“But, Why?”

These two words carry considerable weight when assessing new technology. In my years working with innovation teams, I’ve never encountered this question as frequently as in the past week, as the world gets its first taste of the Apple Vision Pro.

The evolution of this trend — from AR and VR in the 2010s to the recent Metaverse and now into Spatial and Immersive computing — is noteworthy. While I can’t pinpoint our position in the hype cycle, it’s evident that we’re not near maturity, and there might even be another identity crisis in the coming years.

There have been countless reviews from the serious to the seriously ridiculous. I’m not going to re-evaluate the hardware, but after a week of using it, I want to share my thoughts on the future.

Quick Take on Reviews

The review that aligns most with my experience came from one of my favorite tech reporters, Nilay Patel of The Verge . To paraphrase his review — It’s the best anyone has done. That doesn’t make it great yet. I encourage everyone to read his review if you haven’t formed your own opinions yet.

There are only two things I’d add from my own experience:

1. Pass through does not replicate real light. I spent nearly an hour in the Vision Pro in a my sunlit living room. The pass through felt so real, but when I took it off, it felt as if I was emerging from a dark movie theater in the middle of a July afternoon. It was jarring because of how much I had believed the pass through, but clearly the sun is different than 4k screens.
2. I want others to see what I see. I don’t mean mirroring, I mean see it. I put a UConn game on last weekend and made it the size of my living room wall, but no one else could experience that with me. The ability to place an object in space that others could see would open up a world of possibilities.

But…Why

Much like when the iPhone launched, it can be hard to predict the use cases of new tech. If we follow that adoption curve, it’ll be a few years before anyone who isn’t an ultra-early adopter buys one, and a few more before we start seeing mass appeal. The leveling-out for iPhone sales didn’t happen until around 2015, 8 years following the first launch.

With the best case being that mass adoption is years away, I know better than to share predictions for the products that will be built — too many incremental innovations have to deploy before we get the best ideas. Look no further than TikTok and the iPhone — in 2007 we never could have predicted the app’s rise in 2020 because we needed dozens of development between the two dates, not the least of which included 4G & 5G technology, better cameras, and improved processors, to say nothing for the socieltal trands that had to shift.

Instead of making premature predictions, let’s explore the big enablers the Vision Pro could provide after a week of use and some thoughts on what’s needed to get us there.

Immersive Reality for Fintech and Retail

1. Visualizing the abstract

It’s not our fault, but humans are pretty bad with abstract concepts. We struggle with time, numbers, spaces, and subjectivity.

In my 15 years in Fintech, I’ve seen countless efforts to help people visiualize numbers (and have even implemented a few myself). From personal financial management apps to get a better view of where money is going, to simplifying how we explain payoff options and compounding.

Our struggle with the abstract is probably one reason why it seems nearly everyone has made a budget at some point in their adult lives, but only a fraction manage one regularly. It’s difficult to visualize.

I recognize I’ll be met with another “but why?” here, with many questioning if a user would ever wear a headset simply to visualize information. Remember that adoption of new tech is made up of a combination of many small benefits — I doubt many people purchased their smartphone for a single use, yet they find the totality valuable.

2. Adding to the Journey

The past 25 years have seen prediction after prediction of the demise of physical stores. It turns out, though, that the physical store wasn’t the problem — it was the types items and the “why”.

When you know a specific item you need, digital shopping is a convenient fit. The more specific the request, the better online shopping gets. Consider this example — it’s before internet shopping, and you’ve decided you need a blue men’s golf shirt, size medium, wicking material. There would have been lots of back and forth to stores and considering options. Lots of time spent. Lots of waste.

But for the “unknown” purchases, discovery remains difficult online. There’s no perfect “wander” yet. For example, imagine it’t the holiday season and you need one last gift for your mother-in-law. If you begin searching online, it may feel hard to be inspired, and many of us will just end up back in a shopping mall hoping something jumps out at us. The treasure hunt still works best in-person.

Similarly, immersive reality will give us the opportunity to explore ways to add to journeys retail, but also health and wellness, entertainment, and finance. One of the best questions to start with is “what doesn’t work well now?” instead of trying to move existing experiences to new worlds.

3. Connecting the Disconnected

Finally, I think the “killer app” for Vision pro might not be an app at all, but actually future integration built into the operating system.

Wear the Vision pro for an hour, and you’ll find you’ve created a space with multiple applications running all around you. But unfortunately that natural experience fades when you realize that none of those apps speak to one another.

Connectivity among disparate apps within your field of view could make Immersive Reality truly remarkable. After all, in the real world most things I use can work with each other — it stands to reason that the augmented version should do the same. In immersive reality, my fantasy team should be able to interact with the real game I’m watching, even though neither are made by the same developer.

The precedent for interconnectivity like this exists, but making it work across all apps on the Vision Pro will require some creative software development from Apple.

But the pieces of the puzzle are there. Consider a similar approach in digital — browser extensions. The pipes built by chrome enable the user to determine when they want functionality to get added, subtracted, or connected across applications.

