UX STRAT Interview: Laura Müller, Daimler

Paul: Hi Laura, thanks for taking time out to talk with me today. Can you start by telling us a little about yourself and your career?

Laura: I currently live and work in Berlin, and I am a UX designer. I have worked for digital and branding agencies, so I have an agency background. A few months ago, I joined Lab1886, which is the incubator of Daimler. We are an integral part of the so-called CASE initiative. CASE stands for: connectivity (Connected), autonomous driving (Autonomous), intelligent flexible services (Shared & Services) and electric drives (Electric). The goal of Lab1886 is to turn good ideas into businesses, and hopefully successful businesses, and I make sure that the user is always in the center while doing this.

Paul: What are the roles that you mainly work with at Daimler Lab1886?

Laura: I work mainly with the Daimler employees who have had a great idea. So, people from Daimler pitch ideas, and we try to develop them together. It’s not only the lab that tries the idea out, but also the people who actually had the idea within Daimler. In my current project, most of the people on the team have an economics or engineering background. The lab team consists of venture architects, UX and strategic design, tech people and product management.

Paul: Do the innovations have to do with cars, do they have to do with digital stuff, or could it be anything?

Laura: It could be anything, as long as it fits into certain criteria. One of the criteria is that it should be a strategic fit for Daimler. If the idea is really great there is a lot of tolerance. With innovation, you never know exactly which idea will turn out great, so you have to take risks. In general, the strategic fit for Daimler is very important, but it doesn’t have to necessarily revolve around cars. It could be a completely different business that Daimler just wants to tap into.

Paul: I’m familiar with the Mercedes brand, but looking at the larger world of Daimler, what would you say is the business focus of the company?

Laura: Of course, it’s about vehicles and cars and trucks and buses, but it’s way more than that. It’s also financial services; Car2Go belongs to Daimler; MyTaxi is an app in our system where you can book taxis pretty fast. So, we are evolving more and more from cars to mobility.

Paul: Makes sense. So, someone starts the process of generating an idea or an innovation, does it have to go through a number of stages first before it reaches your group?

Laura: Yes, this process I will describe in detail at the conference.

Paul: Awesome, you have to be at the conference to get the whole story. I like that.

Laura: [laughs] Yeah, at the conference I will definitely tell you about the different ways that ideas come to us, and also the criteria for how the idea can move forward, and then, of course, the steps of how we actually turn them into a business. So, I will give you details on this at the conference, definitely.

Paul: And your particular role is to bring both the design perspective and a human-centered perspective?

Laura: Correct. At the beginning, when no product exists, we have to say, “Okay, how can we help the user?” And this involves a lot of research. So we really try to find out what jobs are the users currently trying to solve in that field, where are the pain points, and where could our potential solution help.

Paul: Are the research methodologies that you personally use mostly qualitative, quantitative, or both?

Laura: It’s mostly qualitative, not so much quantitative. We sometimes rely on studies that are quantitative, but our research is more qualitative. And also usually the ideas we get, it’s very hard to get quantitative data for them.

Paul: What are some of the research methodologies that you personally use? Do you use, for example, participatory design with customers to see what they’re most interested in, or do you start mainly with the solution and kind of work your way backwards to a product? What do you find yourself mostly, day-to-day, being involved with?

Laura: Day-to-day, I am a method juggler. So, it really depends on the project. But we work a lot with sprints, we work with the Jobs To Be Done methods; I use a lot of methods from the design thinking process. But I don’t have a dogmatic structure. The projects we get and the problems we are solving at the lab are very different, so there is no “one size fits all” solution. A hardware product is much different from a software product, and you cannot use exactly the same methods. But in general, I would say that I am experienced enough to know which method could work. It doesn’t always work, but at least I have a feeling, “Okay, for this we need to use Jobs To Be Done,” and for other projects we already have a lot of research, so the facilitation becomes more important.

But to give you some examples, sometimes personas are necessary, sometimes they are not. Sometimes it’s necessary to draw a whole customer journey, sometimes this is not the right solution. So, it really depends on the project. And also, we work with sprints, and even within the sprint it could be that I prepared certain methods and thought, “Okay, this is a good way to approach this,” and I realized after that it doesn’t work and I have to turn it around completely. So, spontaneous method choosing is part of my job--and sometimes there’s no method at all.

Paul: Well, I find it interesting that they have created a place for you on this team, because, first of all, Germany has always had a focus on quality engineering, and then Daimler itself is one of the most advanced engineering companies within Germany. For them to say that, “Yes, we need the engineering part, but we also need UX,” that seems to say a lot about both the evolution of your company, plus the evolution of the UX field in general.

