Hi, I'm Zoe Hoffman. I'm a Senior Manager of Customer Experience and Innovation Strategy.
So experience can be ambiguous. It can mean a number of different things and in different job descriptions. From there you can kind of create your own path depending on where you want to focus. We have a number of people within experience who focus on research pretty heavily and how to apply those insights into the work we're doing. We have other folks who think about specifically how employees behave within organizations and what types of infrastructure of tools and systems they need to interact with to do their jobs well.
I would say at a base level if you are in customer experience and innovation consulting type of world, curiosity to me is really the biggest skill overall. Like really wanting to learn, really wanting to understand and synthesize. Again, what makes people tick? How do people interact with their outside world? What are ways that we can introduce digital products and services to actually help them just live their lives? So I think that spark of curiosity is probably the most important foundational skill to have. And then I do think just an ability to collaborate and learn along the way using some of those customer-centric processes that we have and the ability to collaborate across different disciplines.
I think one of the reasons why I came to PS is I wanted to get closer to actually making things real and getting them closer to launch. And that was one of the values I found when I came is that, again, we're not sort of separated as experience strategy or innovation strategy in our own spot. We are staffed on these cross-functional teams and I get to see what the product folks and the technologists are doing, how they're actually turning my work into something that will be a feature that customers will eventually see. One of the things I love most about PS is work-life balance. People really respect boundaries. I've realized that you can grow your career without having to work 80 hours a week and really sacrifice your personal life. Leaders I know are really conscientious about this, especially within the CX&I discipline. They make sure you take vacation, they check in, and I really appreciate that because you don't have to sacrifice as many things if you find that there's an ability to grow here without having to totally run yourself ragged.
Of course, you have to do it.