One week in, the Apple Vision Pro has sparked widespread curiosity, and the question “But why?” echoes in the evolving landscape of augmented and immersive technologies. Similar to the transformative impact of the iPhone, predicting the full range of use cases remains challenging, but potential enablers are emerging. Overcoming limitations in visualizing abstract concepts, enhancing shopping experiences, and fostering connectivity among applications stand out as promising developments. While mass adoption may be on the horizon, the true brilliance of the Vision Pro may lie in innovative software development that seamlessly connects diverse applications, opening new frontiers in interaction.

On our innovation teams, we often ask ourselves a question — are we the Catalyst Maker or the Catalyst Follower?

One look at our trend radar and you’ll see some items in our strike zone that may look strikingly different from one another. Some trends feel perfectly aligned to Fintech & Retail innovation — embedded finance, headless commerce, and verified payments are all clearly linked to our industry. Even without defining the terms, many people could infer that it’s a space where we can influence change. But other trends might leave you scratching your head — why do we care about Web 3.0, the metaverse, or quantum computing?

The differences you’re noticing are not attributable to whether the trends are applicable to Fintech and Retail, but rather which trends players in our industries will be Catalyst Makers of, and which trends we’ll be the Catalyst Followers.

Being able to identify the difference will make it simpler to explain your body of work and prioritization decisions to key stakeholders within your organization.

What is a Catalyst?

In technology and product development, I view a catalyst as a driving force that spurs innovation. When a catalyst trend emerges or a major event occurs, progress and transformation accelerates — often at a multiple.

In many instances, a catalyst will be an enabler for teams across the industry to build new products. Enablers make it possible for people to build new products that wouldn’t exist otherwise. For example, the smartphone and its associated technology was an enabler for mobile applications.

Are You the Maker or the Follower?

A Catalyst Maker is going to create the change that others will build upon. Often they have unique domain expertise and a perceived right to win in a category. In the case of the Metaverse, for example, some clear catalyst makers are Meta, Roblox, and Decentraland among others. Those leaders are breaking through with technology that will enable others to build upon it. In the Fintech and retail space, we’re mostly Catalyst Followers for the Metaverse. As far as I understand, no one in our industries are building their own metaverse, but if the trend gains enough momentum, we would expect to see organizations follow the trend and build products or capabilities within the Metaverse to meet the new expectations of our customers.

We can look at another trend with the opposite effect; embedded finance. Loosely defined as the integration of financial services into non-financial platforms, this trend has been accelerating for some time. To enable this trend, Fintech players need to deploy capabilities that their non-financial partners can use to build their own products. The Fintechs are the Catalyst Makers — without them the trend is unlikely to gain momentum. The products that will be built as a result of this trend are enabled by the catalyst that the Fintechs start.

As with everything, there will be times where the answer of “who will spark the catalyst?” is less clear. Web 3.0 is certainly one of those times. For Web 3.0 to get a foothold, you’ll need digital properties to build for it, but at the same time, those digital properties will need peer organizations who have capabilities people will want to use. Imagine a use case where Fintechs can provide better payment or identity verification leveraging Web 3.0. Helping consumers own and transfer their data around the web has little value if other sites don’t leverage the capabilities.

Crafting a Balanced Mix

Most importantly, having a mix of trends where you can be the Catalyst Maker and the Catalyst Follower will balance your portfolio. Trends where you’re the Catalyst Maker will ultimately take greater time to develop, have more pivots than other products, and require you to exert great effort painting the picture of what could be. Your “Catalyst Follower” trends, on the other hand, will give your team shorter term projects aligned to trends that others are evangelizing. Prioritization for some of these trends will allow you to capitalize on the disruption of others, and ultimately result in some quick wins that keep your team engaged.

I remember being a kid and hearing my mom tell me that her #1 most hated word was “Project”. It had nothing to do with work for her; it was because I grew up in the 90’s — an era of dioramas, take-home activities, and poster board galore. “Project” meant as much homework for her as it did for me.

Fast forward a couple decades, and “Projects” are my job. Clearly, I loved “the project”.

But the types of projects in technology and product development are not made on poster board (though I like to think my creativity has shifted to PowerPoints). Our projects are often lengthy, with conflicting priorities and stakeholders with different goals.

Early in my career, I was running a project that I was personally excited for, but professionally worried about. We were rolling out a new consumer feature that had a significant amount of pushback from within the organization. It was strategically right for us, but there were valid concerns from compliance, retail banking teams, risk management, information security, and my own leadership.

In prior projects, I had found myself struggling with how our cross-functional team handled blockers. When we encountered a compliance issue, the team would react as if the project was dead in the water, but I didn’t agree. This kind of push-and-pull left me looking for a way to set a foundation for what we expect to happen during the course of a project.

“A Post-Mortem is Good for Everyone but the Patient — They’re Already Dead”

In the early 2010’s, I came across a concept called the “pre-mortem”. The pre-mortem is a concept that takes the post-mortem evaluation — a typical retrospective in fields from healthcare to project management — and moves it to the start of the project.

At its core, a post-mortem brings cross-functional stakeholders together to review what went well, what could have been improved, and what the team learned from the experience.

But the post-mortem is performed once everything has happened, which leaves the team with virtually no action items they can take to fix it, only lessons learned for next time.

