UX STRAT Interview: Maarten Pieters, Signify (Philips Lighting)

Paul Bryan: Hi, Maarten. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself: current job role, company, brief bio?

Maarten Pieters: I’m Maarten Pieters, I’m the Head of Co-creation & People Insight here at Signify. You may know us as Philips Lighting. We are the world leaders in connected lighting solutions. We are an almost 130-year-old company, doing $7 billion revenue per year, with about 32,000 people worldwide.

My role is to get the company to become more co-creative. What that means is that I’m making sure that, as a company, we move away from more traditional ways of working, which you often see within the manufacturing industry. We are trying to become not only more agile and using more design-thinking ways of working, putting emphasis on design and how we tackle particular problems and projects, but also focus on getting the user, different customers, all the different people that have a relevant stake in the creation of the solution, to collaborate with us as early as possible. And not just doing that ‘once’, but co-create with them during the whole innovation process.

Paul: Before this, were you involved in more typical digital design? Like websites and apps, or have you always been on the manufacturing side?

Maarten: No, manufacturing is actually relatively new to me--that is, I’ve been working here now for several years, but before that, I was working in the innovation world in general, doing different, partially freelance projects, from FMCG to Education.

I don’t have a background in a web or interaction type of design. I come from the more, I’d say, design-thinking world, the innovation world, and morphing into co-creation over time, and now being where I am. Design is the right place to be because we focus on user experience. I work together with all these different disciplines in Design and beyond: UI/UX, product designers who are really skilled in the craft of design, etc.. we will collaborate continuously to make sure that we walk that journey together.

Paul: How often do you work with engineers?

Maarten: Daily. Different kinds of engineers. Imagine optical engineers, or people who are extremely trained in particular technical aspects. We collaborate on a daily basis. From a co-creation point of view, it is important to involve all these skills, if relevant for the challenge of course.

Paul: You mentioned that this is a different way for Philips or Signify to work. Was that already fully baked when you got there? In other words, were they ready and said, “Maarten, show us the way of co-creation”? Or did you have to sell that through to change based on other environmental dynamics?

Maarten: Good question. So, there was, of course, already different pockets of co-creation, or collaborative working, or design thinking, if you want to call it that way, happening in the organization. I didn’t start it; I didn’t come up with it, of course. Within manufacturing organizations, a lot of things are standardized. Initially they got in touch with me and said, “We need to do more when it comes to users, customers. We need to connect more with our end users. We need to involve the people more into what we’re doing, but we’re not quite sure what that would look like. We’ve got a lot of ideas, we’re doing a lot of things already, but we need someone who’s very dedicated to this.” Which, to me, sounded like a great opportunity and a great challenge—when you work as a freelancer you can’t really change and move that needle, because people go back to what they were doing before—it has to happen from the inside out. I pushed for focusing on co-creation and taking that to a more extreme form than some people were used to. But that is all perception. My message was, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Just do it in a co-creative way.” So, I’m asking them to just do a little bit more. “Instead of sitting maybe in an office for a while,” I said, “Look, why don’t you go out and meet your customers?” Or, “You’ve got some assumptions. How about we organize a workshop where we start challenging those assumptions, but we invite the actual end-user and different stakeholders to really figure out what they think?” Just to really try to make it easy for them and try to break down all the barriers that exist in people’s minds.

And so, step-by-step we kind of moved forward to a point where, all of a sudden, people started asking, “Well, we should do a co-creation session,” or, “We should involve the user more.” So, you see really that cultural change has happened. Though people in the beginning maybe were a bit more--and some people were very positive and immediately wanted to do this, whereas other people were a bit… Not scared, but kind of waiting and trying to figure out what it meant for them and, “Oh, does that mean I’m doing things wrong?” These types of questions. The normal questions, basically.

But the good thing about co-creation is it’s a very positive and very inclusive approach, so we were able to very quickly change that around and then really get people to get involved and to start doing it themselves, as well.

Paul: Cool, and you mentioned there was a challenge to you. Did that challenge come from the business side, the design side, or top leadership…? Where was that impetus to say, “Let’s bring co-creation more fundamentally into our process rather than one-off projects”?

Maarten: The challenge was more that different people had different expectations, understandings, interests, positions, etc. You had all these different types of forces. We needed people to understand that co-creation is in no way a threat. It is just going to help you do even better than you were already doing.

Paul: Yeah. When they invited you to take on that role, who was inviting you to do that? Was it from the design side they approached you, or which group was seeing the need for that?

Maarten: It was the design department. The design department here at Signify is a group of very skilled people that really understand the value of involving users, customers, and all the other relevant stakeholders into the process. A lot of people are trained into how to do this and making sure that they represent the voice of the customer. The difficult thing was that they have so many things to do that they didn’t always have time to do this enough. So, this is one of our focus points: How can we help people do more, and how can we do it quickly without making it a very heavy, complex experience for people, because we simply don’t have time for it?