Laura: Yeah, and actually, I have to say, on our current project I’m not allowed to talk about specifics on it, but I worked together with engineers, and of course they are very well experienced, and they are very good at their job. But it was really enlightening for all of us, that if we put the expertise of an engineer together with a UX person, something completely new could come out of both worlds. So, it’s not like only we learn as a lab, or the other way around, that Daimler learns from the lab about UX stuff. What I realized is that the glue that holds the project team together is trust, and we really have to establish this at the beginning of a project.

Paul: And so do you tend to work with the same engineers over and over again, or do they change with each new innovation that you’re getting involved with?

Laura: The teams always change. So, each project has a completely new team setup. It could be that it’s a new setup from the lab team and also from the Daimler team. Because if it’s a different business unit, then there are going to be other experts.

Paul: And do you have to win their trust all over again, every time?

Laura: I mean, it depends on if we’ve worked together before or not, and what they already know from the lab or not. But in general, I have to say yes, at the beginning of the project the first few days are also about winning trust on both sides.

Paul: Very interesting. It also tells me that a lot of very successful traditional companies are now trying to find the magic sauce for the future, because the nature of business itself is changing, and the way that customers buy things are changing. So, your position in Daimler tells me that companies realize, “We have to think of new ways to be successful.”

Laura: Yes, definitely. We have to think of new ways and we have to be open to new methods, and we also we have to be open to diversifying the team so that it’s not only a male, 35, from a middle to higher-class family who is doing this job. In order to have innovative solutions, we also have to have a diverse team, and here at the Lab we are trying our best to establish this, to have a good mixture.

Paul: There are a number of new technologies that are coming on the scene that are in various stages of what Gartner would call the “Hype Cycle.” In other words, they get all hyped up and then they crash, and then they come back and then they move forward. Virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, internet of things, artificial intelligence… As you look a few years into the future, and as you think about innovation and strategy, do you have a feeling about which of these will be more relevant or less relevant to the world of experience design and new businesses?

Laura: For this, I have a very good answer, actually. Once you figure out the jobs that users are trying to solve, and the pain points--because I think, more or less, these are going to stay the same. You will need to go from point A to point B somehow; you will need to get your food somehow; you will always need that. So, I think the technology that helps you do that in an efficient way or in a cheaper way, this will be the technology that will survive. We have experts for all of this in our lab, and then we have to see which project fits what.

But I don’t like to say, “Oh, this technology is going to be great,” or, “You can only think about solutions for this technology,” because I think this is the wrong way to approach things. You have to also define technology through what the user needs. So, technology for me has always been an enabler. If I had a certain problem I found, then it was clear, “Okay, I need a solution for this,” and then I get together with tech, then we think of what’s best, and time and budget of course, and then we can think about it. But I don’t like to just follow a trend because it’s a trend.

Paul: Well, this is a conference about experience design strategy. So, in your view, how is strategy involved in your work?

Laura: The whole lab itself is a strategy from Daimler. It’s one of their answers to digitalization. So, this is already very strategic. Then, of course, the ideas we pick, how we move forward with them, it all depends on the strategy. And then when you see it on the product level, we start with strategic design. So, everything here is about strategy.

Paul: For me, strategy is about finding the smartest way forward and using whatever tools we have to create the best models we can, and the best chance of success. So your program seems to pursue success on a couple of different levels for Daimler: there’s success for the company overall; there’s success for the people who are coming forward with these inventions or these ideas; there’s success for the internal teams; and there’s success for the customers, that they are able to do their jobs that have to be done, better. So, it seems to me that there’s a number of different levels of success that would be involved in your work. Does that make sense?

Laura: Yeah, the question of success--I mean, we are very young still. We’ve existed since 2017, so we don’t have a real measurement of success yet. We could say success is to build a diverse team for the lab. Another success is that we can move the ideas forward. It could also be a success to kill certain ideas early, because they would have not been successful in the long run and cost a lot of money for nothing. But we haven’t really defined all the success criteria yet, but we eventually, of course, have to do that.

Paul: That seems like a very interesting concept. As you look to your own work some time in the future, three to five years out, how do you see your own skills or your own interests evolving?

Laura: I’ve thought about this a lot. Of course artificial intelligence will become bigger; robots will take over more jobs. And then I thought, “Okay, but somebody still has to train them and tell them what to do, or how to answer, and so on.” And so I think that instead of maybe thinking about how an app works or how a website works, we will think more like, “How can we train a robot in a good way so that the human interaction doesn’t suffer so much?” Because we all know at the moment--like, I was in a hotel recently where there was no human at all, and it just felt weird. So, are there other ways to make it personal or emotional even if no human is there? So, this is something I might be interested in. And also with more artificial intelligence coming and less human contact, for me, I would personally miss the human interaction. I don’t want to lose it; I don’t want to lose the emotional side to being a human. So, maybe I would even design against that. I don’t know. Let’s see.