EPISODE 210: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Marc Minguella

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Marc Minguella for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Marc and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Crucial role of customer experience in Digital Transformation.

2. AI’s huge potential, creating new business models and revenue streams.

3. Scaling AI beyond POCs, ensuring ethical governance.

4. Importance of AI and data governance, creating customer-specific models.

5. Embracing diversity in perspectives, enhancing problem-solving.

6. Using the OKR framework to manage short and long-term goals.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Marc Minguella is an Executive Partner at IBM Consulting, specializing in Innovation and Digital Transformation with over 20 years of experience. He has a proven track record in defining and executing business and IT strategies for major companies like CaixaBank, Catalonia government, General Electric, Sony, and Panasonic, both as an internal and IBM external consultant across Europe. 

Ask Why: IBM Consulting’s Executive Partner Marc Minguella’s Guide to Market-Driven Transformation

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Marc Minguella who is the Executive Partner at IBM Consulting.

Marc Minguella: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Marc Minguella covered in the podcast.

Launch Interactive Quiz

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: All right, so let’s top off the round. The first question is, at what age do you want to retire?

Marc Minguella: On the other hand, I love what I do, so I expect that I will even retire. I will continue to link to technologies somehow.

Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Marc Minguella: Not much. I do running just when I wake up.

Saksham Sharda: Most embarrassing moment of your life?

Marc Minguell: There are many but most of them are in my personal life. More than the professional ones.

Saksham Sharda: Favorite color?

Marc Minguella: Blue and red. For Barcelona,

Saksham Sharda: What time of day are you most inspired?

Marc Minguella: What time of the day? Mornings and evenings.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Marc Minguella: Between six and seven.

Saksham Sharda: Fill in the blank. An upcoming finance trend is ____.

Marc Minguella: Generative AI.

Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened.

Marc Minguella: Barcelona.

Saksham Sharda: Pick one. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

Marc Minguella: Wow, that’s not easy. Will take Elon.

Saksham Sharda: The biggest mistake of your career.

Marc  Minguella: Whenever I didn’t try something.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Marc Minguella: I run

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?

Marc Minguella: Procrastination.

Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Marc Minguella: Respect.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite Netflix show.

Marc Minguella: I prefer a book.

Saksham Sharda: One-word description of your leadership style?

Marc Minguella: Open.

Saksham Sharda: Top priority in your daily schedule.

Marc Minguella: Family.

Saksham Sharda: Ideal vacation spot for relaxation.

Saksham Sharda: Key factor for maintaining a work-life balance.

Marc Minguella: Being conscious of the importance of time.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: That was the end of the rapid fire. Okay. Now we can go onto the longer questions, which you can answer with as much time and ease as you like. The first one is, what role does customer experience play in digital transformation initiatives?

Marc Minguella: It plays a crucial role. I mean, no matter what transformation you are working on now, it has to be used by a client. It doesn’t matter if you, a final client, an employee, or whoever that user will decide if they will adopt your transformational project. Or maybe it’s gonna be your differentiator because that client can choose between your option and another one. So whatever change, whatever transformational project you are working on, the most relevant thing will be how it will be accepted by the client. So it’s key.

Saksham Sharda: And so can you share some memorable examples where improving customer experience significantly impacted any of your clients’ businesses?

Marc Minguella: Yes. We work quite a lot. I’ve worked in my life in the public sector and banking sector. In both of them. Having little changes in that client experience can have a huge change. And we have quite a lot of examples of the only idea of being able to measure that experience. And this is something that not everyone is doing, gives you the capability to improve. What you cannot measure, you cannot improve it. And for me, that was a big learning at the beginning of my career.

Saksham Sharda: So when it comes to defining and executing IT strategies for large companies, how do you usually approach that?

Marc  Minguella: First of all, there is a book by Simon Sinek called Start With Why. When defining those kinds of big transformational projects when defining strategies, you need to start with the why. You need to work together with the client to understand why not what, not what they want to do, but what’s the reason behind that change. No single transformational projector strategy can be executed from the outside of the company. So co-creation of that strategy, co execution of that strategy in a collaborative model, in a partnership model is key. Otherwise, it won’t work. It’s simply one work.