The Pre-Mortem does something similar as the post-mortem, but at the beginning of a project with the purpose of identifying potential risks before they occur. In my experience, you’ll be happiest that you did the pre-mortem not at the time you do it, but rather weeks or months later.

That’s because in the moment that you hit that blocker that you called out as a potential risk in the pre-mortem, you’ll be able to clear the air by highlighting it and saying “We knew this could happen — it’s expected, and we know how to handle it.”

Here’s the path I follow to create a pre-mortem:

1. Bring the team together and re-align on goals.
2. Imagine the project failing. What happened to cause it? Did you encounter a blocker? Did business factors come into play? Was there a change in strategy?
3. Identify the root cause of the failure. Yes, it hasn’t happened yet, but if you can imagine the failure happening, keep pulling at that thread and answer why it would have happened.
4. Create your mitigation plan. You already have enough on your plate, so keep it simple. While your head is clear now, write down a bullet or two about how you would handle the failure.

Using a pre-mortem empowers your team’s diverse stakeholders to share their thoughts & viewpoints before the project begins. This technique can help ease concerns and avoid having negative thoughts simmer under the surface.

Thanking my “Past Self”

I began using the pre-mrotem technique on some select projects where I knew we had a difficult mountain to climb. It’s not a tool for every adventure, but I found it useful to unite a team.

But it’s not just a team activity — it can benefit your own reflection when you hit the home stretch and reflect on your accomplishments (or if we’re being honest, the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve thoughts). This time of year I always start to feel a bit of anxiety creeping in.

Is my team on track to accomplish our goals? Are we building things that are adding value? What about all the things we’ve encountered that made us pivot along the way? Could we have made different decisions?

I use the pre-mortems I wrote earlier in the year to answer those questions and ease some of the intrusive thoughts — as it happens, the pre-mortem is as much for me as it is for the rest of the team.

Today, Synchrony was named a “Top Workplace for Innovators” by Fast Company. It’s a distinction that I’m proud of, validating Synchrony’s years of work to create a culture where everyone feels empowered to explore new ideas, and opportunities to deploy tests in pursuit of knowledge are encouraged.

Getting here was a journey — through trial & error, pivots and changes, deployments and failures.

When I began my career in product innovation a decade ago, I was struck by how difficult it was to find out how other organizations built their teams and approached their work.

Our approach won’t fit every organization, but over time, our playbook has evolved to a place that I hope it could help you evaluate your own Innovation.

1) Take Time to Develop Your Mandate

As an innovation program leader, the biggest threat is becoming a “catch all” for every initiative that wasn’t prioritized, a test bed for shiny objects, or a directionless group building whatever comes to mind.

Those approaches won’t lead to repeatable success.

Our Innovation team’s mandate can be summed up in an elevator pitch:

We leverage Synchrony’s Innovation Ecosystem to identify & plot trends on our radar, aligning teams to strategic strike zones that match their unique skillset. Our teams build products to meet the trends and deploy to the market in areas of strategic significance for the company and our partners.

Some facts we all agree to:

• Our time horizons are Now, Near, & Next, measured in years.
• We are an integrated lab, working with our talented agile teams. We are not a moonshot (isolated) lab.
• Our teams have unique core competencies to build various products.
• Core competencies (build, incubate, R&D) will determine which strike zone teams and products align to.
• We will focus on trends within our strike zone, and monitor (but not build) those outside it.
• Success is defined by key metrics.

2) Don’t Assume Innovation is “Just Happening”

Innovation will primarily spark from two places — seemingly random, almost kismet interactions among team members, and facilitated events.

Both are critical to success.

While the first will be the most exciting, it also often results in incremental innovation. Disruptive innovation will frequently require teams to come together to deeply evaluate, understand, and explore multiple pathways that are yet to be charted.

By creating opportunities for facilitation, you can get large parts of the organization aligned to a trend, which they can bring back to their areas of focus to build products through their unique lens.

Our innovation toolbox looks like this:

· Rapid Prototyping — Problems to be Solved with Technology

· Hacking — Technology that can be used to solve problems

· Exploring — Long-term independent thinking challenges

· Ideating — Quick sessions on a single topic

3) Embrace the Slog

From the outside in, a role on an Innovation team is one of the most exciting jobs, but the wins seen by the outside are less than 1% of the work.

Recognize early on that two competing things can be true — innovation is the most fun you will have, and innovation is a slog.

You will have to grind it out to make seemingly small, incremental progress. One of the most common things you’ll do is attempt to paint a vision others can’t see. You’ll need to tell your story consistently, with the same excitement and energy, to solicit buy-in from teams with competing priorities.

Your team will need to be a safe space — to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, a culture of “Disagree and Commit” requires trust, but powers meaningful change. It will not be uncommon to have multi-hour sessions where you can’t find an answer the team agrees upon.

But the slog is where the real innovation happens. It’s the thing of breakthroughs. The place where deep domain expertise is created, and new knowledge is formed. It’s where your team will feel confident in being right, and confident in being wrong.

And to maintain an effective team culture, your leaders should acknowledge the slog regularly. Validating the team’s feelings and frustrations will remind everyone that this is expected.

