Daniel Muzquiz is responsible for the execution of the corporate strategy through the oversight of internal operations for the company including technology, finance, business analytics, and science. In addition, Daniel is a founder and managing director at Phoenix Strategy Investments, a private equity firm based in Dallas.
Why did you interview current PI clients? What were you hoping to learn from them? Interviewing clients is huge when developing new products and user insights. Just as importantly, is how you interview clients. Our goal when interviewing clients is to really understand their goals, their real business objectives, and their challenges. This is the first discovery step. We then look for commonalities between clients so we can make informed choices when prioritizing new products and services. Once we understand their root need, then we develop multiple concepts and do targeted interviewing around these concepts to refine and eventually make these concepts real products and features that get added into our solution. We also interview lost clients, but we can save that subject for another time.
What were the job roles/titles of most of the people you spoke with? Almost all people we talked to were leaders in their organizations. It was evenly split between C-suite and talent managers (i.e. HR professionals). I would generally refer to all of them as PI champions.
Did you learn anything that surprised you? The most surprising aspect was the passion clients felt towards helping their teams succeed using PI. The people I spoke with were very aware of the value of The Predictive Index and how it helps their strategic business roadmap. They were well beyond thinking of PI as just a hiring tool. They were actively using and thinking of PI as a tool to inspire and engage their teams. As a power user for 10 years before buying The Predictive Index, I know the link between talent and business performance very well. It was surprising just how many people were so fluent in their vision to infuse a talent methodology into their business strategy.
Did you discover a theme where many of the leaders you spoke with were reporting the same issues and difficulties? Definitely. The biggest theme involved helping their organizations take PI deeper into the culture. Many clients speak PI lingo throughout their organizations while others are in the process of expanding usage of PI in their organizations. What they had in common was a need to more easily apply PI to specific situations quickly so their organizations would benefit sooner and more broadly from PI.
What is PI doing to address these issues? We created a framework to allow users at each organization to easily get up to speed on PI. We do this by providing useful information at a specific point in time that helps a casual user solve their immediate need. This builds confidence and gains more advocates around our champions. By creating value for more casual users at an organization on a daily basis, receptivity to progressive talent management methodologies goes way, way up. This helps the organization mature much faster on their strategic quest to attract and engage talent.
What is PI Insights? PI Insights is a key piece of our methodology to help clients. It complements our top notch science, interactive software, and highly rated professional development workshops. PI Insights are a series of reports that address the most common practical points of need requested by our clients. Each of these reports is designed specifically for a non-PI power user to consume. Each report automatically customizes to each person or situation so it is very usable and super valuable. As a benefit, each report reinforces the best practices within our methodology to help clients build a self-aware talent culture.
Please tell me more about these new reports. Let’s start with the PI Placard. It is best thought of as a ‘cheat sheet’ that is posted on an employee’s workstation or office door giving co-workers guidance on how to best interact with them. It makes the employee more effective because people will interact with them in a more purposeful way. And it helps co-workers be more productive by improving the interaction with the employee. As an example, imagine you’re a new employee at a company, wouldn’t it be great to have this cheat sheet available before you engaged with your co-workers. We have them all over our office and they are great for newbies and veterans! What’s so cool about it is that it helps everyone every day. Clients have been making versions of the Placard using clipart for a decade. We even did this when I was a client!
The PI Personal Development Chart (PDC), the name is pretty descriptive. Our vision starts by helping people understand themselves by becoming more self-aware. This forms the foundation of good teams and a good work culture. The PDC is meant as an honest jump start to that important self-reflection conversation we all have with ourselves. It’s also a wonderful framework to start demystifying co-workers’ behaviors since the PDC is built on the same framework used throughout our methodology. We recommend new clients provide these for all employees when they get started, and for newly hired employees as part of the onboarding process.
What other new features and tools is PI coming out with this year? We’re currently working on a state-of-the-art translation management engine that will allow us to better serve our global client base. We support more than 70 languages and operate in over 140 countries, so this is really important work for us. We’ll also be adding new report types that will help our clients more quickly interpret PI results. We also expect to continue developing our API and integration capabilities to help our growing roster of software partners bring PI to clients in powerful new ways. It’s going to be a busy year at PI!
You can also visit the PI Product Blog to learn more about the benefits of PI Insights.
Learn more about Daniel: Prior to The Predictive Index, Daniel was CEO of ExamSoft Worldwide, where he led the acquisition and grew the company’s client base by 400% to become a leading player in higher education assessments, before being acquired by Spectrum Equity in 2014. Prior to ExamSoft, Daniel was the COO of LEDCO/Chargeguard, LLC, Phoenix’s first private equity investment. Daniel first learned of the practical power of The Predictive Index’s tools at LEDCO, and became a lifelong believer. Prior to co-founding Phoenix Strategy Investments in 2002, Daniel worked as a strategy consultant for The Boston Consulting Group. He previously served as country manager for Nabors Drilling International in Mozambique and later Colombia. Daniel has a personal passion for improving public education and actively participates in reform efforts. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas, and a MBA from Harvard Business School.