Saksham Sharda: So how do you go about defining this why? What do you do with the customer to find?

Marc  Minguella: I think the most basic skill of any consultant, and I consider myself a consultant, is asking questions. Many people try to show they know a lot of things, but the most basic skill and the most important skill is asking the proper questions to make the customer think. But also to get that information, you need to work with them. And this is how I get the why, working with the client and asking a lot of questions.

Saksham Sharda: So in the rapid-fire, you mentioned that AI, gen AI is gonna be the next financial trend. How do you foresee the role or impact of AI in the financial services transformation as the industry?

Marc Minguella: It’s gonna be huge. It’s gonna be huge. I mean, the impact of AI, not only in banking, but in other sectors it’s gonna be very, very weak. We have seen only the very first step. We have a baby in our hands that will have to grow up. But we can see the potential in creating new business models, in creating new revenue streams, in reducing the operative costs in at least changing even the regulation we are working in. So the impact is gonna be very strong, and we are just in the beginning.

Saksham Sharda: And how about AI influencing customer experience and personalization in the financial industry?

Marc  Minguella: Absolutely, it will, but we are seeing it now. I mean, with the impact of this new-gen AI in everyone’s use, the expectation of our clients is to see it in our applications. As an example. Whatever best experience you have in any service, it’s going to be the minimum expectation experience you are expecting in any service. So our customers, our employees, they are used to gen AI. They have seen it in their daily lives, so they will be expecting something like that. They’ll expect assistance more than transactions, and this is something that will come with the time.

Saksham Sharda: And so what about the regulatory concerns here and the privacy concerns?

Marc  Minguella: Well, they, that’s part of the government too. It’s not only AI governance, but also data governance. You know, there is a new regulation in Europe, they act there’s gonna be a lot of movement around that because banks have to sometimes comply with that regulation, but not much. But they need that anyway to scale. I mean, though, what’s coming from the UX is quite basic rules that we need to apply to our business. To have explainability, we need to be able to explain why a model is taken. The decision is taken in terms of transparency. If, in terms of being sure our models have no bias, many, many areas of the way we are managing AI at a higher level will be impacted. I also expect customers and clients to create their own models and their own AI platforms that will be part of their competitive advantage. So not only using the AI provided by technology vendors, but creating their own ecosystem of solutions that will be key in order to define the new business models and the new experiences for clients.

Saksham Sharda: So let’s talk a bit about the consulting side again. Can you describe a particularly challenging digital transformation project you led and how you navigated it to success?

Marc Minguella: Well, I’ve been working on many, many projects in my life. I have some white hair. So I’ve been working for, for a while., I’ve been working on public and banking projects. But when you manage one of these big projects, the most important thing is working on a client, so understanding that we have a partnership and that our success depends on client success. And when you do that, you are successful.

Saksham Sharda: And what were the main obstacles you faced in one of these projects? If you can elaborate.

Marc  Minguella: Sometimes the most complex areas in transformational projects are not usually linked to technology. They are linked to creating new operating models for the new organization in the client, aligning the expectations and, and objectives of the different stakeholders. So having that in mind, understanding that our project, it’s not a technical project only, but has a much bigger picture is key to being successful, in any transformational project.

Saksham Sharda: So what strategies besides this do you employ to manage and align these expectations of various stakeholders in large-scale IT projects?

Marc Minguella: As I say, as I mentioned before, co-creating with them, sitting down with them, understanding not only the way for the big project but also the why of every single stakeholder. Sometimes we even have a very big program with very clearly defined objectives for it. Then you have the other objectives. Every single stakeholder has its own and those objectives are linked or aligned with the objective of the big program. Or maybe not, but you need to learn. You need to understand the objectives and make it possible. And having a strategy on how to work with those stakeholders. So to make the program successful, that’s the only way you need to understand them.

Saksham Sharda:  So what are the main challenges the company, especially in the banking industry, are facing to adopt AI? 