4) Data Will Empower You

Rooting an innovation team in data feels like a paradox for many, because data doesn’t feel very creative. But data can open the new pathways to creativity that you hadn’t before imagined.

In corporate product development, data is a language that’s universally understood. Leadership, peers, and stakeholders likely all use data to make decisions, so showing up empty handed will bring them out of their comfort zone before you have a chance to paint your vision.

The difference is that many metrics used throughout your organization may not make sense on a team that is empowered to fail fast. ROI can’t be measured for years. Active users will discourage incremental learnings. Revenue will take your eye off the customer needs.

Within Synchrony, we use metrics that motivate the success of Innovation teams, measuring speed to make decisions, alignment to trends, and improvement in expertise among our teams.

Some of the data points we use are:

• Time to Value — how quickly can we define, design, develop, and deploy our products, measured by the speed to a decision, not speed to success.
• Alignment with Trends — how prepared our teams are for changes coming.
• Weighted Backlog Scoring — an seasoned model to take the subjective (good ideas) and make them objective (right idea to focus on).
• Win/Loss Ratio — how many of our projects deploy, vs. how many stall during a pre-deployment phase.

5) Compare, But Don’t Become

Your competitors are innovating too, and your leaders and peers know it. One of the most common discussions I have is about what new ideas we’ve seen in our space and how we think it’ll play out.

The risk of comparison is that your innovation strategy becomes a worse, delayed version your competitors.

You need to know what they’re doing, but you don’t need to do what they’re doing.

Comparing your story and market tests with others can help inform where you see trends growing or shrinking, but the unknown variables are too great for you to use that information effectively to change your own approach. What are their time horizons? How do they define success? What did they try but kill that you never saw? What is their mandate? Do they feel they have a right to win in areas you don’t?

Our story is our own. We develop our own trend radar, plotting emerging and disruptive changes as we see them from our vantage point. Other companies will see them differently — they might be the catalyst for a key trend, while we would build a product after the catalyst occurs. Those distinctions will affect time horizons, opportunity, and degree of impact to the organization.

See the full list of Top Workplaces for Innovators here.

Like millions of people in America, the highlight of my springtime events was attending the Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour”. I’ll confess, before May, I wasn’t a self-proclaimed Swiftie —I didn’t really get into anything that wasn’t a radio hit until 2019, and had purchased the tickets for my wife as a Christmas present.

It had been a while since I attended a stadium show of any kind, which made this my first time experiencing the immersive light-up bracelets artists like Swift have come to use during the performance over the past ~5 years. I was geeking out. How did they make these work? How did they know where I was to make the shapes and patterns? The bracelets were handed out at the door — they had no idea where I was going to sit, so they couldn’t be linked up in advance. I had to know.

Give most technologists the problem of synchronizing 70,000 light-up bracelets, and we’d be creating WiFi maps, identifying bluetooth capabilities, exploring beacon options, and evaluating NFC and companion apps.

I doubt many would ask “how about using infrared light?” You mean the technology that’s controlled my TV remote since the 1980's? That can’t be the best solution.

You can imagine my surprise when I learned that was exactly how it works.

(The creators do have other technology options for varying applications, including RF and Bluetooth, but let’s put that to the side for now.)

Infrared is Nothing New (sorry for the pun, Swifties). On the most basic level, your TV remote is programmed to send binary bits of invisible light to the receiver, which reads it like morse code and performs the desired action.

For stadium shows like this, infrared light is directed at all or part of the crowd to activate the bracelets in a way that will match the lighting effects being used on stage. To make shapes, they use masks over the light, or scatter the IR to make variable patterns.

The programming results in an impressive display, allows everything from washing the audience in color synched to the show, to Coldplay’s “Sky full of Stars” effect or BTS “wave of color” that moved through the crowd.

What’s fascinating is how the bracelets change the culture of the concert. Because the light is immersive, it creates a sense of community and unity of the large audience with the stage and performers below. Contrast that with the traditional way of lighting a crowd, which involved harsh uplighting from the floor and resulted in an unequal experience, with floor attendees feeling immersed and the bowl attendees feeling like they were looking in on the experience.

So What is Our Swift-Inspired Mantra?:

Innovative Products Don’t Have to be Built with Innovative Technology

I confess, this new mantra makes me feel really seen. How many times have I tried to use new technology to solve an old problem? When have I over-engineered a creative idea?

Every team’s mandate is different, but my team’s is summed up in part:

“…Our innovation teams build products to meet emerging and disruptive trends, and deploy to the market in areas of strategic significance for the company and our partners.”

Nowhere are we asked to use the newest technology, or only consider the flashiest features. We need to build products that will meet customers where they are going to be in 2–3 years. Understanding and building to the trends is most important, and most people won’t ever care how we made it work (present company excluded).

The “full-circle” moment for me was realizing how well these bracelets align with a trend we began watching years ago: the experience economy. Consumers increasingly want to spend money on experiences and feel fully immersed in the moment. Solving that desire for attendees is exactly where PixMob (the company creating the bracelets) found their sweet spot.

For me, this new mantra is a great grounding tool when determining what we’re building and what we’re trying to solve for. It’s not a directive excluding the use of innovative tech, but a reminder that amazing new products can be built with components that might already be sitting on your shelf.

