the needs of the customers (in our case our employees).

Key take-aways and learnings

Most roads are not one-way. So, I gained a lot of experience during and after my assignment in HR. Therefore, let’s put a focus now on the learnings and skills I brought back from HR to the engineering world:

People focus: I was amazed of the honest interest my colleagues showed in what others do and what they specialize in, and their willingness to learn more about it and gather insights.

Diversity: Hereby I am not referring to gender diversity, as this looks a bit similar to engineering, however upside down ;). I enjoyed the diversity of backgrounds, personalities, and skillsets I found in the HR departments.

Curiosity in change: As described in the previous paragraph, I tried many new ways of working within the team and I was blown away by the low resistance and change management it required. Everyone was really open to change and happy to try out new approaches and react to feedback.

Collaboration: Not necessarily contributing to one specific business, I experienced a high-level of collaboration and exchange throughout the organization. Looking at Philips as part of a larger ecosystem helped me a lot to make decisions and drive projects with the bigger picture in mind.

Conclusions

One year, two worlds, and 1000s of learnings. That’s how I would summarize my experience going from software to HR and back. I hope this short blog post sheds light on how different disciplines can learn from each other, even if they seem far apart at first glance. On second thought, it might be these differences in the first place that create the opportunity to learn from each other. What do you think?

This article was originally published by Lena Jaschke on TechTalks , a publication that examines trends in technology, how they affect the way we live and do business, and the problems they solve. But we also discuss the evil side of technology, the darker implications of new tech, and what we need to look out for. You can read the original article here .

How to balance customer satisfaction and profitability

“The better you treat customers, the more likely they are to come back and recommend your services, increasing the profit,” some might say. However, the world isn’t black-and-white, and when it comes to business strategies, there’s more to this than a seemingly obvious causal connection.

Different circumstances require different strategies

On the one hand, an entrepreneur would prefer to run a highly profitable business with a low customer satisfaction rate than vice versa. On the other hand, levels of positive customer experience tend to decrease globally, as companies deliver better services and users get accustomed to these new standards almost instantly.

I’ve found the core ‘balance’ to be driven by the business owner’s goals. If an entrepreneur aims to make money quickly, they won’t be concerned about customer satisfaction much, whether they deliver a promised level of services or meet deadlines.

If a person provides a one-time in-demand service, they don’t have to care about customer satisfaction. It may be unethical, but it is feasible. As soon as such a company is out of items or their service becomes irrelevant, the business is out of customers as well.

Those convinced that customers are going to return no matter what don’t invest much in customer satisfaction either. For example, vendors that offer the lowest prices on the market know for sure that there is a client segment ready to endure poor service if it is compensated in terms of price.

Therefore, we can draw a pyramid with a low quality of service delivery at the bottom and high level at the top. It doesn’t matter whether we speak about items for personal use or B2B services – it’ll be the same pyramid. And the quality of services that is at the core of customer satisfaction is inversely related to it.

Customers invest in the experience, and they are aware of it

The more a customer is ready to pay, the higher level of service they expect to get. When we compare the purchase of a used car and the purchase of a luxurious car, technically, the processes don’t differ much. And still, people expect to get a totally different level of experience and attitude in each case because of the prices they pay.

In the latter case, a vendor has to create an atmosphere that becomes an added value – a personalized approach they tend to call “unforgettable experience.”

People in the middle segment, as a rule, are more or less satisfied with the level of services they receive. This audience may have some suggestions on improvements, but they don’t demand anything extraordinary.

In general, customer satisfaction always comes first

If we are speaking about the majority of businesses, customer satisfaction, for sure, comes before profit. The cost of retaining customers is always lower than attracting new ones. If a person is happy, they will be back and spend more money. They may recommend you to the others willingly or in exchange for the benefits a loyalty program offers.

If you focus solely on making a profit instead of paying attention to the experience and quality the company delivers, building long-term relationships will be complicated, if not impossible. In a perfect case, you should aim to provide a bit better service than people expect, encouraging them to come back for more.

So there comes another question: for who do we work?

That’s when one more variable comes in: customer’s paying capacity that lies at the heart of customer segmentation.

In practice, the story of the balance of customer experience and profit is closely linked to the abovementioned market segmentation, which, in its turn, is based on payment capacity. And in this case, it is not about respect or disrespect – it’s about maths.

Price, quality, and service are all the variables in the formula of customer satisfaction. Their value changes depending on the circumstances, but the correlation remains constant: all are more or less equal.

The high quality of products/services that comes with high customer satisfaction is high ly-priced. Change the italic text to ‘low’ or ‘average,’ and you’ll get the rest of the basic formulas. If one of these elements is not synchronized with the rest, it affects either profit or customer satisfaction rates.

To sum up

Profitability is key to a leading business. A company has to make a profit to exist. To keep business sustainable, you need to determine the correct price to quality correlation.

Unfortunately, high quality with premium service for a low price is not a feasible strategy, rather a utopia. Meanwhile, low quality with high price is a strategy that won’t work out in the long term.

So if you aim to find the balance between customer satisfaction and profitability, I suggest you start with studying customer segmentation. Learn who your audience is, what they need, how much they can afford to pay, and what their priorities are.