And over the last few years we’ve built strong relationships and people in Signify have understood the value of adding Design and the user experience part to the equation, where traditionally often things were looked at maybe from too much from the tech part.

Paul: I know for a lot of manufacturers, product management drives the direction of the company, the direction of its markets, and the products and services that go to market. From a UX STRAT perspective, that’s changing a bit. Design leaders are starting to have a voice that guides the business into markets and products. Not just responding to what the business is saying and creating designs from that, but actually having an impact on the business and the product set. Are things progressing in this direction at Signify?

Maarten: I would love to be able to say we have made such a mark that we are always sitting there right at the table, at the core of things. And this, I think, is a challenge that you see all over the world. I think we have definitely moved the needle in that direction. We are collaborating now very well with different departments, across different silos, and people understand the value of what we do. So, we have moved to a position where people understand that we can build on each other’s experience and capabilities, so that’s a really good place to be already.

And in certain situations, we have been very much part of the core of different strategic projects, where design was represented to push and guard not just the user insights, but also function as a glue to bind other departments together. It’s not just about adding us to the process, it’s also adding the other relevant functions as well. We have to do this together, because everyone has a different piece of the puzzle. If we want to make this work, we also have to internally work together.

Paul: Obviously there’s a maturity curve in that process. In the bulk of projects or products that you’re working on, is the co-creation primarily evaluative or more formative? In other words, is it having some impact on the products? Or is it more generative, like, “Let’s prototype with customers and evolve the product as we’re talking to them”? What stage do you see it at right now, primarily?

Maarten: What we aim for is complete co-creation. I’m co-author of a book called ‘The 7 Principles of Complete Co-Creation’, and here we talk about an approach of how can you, on a continuous basis, involve your end-users, your customers, and all the relevant stakeholders, both internally and externally, throughout the whole development or innovation process.

There are moments where actual creation happens. It could be ideas; it could be building prototypes or demos. But we say, “That’s great, but there are other phases, as well, where you need to have that outside input from people and you need to collaborate.” And there maybe you’re creating a thought, or a concept, or anything else that happens throughout that normal design process.

We are saying, don’t just do that at the end, but cocreate throughout all those different phases. And this is something that is, I think, the bigger challenge. A lot of people are used to working in isolation, or not with all the pieces of the puzzle (read: people that have a stake in the solution). I think, and I have seen, that the success rate is higher when you involve all relevant people as early as possible, and cocreate ‘completely’.

Paul: Looking at the environment, so many things are changing, and part of the UX STRAT mindset is changing, as well. We have a new event called XD IMMERSIVE, which is more around artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and things like that. I can imagine in the lighting world, since lighting is everywhere, that these environmental changes are encroaching upon Signify, as well. Something like Smart Office, artificial intelligence, or environmental psychology. Do you see any of these things in your road map that, yes, we need to come to grips with some kind of larger trends? Or has that not yet hit the lighting industry?

Maarten: This is the core of what we’re doing at the moment. We have realized that it’s not just about lighting. Yes, as you say very rightfully, lighting is everywhere, so we have a right to play, basically, in any environment where there are people, because where there’s people, you’ll need light. So if you take the office, for example--and I think that’s a great example--there’s a lot of things that can to happen there. The office world, and how people consider offices to be valuable, is changing. In our work we are thinking very much from a point-of-view of what value actually means within a changing office context. What is good for the people that work in that office? Is it about well-being? Is it about engagement? Is it about productivity, performance? What about the operations?

So, we’re taking a more holistic approach to things and thinking about what are the actual needs in an office building for all the different people involved, whether it’s from a the point of view from a construction company, an investor, architects, light designers, people working in offices, HR, facility, etc. And what about IoT, sensor technology that we are pioneering? We are merging all of these dimensions and incorporate that into our own lighting solutions.

So, yes, lighting is not just, “There is light,”. Lighting can make you feel good, lighting can help you perform at different moments… We create different IoT applications that can really help people perform and feel better in an office building. Within the lighting industry, we are really driving this change.

Paul: Just from your own career perspective, again, a lot of things are changing, and complexity is growing: What’s something that you see coming up, where you feel like, “I would like to get involved in that, I would like to steer myself in that direction”? Anything on the horizon that you feel more or less excited about?

Maarten: Well, there’s definitely one particular trend that I’m very excited about, and it’s about designing for relationships. It’s about creating loyalty, building relationships, and how do you then do that. How do you design for creating a strong relationship with a customer? We often look at NPS, we often look at good experience as a whole, but what does that really mean? I find that trend very interesting. How can we then build and create our experience, our service, our company around that principle of loyalty?

I think it’s a very complex world, because it means that things that we may consider normal are, all of a sudden, not so important. For instance, the NPS question--it’s a good question, it makes sense. But from a relationship and loyalty point-of-view, does it really? A high NPS score doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody is coming back. NPS does not lead us to loyalty and relationships. Co-creation on the other hand, does. This, for me, is really next-level NPS world, and I find that very fascinating.