Today I had the opportunity to participate on a panel discussing how Generative AI will impact product development. It’s a topic that would have felt far off in the future a year ago, but in the last 6 months the explosion of the trend has opened the door to new opportunities, and many are left wondering how it’ll fit into their strategy.

Like so many, we’ve been using Artificial Intelligence for years to improve internal processes and customer experiences, but the use was often behind the scenes.

Now, Generative AI is front-and-center, placing creative power in the hands of millions, poised to disrupt the way we work and build solutions.

It’s 1997 All Over Again

I want you to transport yourself back in time. You’re a marketing executive at a retail company in 1997, and your team just told you they need to photograph every product you have from multiple angles and put them on your soon-to-be-released website. What a mountain that looked like.

And now, we’re in a similar stage of disruption for product listings, today.

Generative AI presents a very real opportunity to explore the personalities of your products. For example, a user might search for “road trip destinations” today, giving you some clear guidance on the types of keywords you need to use to be found, and the places you might need to be listed to be discovered.

But what happens when the search becomes more like a prompt:

“I’m a 40-year old dad of two boys, 10 and 7. We want to take a road trip from new York to somewhere that has a great beach with a boardwalk we can have dinner on. We’re happy to drive two days, but never more than 6 hours in a car to get there. My kids need a separate room from my wife and I, and one of the boys is sensitive to gluten so that will impact where we can eat. Plan the trip, meals, activities for the kids, and itinerary, giving us at least 2 days of relaxing on the beach.”

That could change how you list your products. It’s not about showcasing your offerings, it’s about creating a deep understanding of the way your products will be used, the feelings they might evoke, and the context in which they’ll be described.

It might also give you unique opportunities to build products that fit specific emotions, feelings, or desires. With search phrases giving way to descriptive prompts, the data of what a consumer is looking for could empower hyper-niche products to accelerate their growth.

Community Disrupted

Generative AI is going to spark a lot of questions about where product information comes form, and how the aggregators of that information add value to ensure they’re still useful.

In the trip planning example, there’s a good chance that the LLM was trained on data from Yelp, TripAdvisor, Expedia, or a myriad of other solutions who have built their brand on the idea that they would deliver the right answer from search results.

We’re witnessing some initial exploration of this shift within solutions like ChatGPT, as brands build widgets to integrate their information more natively. The question remains how well that’s adopted — for all the “skills” enabled by companies for voice products, most people still use the most basic native functions of Alexa and Google Home.

Prompting the Product

The past decade has seen an explosion of boutique brands, creator marketplaces, and hyper-niche products.

Prompted products could become a very real way for more creators and companies to further their journey of making timely, relevant products with significantly less cost.

Imagine that tomorrow, a hit show has its final finale. Let’s call it, Ted Lasso 😉.

Fan art for the show is already abundant, and while many creators are designing from scratch, and ever-growing number are using templates in sites like Canva. With generative AI as a helping hand, products could be created that reference fan-favorite moments from the finale and listed on creator marketplaces before the show is over.

The ability to make variations of the fan art to fit different complementing styles of clothing or aesthetics will be easy to do with only a handful of additional prompts.

For brands, creators, and marketplaces, there will be questions about how consumers react. Does the expanded variety result in decision fatigue? Does the artist or brand develop their own unique style based on the types of prompts they write, akin to the brush strokes of a classic artist?

Or do consumers instead become the creators themselves, writing the prompt, gathering the output, and printing the item using an online on-demand shop, all in a matter of minutes?

Welcoming A New Member of Your Dev Team

A meme has been circulating the techno-sphere for a few months now. The headline says “For AI to replace designers and developers, product owners would need to accurately describe what they want. We’re safe”.

As a technical product owner, the joke isn’t lost on me.

But the real opportunity is not in replacing anything, it’s adding a member to your dev team who can help improve the efficiency of the non-additive work.

Let’s look at this from two perspectives: the product owner, and the designer.

The designer has some amazing opportunities to make their least-fulfilling work more efficient. When their product owner asks for a new page to be designed for a feature that’s in their backlog, generative AI might become a supplement to the component library used today. With a few sentences, the designer prompts the AI to get them the first draft of the design, perhaps based on existing pages on the site or app, organization design guidelines, component libraries, and some basic understanding of what the new functionality needs to perform. Once generated, the designer flips through their options, grabs the one that most closely resembles their vision, and cleans it up to fit their exact needs.

The designer has been freed up to work on their more fulfilling work, including deep thinking, customer experience research, and net new builds that require unique human skills.

The product owner, after receiving the design from their teammate, no longer needs to go back and forth on revisions for minor changes. “Our development team say’s the button needs to be 10 pixels smaller, while remaining ADA compliant and aligned to our design standards” might be a prompt that cuts out days of waiting to prioritize work, resulting in faster speed to deployment.

The Fear of the Unknown

I want to leave everyone with some thoughts on the question what was on everyone’s mind — how will this impact my career?

Some reflection on the past can give us perspective on where the world is going.

I once heard an economist say “We wouldn’t have podcasters if we still had to farm”. It’s a bold statement, but it’s also likely true. The agricultural revolution empowered people to find work off of a farm. Since basic needs were met with fewer hands, we could focus on other work, spurring the industrial revolution that followed and the boom of manufacturing.