Marc Minguella: I think the main challenge is deploying it at scale. So, most clients have been executing POCs and generative AI is useful and fun when you have to build an email and build PowerPoints and things like that. The challenge now is to bring it to the real processes that need to be executed many, many times a day. For that you need to have your AI governance, meaning that you will leave AI to make some decisions on a daily basis. For example, it’ll decide if you will get credit or not, and that decision can have a huge impact on your life. So we need to have that AI governance that is able to provide AI ethics. At IBM, We have been working with AI for a long time. You may remember Watson, we’ve been working with foundational models for many years before GPT appeared. And we have a methodology and we also have Watson X, which is a capability that includes, the capability of go or to-go data AI and a specific platform, for AI governance. So, uh, this is key in our value proposition and this is needed in order to be able to scale, to bring AI at the scale of any client. 

Saksham Sharda: So let’s go into a lighter question now. What does a typical day at IBM look like? You wake up in the morning and then?

Marc Minguella:  Well, I will wake up in the morning if I can. I go to do some running, and then I normally go to the office. We can decide whether we want to work in the office or at home, but I prefer going there. I live not far from it. In my case, I am a client-facing person to be as close as possible to the client. So most of my agenda is having meetings with the client, and working with them. That’s key. To have that level of trust and confidence, that gives you the opportunity of having, of providing those questions. You need to understand the why and you cannot understand the why sitting in your office, you need to be in the client. I would say that’s my role.

Saksham Sharda: And how much of all your time is taken up by meetings then? 

Marc Minguella:   I would say that not enough time for client meetings and too much time for internal meetings

Saksham Sharda: What advice would you have for job seekers looking for a job in your industry?

Marc Minguella: To keep updating. I mean, our wall is changing very, very fast and this is going to be faster and faster and faster. So keep updated. That’s the only advice I can give.

Saksham Sharda: So you worked in multiple countries, Germany, Hungary, the UK, Belgium, and Spain. How has your experience in all these countries influenced your approach to it? Consultancy

Marc Minguella: When working in those countries you feel the multicultural diversity. I mean, you can feel at the same time they are very, very similar to you on the why, but they are somewhat different on the how and the what. You also learn that having multicultural teams gives you a lot of power because it gives you different points of view on the same problem, even definitions, different definitions of the same problem. And you can provide much more value by adding all those different points of view. So it’s a learning experience and at the end of the day, it’s a, what the, the most important thing you learn is that you need to respect every single culture in the world.

Saksham Sharda: How do you balance all of this learning and innovation with practical business needs and constraints?

Marc Minguella: I would say that’s a challenge that every single leader in the world has balancing the short term and the mid-long term. What I do with my teams is we work on an okay R framework. We have objectives for both short-term and mid and long-term, and we follow them so we can make sure we are not forgetting in the short term and not the long term. You cannot only work in the long term because you will be out and you cannot only work in the short term because you will be out of the business for some time. So you need to balance both.

Saksham Sharda: You mentioned earlier as well that it’s a very rapidly changing industry that you’re in. How do you stay ahead of this rapidly evolving technology landscape to ensure your strategies remain relevant?

Marc Minguella: That’s, that was, my advice to everyone. I have one advantage. I love what I do. So for me, reading and keeping updates is kind of a hobby, but if you want to learn something, you have to take the risk to jump into the scenario. You need to create your presentation to expose yourself, to explain it to the client, to another colleague, to teach for example, to a class because if you read a book, you learn something, Yogananda the ideas, but if you have to explain it yourself, then it will become yours. And this is the real way you can really learn.

Saksham Sharda: What are your resources? Where do you learn everything? Are there particular newspapers? Are there networks? Where do you get your information from?

Marc Minguella: We have very good information sources. At IBM, we have an Institute for Business Value that is a leading consultancy similar to McKinsey, for example. I read books, I read blocks. I listen to podcasts and I try to learn as much as possible from the people I work with, from my client, from my team, from my bosses, and so on, from everyone. Having as many conversations as you can is the best way to learn.

Saksham Sharda: The final question for you, as of a personal kind, is what would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Marc Minguella: That’s a good question. I would say something similar. Yeah. and I don’t have an answer to that

Saksham Sharda: Teaching. But you are already teaching.

Marc Minguella: Yeah, I’m already teaching. I love teaching. I love teaching. But I don’t have a clear answer for that. Maybe teaching is my UB plan.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Marc Minguella who is the Executive Partner at IBM Consulting.

Marc Minguella: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.