From Analog to Digital: Elevating Emotional Well-being with Cloud Innovation

Ellen Cowan (03:04):
When we first started working together, we shared a bit about our culture of innovation at Amazon, and we looked at our Working Backwards mechanism where we reframe problems through the lens of what the customers might want or need, not thinking so much about organizational goals, but more thinking about our customers. And then we work to define the most important problem to solve for those customers, and start with something quite specific as an invention that we can then test and iterate upon in order to bring a solution to life quickly. What was that process like for you, moving away from your goal to scale to a million?

Eric Rice (03:42):
Working Backwards made us completely rethink how we would scale our programs. For years, we were for everybody and anyone, but we couldn't just build bigger. We had to build smarter. And so through Working Backwards, we identified several personas. People with emotions and families and jobs, and all these things that rounded them out. And then we looked at the intersection of what do they have in common? And we found the workplace — struggles in the workplace, struggles connecting, struggles with trust. And also coming out of the pandemic, hybrid was taking over and it was a lot.

Matt Kaplan (04:18):
And we dove into this work right in the throes of the pandemic. So for us as an organization, it was actually our first opportunity to use virtual platforms. We were doing Zoom workshops, we were doing our trainings via Teams. It was our first experience of not being with people and holding people and hugging people. It was really, really different for us, and it didn't always feel great. And I think that really helped us as we got into the Working Backwards is like, "We better stretch our comfort zones here." And especially where we landed with digital first.

Ellen Cowan (05:32):
Now, I know we looked at many potential solutions, so then how do you decide what's the right thing to build once you know what the problem is?

Eric Rice (05:44):
Working Backwards really helped us define exactly the person that we wanted to serve. And then we put that idea out to all sorts of different friends, companies, partners, asking for ideas. And what we got back we were able to take a look at, reflect on, iterate on, and really refine for that segment what would be the best product to put out there.

Ellen Cowan (06:03):
What did you end up with?

Matt Kaplan (06:54):
We actually landed on something that I think we were really comfortable with, which was an analog game that would bring people together, help people connect. And that game, as much as we loved it, we're going through this exercise and we're like, "Are we going to sell a million board games? Who sells a million board games?"

Ellen Cowan (07:19):
How do we lose the scale? We've got something people love to do, everybody who sits down and does this feels great. How do we bring it into the workplace, and will it scale to a million? What's the process there?

Eric Rice (07:37):
The one nice part about the analog game is it really helped us identify the core of our modality. We ask people or we give them space to be creative, and tell us a story. And it worked as an analog game. And so when we decided to pivot into the digital game, I think we weren't as scared to approach technology like we had been in the past.

Matt Kaplan (07:57):
But it was also like there was an aha moment when, you were there, there were 20 of us around a table playing a game. And we all kind of looked at each other and I think it was Sanju said, "Well, why don't we just do this digital first?" And that sounded great. We've never done anything digital in our life. I think over the course of the next two hours, we whiteboarded how we would take an analog game and convert it to a digital product. It was fun. And we ended up selecting that as our pilot product. And we set out to build that MLP right from there.

Ellen Cowan (12:45):
Let's talk about scale a little bit. We were first going to serve all people, and then we narrowed down and said, "How can we focus on the adult in the workplace?" How big can that be? And how do we reach back to get as big as we can with this?

Matt Kaplan (13:05):
So the easiest way to answer that question is, I think it's limitless how many people we can reach. For us, the most interesting thing, and maybe one of the most rewarding things is when we play this game and we show it to somebody, everybody has a use case in their head. Like, "Hey, I would love to do this with my faith-based group," or "I work with veterans and this would be a great way to kick off a meeting." We work with a very large group in the mental health space and they work with underinsured or uninsured youth through schools. They're like, "Every counselor should have this game, and they should use it as their orientation for teachers." I think it could benefit any community.

Ellen Cowan (14:11):
We pick so that we can be really intentional in what we're going to build and test and iterate. And it's okay to fail if we're starting somewhere that's actionable and smaller. But the idea is of course, that we're going to look and see how big can it be, with every invention. I'm really excited to see all that's coming along.

Ellen Cowan (14:30):
Having taken this journey with us, and knowing that there are so many organizations out there that have massive challenges that they need to tackle and overcome. What advice could you give them after going through this process that might resonate?

Eric Rice (14:52):
Trust it. Trust the process. We were just talking about other segments, opening up new segments. We're going to go back and we're going to do it again, and we're going to refine the product for those segments. We now have that tool set that we learned through Working Backwards to do it properly.

Mark Kaplan (15:34):
My advice would just be you've got to take chances. Especially if you want to solve for something as challenging as mental health or emotional wellbeing, or how do you develop empathy in the workplace? These are big things. We don't get here if we aren't partnered with you guys. If we're not partnered with Slalom, if we were smart enough to know that, "Hey, we're going to need people that not only have the expertise but can actually help us build this," because as a nonprofit, you are not going out and raising substantial dollars to build a new technology product, at least in our case. So we had to be really thoughtful about how we talked about this, how we approached it. And I think it's the greatest investment that we've ever made as a company. We have the opportunity now to truly impact many, many more lives.

Eric Rice (17:22):
In the same way that we give people permission to talk about their feelings, AWS has given us permission to dream as big as we possibly could. And while that can be a little bit scary, you've been so reassuring during the process I think one of my favorite times was during the solutions workshop when I was talking to Sanju Sonny about how should we end this game? And we had an idea, and it was kind of crazy at the time. It was very much out of the realm of what we were normally doing. And I asked, I said, "Is this even possible?" And he said, "Of course it's possible." He had this little smile, and he said, "We're Amazon, we can do anything."

Ellen Cowan (17:58):
Well, with technology, we can do anything. Or almost anything. And the hard part is how do we frame the problems in the right size and shape where we know exactly what we need to go do and we can test and measure it? And how do we start with something that we could build upon? If we try to boil the ocean and take the biggest problem and have the best big idea that anybody's ever seen, the first time, and we're afraid to be wrong, that's really hard. But if we can give ourselves permission to start with something that seems actionable and then see how good we could be, we can test, improve and get there. That's not hard, that's fun.