We have to wonder if the data-centric world we live in would be as advanced today if not for Microsoft Excel. A program of my size would have had a bookkeeper in the 1970’s, but not today. I run my own budget without any intervention from a bookkeeper, but people with a love of finance and mathematics didn’t disappear. The advent of Excel freed their minds to even more meaningful work in data science, engineering, modeling, and quantitative computing.

Generative AI feels scary for so many because it’s the first time we’re seeing AI come for knowledge work. Just this week, I watched as Adobe rolled out “Generative Fill”, and my heart sank as I thought of how long I spent practicing cloning and airbrushing in my dorm room while taking “Introduction to Graphic Design”.

But the sinking feeling didn’t last long…it was immediately met with joy for how this will bring about new possibilities we can’t even imagine yet. And that’s the beauty of innovation.

More information and a recording of the Tech Talk referenced in this article can be viewed at method.com/generativeai.

One of the most humbling parts of my work is exploring where we predicted trends incorrectly, and reflecting on how the changing tides will impact the future.

Last week, I gave a fireside chat about Payments in the Metaverse where I had the opportunity to do this alongside my peers at American Banker’s Payment’s Forum.

When we planned to talk about Payments in the Metaverse months ago, we were hopeful that breakthroughs in the technology or increased adoption would shine a light on where retailers and FinTechs had been successful, and how others could explore building products on the bleeding edge.

But the trend shifted, and so did our conversation. We discussed how to evaluate a trend that’s decelerating, where the catalysts might come from to accelerate it in the future, and how FinTechs can think about building products and integrating payments.

For me, the Metaverse has been the hardest trend shift to reflect upon. Not because I was particularly bullish on the trend, but rather because I hadn’t accurately calibrated all of the incremental innovation that needed to come for it to reach the masses.

I think we can all agree — The metaverse trend has softened.

It’s not uncommon that trends are hyped and then fall out of favor; in fact it’s so common that Gartner creates Hype Cycles for just about ever industry imaginable.

What is uncommon is to see so much investment — entire shifts in strategy and in company purpose — poured into something only to see it de-scoped in a timeline that can be measured in months.

With that as the foundation for reflection, let’s dive into the insight I shared during the fireside chat and the advice I gave to FinTechs looking at where to go next.

Current State of the Trend

In early November of 2022 I was looking out to the new year and preparing for the trends my team would focus on.

The Metaverse was all a buzz.

We were in the midst of drawing inspiration from our physical company spaces and recreating them in Decentraland with hopes that we would establish a foundation where we could activate unique experiences to test new products and capabilities.

Regardless of your own predictions, it was hard to ignore the investments pouring into the space from some of the largest rain-makers in the tech industry.

Fast forward to May 2023, the trend has given way to the promise of Generative AI and yielding excitement as the metaverse experience has proven to be inadequate for most.

This is to be expected, as the evolution of technology takes time. Over the last 25 years, smart phone technology evolved from the palm pilot to the blackberry, and now to the iPhone. We are arguably still in the “palm pilot” phase where we are developing the hardware needed to make the metaverse functional.

The blockers facing the metaverse have brought us to a pause. Hardware challenges, the lack of a viable input device, clunky software, and a

But even with all of that, I believe this is a pause and not a stop. That’s because there remain valuable use cases that could be solved for millions of people, and with the right catalyst, the trend will pick up once again.

Where We Look for Signals

If the trend is hitting a pause, then this is the moment where we take a step back to identify the opportunities we were exploring, and what signals we’ll be looking for to move the trend forward again.

Once a trend appears to be impactful, I like to take a step back and ask “who will create the catalyst?”

There are times where the answer is “my industry” — we will create the change that empowers embedded finance, a wallet-less consumer, and the future of identity.

Other times, we need to be watching for the catalyst, a humbling statement where it becomes clear that we will not create the metaverse, a connected car, or web 3.0 — we will create products within those spaces thanks to the catalysts of others.

As the metaverse loses some shine, I encouraged attendees at our fireside chat to look for the catalysts that will polish it back up and get it ready for the mainstream.

Here are three that I’ll be watching for:

• Improved Hardware: The current hardware is heavy, uncomfortable, and struggles to alternate between immersive virtual reality and mixed reality. Changes in the devices might make them more appealing to mass-market users, opening new opportunities for growth.
• A New Input Device: This links closely to hardware, but I feel it’s important enough to stand on its own. Current input modalities don’t work for mass adoption. Hand controllers are clunky, a secondary device like a phone seems duplicative, and waving your hand in the air is a great way to stand out in a crowd. When a new input device is developed, we’ll start to see some walls fall down.
• Elimination of Steps: The process of engaging in the metaverse today is not for the faint of heart. Interoperability doesn’t exist yet, meaning users are re-creating worlds, spaces, and avatars as they move among them. There’s also some work that goes into diving into the metaverse every time, which is a barrier for short attention spans.

How to Prepare and Remain Consistent

The metaverse’s impact may feel small right now, but that’s largely impacted by how nascent the trend is. With few people using it and low adoption from corporations, the rails haven’t been built to make technology easy to integrate.