Want to be an entrepreneur? Start by visualizing your success

The whole of our lives is comprised of a series of individual events threaded together by the decisions we make. One day we wake up and the sun is shining and there’s no stopping us. And on other days, like now, uncertainly and fear control our collective psyche and send everyone into disarray and confusion. But no matter who you are and how hard you try to better your life, malaise will creep in every decade or so, leaving you feeling trapped and unable to shake yourself from it.

When it does, it inflicts pain on your soul and paints your days a darker shade. We’re told to make changes and dream anew. But changing is hard unless you master the art of hacking your brain and visualizing a better path. Your ‘True North.’

Hack your neurons and actualize your dreams

Resetting your journey and leading your best life starts with a vision. In my early 20s, I was a graduate student living in a studio apartment in San Francisco. Above my bed was a poster of a tropical island with white sandy beaches and palm trees. It reminded me of my time as a younger backpacker in South East Asia, and I put it there because one day I wanted to live in that setting once again.

Just a few years later, having regularly visualized the promise of that life, I was living a reality that seemed almost impossible — a Silicon Valley job with Microsoft in Indonesia, enjoying stunning sunsets in Bali multiple times each year. Through an unexpected series of life events, the opportunity presented itself. All I had to do was accept it. Getting there required no exceptional talent, connections, or off-the-charts IQ, but rather a practice: Visualizing what’s next. I learned early on that while I can’t foresee the future, I can certainly imagine it and try to make it happen.

Years later, I wanted to break away from what I deemed an oppressive corporate routine to become an entrepreneur. I visualized everything opposite to career misery and missed aspirations. I wanted to feel grateful, creative, and in charge of the time in my years, not disappointed or discontented because someone else didn’t provide me with the life I needed.

Shortly thereafter, I started my first company with an awesome stranger, in an industry I knew very little about. Leaving a familiar, comfortable career was not the path of cheap slogans, “You can be anything you want to be.” It was WAR . It took me a while to find my footing. But when I did, the ability to create new products, give expression to my inner artist, along with a tenacious work ethic, was liberating and empowering.  The company was acquired less than three years after inception.

As we age, things tend to get more complicated than anticipated. We may not climb the corporate ladder as quickly as we’d hoped or remain in the same relationship that we’re in today. Fears and self-doubt hinder our ability to stay optimistic and imaginative. Visualization can help you hack your brain, retrain your neurons, and find a path to creative thinking once again.

In 2014, I co-founded another company called Hackster . It was the most significant financial and time risk of my life. My co-founder and I had the idea to connect millions of hardware engineers from all over the world under a single open-source platform as a means for community-based learning. Hackster came from a place of pushing past the limit.

We worked and fed the company with a great team until it grew to become the largest platform for hardware engineers in the world, with over 1,200,000 members, 20,000 open source projects, and 40,000 new members joining each month. It was the most meaningful economic, intellectual, and creative journey of my life. Hackster was a gift, and it was visualized from day one.

In the meantime, Hackster been acquired by a Fortune 500 company, Avnet , giving it the means to impact further and broader than ever before. I’ve seen what is possible when we let people take ideas and run with them when we don’t reduce employees to formulaic versions of themselves, instead of giving them the freedom to bring any vision to life. The power of visualization exponentially grows when shared with others, gaining speed and impact.

Try these three proven visualization practices to hack your new decade:

1. Start visualizing a better life for yourself

This powerful mental practice will unlock your future and where you want to be in life. It’s the foundation for everything. Studies reveal that your thoughts can produce critical mental instructions, training you for the actual performance that comes later. It’s critical to be clear about your vision and “see” it regularly.

Begin by establishing a highly specific goal, and you have already unlocked it. Try setting the stage for your thoughts: Who are you with? How does it make you feel? What will you build? Eliminate doubts and remind yourself that this is your turn.

2. Set new goals that excite and energize you

Your vision is the outcome of your work, and goal setting along with milestones will help you reach it. Think of it like this. First, you visualize, then you execute. Start with actionable goals and small tactical wins that offer gratification or reward as you walk your new path. Hitting one tiny target at a time is the fuel you need to get you to the next one.

Working toward your goals will take time and sometimes even money, so pacing yourself as you execute is critical to your energy and emotional well-being. Continue “seeing” what can be as you go. Meditate on it.

3. Starting small is better than not starting at all

You’re not Elon Musk or Oprah (and even they had humble beginnings). Working with startups and friends pursuing a new path, I often sense impatience and unreasonable expectations that significantly hinder their potential. We can easily fall victim to hasty, grandiose expectations.

Whatever it is you want to create – start small, test your hypothesis and burn as little energy and resources as possible because whether you like it or not, you’re in this for the long run. Overnight mega-success is rare, and something of a cultural myth. Lean into, and savor, your process.

2020 is the decade to reset and rise

As the years go by, keep hitting your reset button each time you find yourself standing still. Read voraciously, explore new models of work, meet new people, listen to podcasts, frequent Meetups, industry events, take in as much as possible.

Anyone committed to being a lifelong learner and who applies visualization to get from basecamp to peak will eventually summit.