After nearly twenty-five years at Microsoft, longtime executive Julie Larson-Green is joining Utah unicorn Qualtrics as its chief experience officer.
Larson-Green will oversee product design and product experience, people operations, hiring and talent development in the CXO role at Qualtrics, which was valued at $2.7 billion in April 2017. Larson-Green will work out of Qualtrics' Seattle office, which the company recently anointed its second headquarters, reporting directly to CEO and cofounder Ryan Smith.
"To have someone who has built products that have impacted millions of people, who has an experience management title, and they still want to work? That's hard to find," says Smith. "Julie is renowned for building amazing teams and culture within those teams."
Larson-Green had taken time off earlier in the year to recover from spinal cord surgery before announcing her departure last month. She'd led the Windows 8 redesign and helped bring ribbons to Office in her time at Microsoft, overseeing all of Windows after Steven Sinofsky left the company in 2012 and then working to bring artificial intelligence tools to Office. "The things I've really enjoyed the most are when I can work on building great teams and great quality products and experiences, and this is an opportunity to focus on those two areas," Larson-Green says. "I've done a lot of mentoring with startups, and this is a chance to do that in a new setting."
Like a startup's founding story, Larson-Green and Smith have their own fable-worthy yarn of how they met. Several years ago, Larson-Green's husband, an academic, met Smith in the airport and recognized Qualtrics as the survey tool that he used at his university. A week later, Smith sent him a company hat and t-shirt. Then a few months later, Larson-Green was at a senior leadership event led by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in which a handful of startups presented to Microsoft leadership, including Qualtrics. Larson-Green showed Smith a picture of the Qualtrics hat texted to her by her husband. "Ryan definitely made a good impression," says Larson-Green, who says she was also impressed by the company's philanthropic efforts. "But what really got me excited was the culture of the company. They have a strong vision but they're open to input, and it's a growing category."
Qualtrics got its start in 2002 when Smith, his father (also an academic), code whiz brother and a college roommate started working on survey tools for academia out of a Utah garage. Profitable for a decade, the company raised its first outside capital in 2012 and has since evolved into the "XM," or experience management, category of software, providing employee feedback and engagement tools that go beyond simple online surveys. In April, months after announcing its XM platform, Qualtrics unveiled tools to distill all that raw data into actionable business insights. After hiring Microsoft veteran Zig Serafin last October as COO, the company added a CFO with initial public offering experience in November.
For more on the rise of Utah cloud companies, see our Forbes July feature here.
With Larson-Green's hiring, the Qualtrics management team is roughly filled out, says Smith, but watchers shouldn't expect a quick path to IPO, he claims. "This doesn't change that," he says. "We could've gone public last year."
As CXO of a company looking to evangelize and grow the customer experience category, Larson-Green will face a challenge of not just determining best practices at Qualtrics, but then embedding best practices into Qualtrics' products to share with its customer base. Too often, companies still build products without a customer in mind and without close integration of teams such as engineering, product and sales and marketing, she says.
"This role is a nascent role, where some think it's customer service related, some that it's user related or now I'm hearing design related. To me it's the intersection of all those things that creates a great experience for the customer," says Larson-Green. "What I see as the potential of XM addresses a need of big products with billions of customers. I have a lot of ideas, and I think this is a great opportunity."