It’s important to ask yourself “what if…” and try to answer with how you would need to pivot and respond.

• What if payments need to work in the metaverse? With the current method of converting FIAT to crypto, many consumers feel left out of making purchases. How would integrations of the 4 major networks impact your ability to sell? Would the experience offer new ways to integrate API-based payment methods, and if so, would that change how you develop your strategy?
• What if the metaverse solves for digital problems we have today? Online and mobile shopping work phenominally well when you know the product you need, but the “wander” or “treasure hunt” experiences are still yet to be reproduced in a way that feels authentic. If the metaverse can solve this problem alongside existing digital properties, how will that impact shopping and what will you have to do to make them co-exist for your brand?
• What if my brand needs to evolve to fit the space? Just like social media had an impact on a brand’s voice and customer interactions, so too might the metaverse. With the ability to build immersive experiences, will the expectations of brands be to interact in new ways? What would that mean for your team, marketing strategy, and the talent you need to acquire?

It’s hard to say how close the catalysts are, and if the pause will become a stop. Perhaps my reflection piece years from now on this post will surprise me.

Until the future comes, it’s our job as innovators to acknowledge the shift, prepare for re-engagement, and share knowledge. It only takes one catalyst to shift the dynamic all over again.

It’s the question every leader asks themselves: Should our innovation mindset be “Bleeding Edge” or “Fast-Follower”?

Too often, we find ourselves looking for the answer to this question in how we want to be perceived by our peers. There’s a desire to be first, fastest, best, or jaw-dropping.

Looking to our peers is the wrong direction.

Instead, we should look at our products and to the people who buy them.

Let’s explore two companies who take different approaches, and why their innovation mindset aligns with their product strategy.

Fast-Follower: Apple

Apple is one of the most successful “Fast-followers” because they’ve positioned themselves as a brand that makes technology that’s simple-to-use.

A Fast-Follower mindset gives Apple time to observe the products that their competitors put in market and gauge consumer reactions without the risk of missing the mark and making a poor first impression themselves.

It makes sense for you to be a fast-follower if:

• Your customers have an expectation that your product is highly stable.
• Your product garners repeated use that would be impeded by bugs.
• You have competitors who offer products that are good substitutes for your own, which empowers you to learn from their tests.

The risks: if your product has close substitutes and your customers can easily switch, fast-following could mean you lose a customer who thinks you’re taking too long to innovate.

Bleeding Edge: Samsung

Samsung’s approach stands in contrast with Apple. Samsung is a company known for being “Bleeding Edge” and their large base of early-adopters gives them a proving ground of customers who find the “fun” in dysfunctional, incomplete product builds.

A “Bleeding Edge” mindset gives Samsung an opportunity to explore large jumps in technology for their high-end products, then taking their components with the best consumer reaction and folding it into their flagship devices.

It makes sense for you to be bleeding edge if:

• Your customers are heavily engaged in your product development.
• You can create dedicated “testbed” product sandboxes.
• You’re attempting to overtake large competitors by taking a risk and making their technology feel inferior.

The risks: if your customer base perceives the “bleeding edge, test-and-learn” approach as sloppy development with unclear direction, they might seek out a more stable substitute from your competition.

This week the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) is back in Last Vegas with all the fanfare and opinions that come with it. For the uninitiated, the conference is the place to see the future of technology — from the exciting to the totally weird.

By now, the cliche “Every Company is a Tech Company” has been worn out, but the reality is that CES is where impactful trends are born. With something so futuristic, however, it can seem difficult to figure out how breakthrough innovation will align to your business.

I’ve spent my career developing consumer technology in the banking industry, a space that might not seem obviously impacted by the regular announcements on stage in Vegas. I’m sharing the two questions I ask myself each year to make the announcements relevant for my company, and examples on how to make CES relevant for you.

Which areas have a bunch of really similar ideas?

CES covers everything, from AR & VR, to foldable screen technology, to the future of agriculture. You can’t possibly follow it all, but there is a way to sift through the noise and figure out what might be approaching a breakthrough moment.

When an area begins to have similar product announcements, at similar maturity levels, with capabilities that are only minorly different, it becomes an area to shine a spotlight.

The “boring similarity” often indicates that the companies closest to releasing products to market have answered many of the same questions, validated similar hypotheses, and reached similar conclusions. This is a sign of maturity in the innovation space.

For example, in 2022 I wrote about how blockchain became boring (and why it’s a good thing).

• We’re beginning to exit the chaotic phase where everyone is clamoring for reasons to get into blockchain, and instead exploring solutions with much more meat on them.
• The major players have proven use cases and an ability to clearly articulate what should be built, and how.
• There is a shift in understanding when blockchain is not the correct solution, which points to maturity for the industry.

As you explore the announcements from CES, look for similar examples in the areas that matter to you.

The flashy objects that you’ll inevitably see make headlines are sometimes the most exciting (especially if you’re a geek like me), but they should be seen as less of an indication of what's to come, and more of an indication of what leading innovators are trying to test.

Will the ideas become a disruptor for what you do?

The concept of “Third Order Effects” became clear to me during the COVID-19 Pandemic — the idea that something like a major (like a virus outbreak) might change seemingly unrelated areas (like how people work, where they choose to live, or the increase popularity of a nomadic lifestyle).

Depending upon your industry, what you see at CES might seem irrelevant. Instead of looking for direct connections, look for the third order effects.

For example, a few years ago CES was filled with innovations around connected cars and autonomous driving. If your organization is a large national retailer, it might not seem like connected vehicles will impact you, but once we ask a few prompting questions, the impact becomes clearer.

• Will people live further from work if they have an autonomous car and can relax while they commute?
• How will consumers decide which stores to stop at? Will the car make better decisions based on traffic and efficiency?
• What happens if people will travel further for preferred stores now that they don’t have to drive on their own?
• Does roadtripping see a resurgence? Will people go on more day trips to further locations?
• Would ghost cars ever arrive at my store to pick up items without a driver inside?
• Would consumers begin to expect more or less automation in my own store if this becomes the norm? What could / should be automated?

While the answers may differ depending on the type of business you’re a part of, the prompts can help you think in new ways and ensure you’re not blind to the changing behaviors that could impact your organization long-term.

One final thing to remember — being wrong in trend sensing, especially technology trends, is expected. It can feel frustrating to go through this exercise only for the trend never to materialize. Over the years, I’ve even seen leaders challenge their team members on why their predictions didn’t come true. Often times, the answer is a confluence of things, not a single item that can be identified.

Trend sensing is a way to prepare your organization and de-risk innovation so that you have opinions that get you ahead of the competition. Embrace being wrong, and reflect on the catalysts that nudged the change in a different direction so you can make better predictions next time.

Money 20/20 was back in pre-pandemic force this week in Las Vegas, with thousands descending on the conference to hear from the biggest names in FinTech and explore new trends.

As always, there were exciting announcements, talks from the biggest names in the industry, and articles from around the country trying to predict the future.

I’m not going to rehash what you’ve already read, but I want to reflect on some observations that I’ve shared with my team as we head into the next year.

The Search for the Next Big Industry is On

It’s been a while since an entirely new industry exploded, but this year the FinTech community was ready to discuss the opportunities for growth in previously un-bankable verticals. Cannabis, Sports Betting, and Adult Content all made their mark in breakout tracks.

It’s no surprise that there’s money to be made, but it seems that digital maturity and new views on what’s palatable are providing a roadmap to mainstream adoption. As content moderation and responsibility grows, the ability to regulate and operate safely in these spaces appear to be lowering the perceived risk of involvement for some FinTechs.

What to watch: Mainstream consumer adoption could fuel these industries, which will demand new consumer experiences and simpler risk & fraud mitigation strategies. Keep an eye on how banks can make the industries more secure, and how they leverage existing technology to create new services. There will likely be a need for KYC & identity processes or new methods of checkout that align with the strategies of the marketplace.

Identity Management is Hitting a Saturation Point

This year, it was impossible to miss the myriad of solutions proving digital identity products for every point of the customer journey.

I’ve been closely watching trends that align to these solutions, including the shift consumers are making away from their physical wallets and the opportunities Web3.0 may provide to pass information cross-sites.

While many in the industry have been using facial recognition and AI to fight fraud for a few years, the strategies deployed have often been behind the scenes, hidden from the customer’s view. This year, more products are moving to the front-end, with promises of an easier and more secure experience. Dozens of companies planted a flag, stating that their AI was able to catch more fraud with fewer false hits.

What to watch: Consumers are more sensitive to privacy than ever before, and identity management could result in either a more secure experience or consumer aversion to sharing an increased amount of their biometric data. Sentiment will be key in winning this game. Also, keep an eye on companies claiming an advantage using unique AI to see if the‘re able to find unbiased success where others have fallen short.

“As-a-Service” Fits Nascent Needs

Short times to launch. Micro-brands. Niche client segments.

Banking-as-a-Service was hot on the show floor, with providers racing to hit the shortest time to launch new programs. Millennials and Gen Z are both showing affinity to micro-brands, an area that has traditionally seen economic challenges when it comes to loyalty and payment programs.

What to watch: Many of the Bank-as-a-Service companies have proven their technology, so I’d turn your attention to the new programs that launch and their ability to scale. If consumers’ affinity towards micro brands translates into top-of-wallet cards, there will be a greater need for plug-and-play program creation in the future.

Blockchain Hype is Normalizing

This one feels exciting for me. We’re beginning to exit the chaotic phase where everyone is clamoring for reasons to get into blockchain, and instead exploring solutions with much more meat on them.

The players throughout the conference had proven use cases and an ability to clearly articulate what should be built, and how. Moreover, there seemed to be a shift in understanding when blockchain is not the correct solution, which points to maturity for the industry.

Cash-to-crypto rewards, multi-currency wallets, and private blockchains with the ability to create unique networks were all on display.

What to watch: I think blockchain has survived the hype curve, and is making its way into the mainstream infrastructure ecosystem. The question remains how the business side of organizations handle decisions to become part of various consortiums, and what it will mean for industries that are still far behind on their foundational technologies. Look for announcements coming from strategy teams over the next year to see if this is moving into an area beyond the technology C-suite.