5 Quotes from Matylda & The Little Prince That (If Applied) Can Change Your Perspective on Life
Lessons on Design and Life from Matylda, Lead Product Researcher at OLX Group
“Now, more than ever, change is the only constant. Get comfortable with the unknown. You can’t plan your life with 100% accuracy. That’s the advice I would give my childhood self,” states Matylda, Lead Research Designer at OLX Group.
“You must go beyond the surface and look deeper. My favorite book is The Little Prince. It reminds me of the importance of curiosity, open-mindedness and empathy, especially in the context of driving business value through innovation, customer strategy, and service design.”
To find truths and meaning, you can’t make quick judgments. You must explore and welcome the new and unknown, as a child would. Like the Fox tells the Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
During our discussion with Matylda, we talk more about getting comfortable with change and learning through exploration. We also cover her career path, her work as Lead Product Researcher, and all the great things ahead for OLX Group.
In each section, we’ve added one of Matylda’s favourite quotes from The Little Prince to connect all the wonderful ideas Matylda discussed. We hope it inspires you!
“I am who I am and I have the need to be.”
We’ll return to where it all began for Matylda.
“I’ve always had a fascination with people and their stories. As a child, I always liked to explore old boxes full of dust and old family photographs. I spent hours and hours looking at these old photos and asking my family about the people who appeared in them: ‘Who are they? Where are they now? What were their passions and dreams?’ That’s what led me to psychology. I wanted to deepen my knowledge of people’s behaviors and motivations,” tells Matylda.
From boxes of photos to studying psychology at the University of Granada in Spain, Matylda’s curiosity has driven her to new landscapes. While at university, she learned about how psychology could play a role in business and culture building. She also discovered photography and cinema, as well as diving deeper into art and design.
“During my last year of university studies, while interviewing for an internship with Telefonica in Barcelona, they told me about all they’re doing with UX design. During that interview I had an ‘aha’ moment: I realized UX combined my passion for Psychology and design.”
Following that internship, Matylda joined the UX team at Telefonica. In this role, she fell in love with being a UX researcher and started exploring everything in the field. That was the time she discovered service design.
“I became very interested in services design, as it’s a very strategic field and involves aligning an organization’s operations to better meet the needs of customer journeys.”
Matylda makes a good point about the power of service design. If used correctly, it can deliver great value to a business. Here’s how one expert in service design puts it:
“This is the crux of service design. It is the behind the scenes goings-on (processes, governance, organisational structures, change management, policies, culture even) that need to be designed and crafted in a human centred way such that a human centred front-of-stage experience can be delivered. And to do this well, that person needs to have a greater sense of business knowledge & acumen, blended with the core talents of being a designer; creativity, critical thinking and collaboration.”
Seeing the growing value of services design, Matylda decided to follow her curiosity and take a more formal jump into services design. This is what led her to move to London.
So, she took a job at BCG Digital Ventures, where she worked across a variety of industries while starting new ventures from the ground up. For example, she worked on a blockchain digital venture with the aim of creating a secure and transparent route-to-market for ethically-sourced artisanal and small-scale mined diamonds from Africa.
“I learned a lot at BCG DV. I consulted to clients in industries ranging from construction and machinery to luxury and fashion. Eventually, I felt I would like to have more ownership over the projects I worked on and decided to move to the client side.”
The lesson here from Matylda is powerful: Never settle. When it’s time for a change, take the leap. That’s how you move forward.
“All grown-ups were once children…but only few of them remember it.”
Oh, the days of our childhood. We can’t forget the sense of wonder we had then.
“I joined OLX Group because it feels like a startup here. I feel I am having a real impact. It’s fun imagining the possibilities and then working to create that future,” says Matylda.
Coming to OLX Group renewed Matylda’s sense of wonder. OLX Group is working to shape the future of trade to unlock the hidden value in everything. Serving 300 million people across more than 20 brands and 30 countries, users come onto the OLX group platforms to buy and sell cars, find housing, get jobs, buy and sell household goods, and much more.
“We’re building the OLX group platforms into something special, a place full of hidden treasures. Although we’ve grown in size, we still maintain an agile way of thinking and working. We emphasize user-centered design. At the same time, the organization’s maturation process forces the need to structure certain areas, such as business customer support.”
To Matylda, success for the OLX Group depends on keeping that youthful spirit, much like the story of The Little Prince advises.
“But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.”
As a Lead Research Designer, Matylda spends a lot of time getting to know the users. She wants to understand their needs and pain points. This requires curiosity, empathy and an open-minded approach.
“You have to understand the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. You can never stop asking why, exactly like the Little Prince who never stops asking questions and never once let go of a question, after asking it for the first time,” attests Matylda.
To better solve those needs, Matylda has joined forces with data science and product analytics. This way, they can understand behaviours more deeply.
“It’s really all about exploring as a team. We need to bring qualitative and quantitative together. Our UX team is working on providing the Data Science team with a deeper understating of our user’s feelings and motivations so we can get a complete picture (raw data is never enough). We’ve had to keep an open mind and put ourselves in our user’s shoes, as we’ve arrived at some unexpected results.” details Matylda.
All this work is meant to understand the motivations and wants of the users. And while it requires a lot of research and data, success hinges on a human-centric approach and being of service.
A blog post on service design sums this notion up well:
“Companies that see themselves as products and a brand; they will struggle. Companies that see themselves as providing a service — or better, acting IN service — will thrive.”
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
At any moment, folks are searching for hidden treasures on OLX Group platforms across the world, from Poland to India to Brazil. Matylda spends her time understanding these users and building a better platform for them.
“To use that quote from The Little Prince as a metaphor. All our data and learnings symbolize the rock pile. What we build with it is the cathedral,” says Matylda.
In collaboration with the Data Science and Product teams and using all the qualitative and quantitative data they’ve combined, Matylda and the UX team have begun the B2C Segmentation Operation. The purpose of building this out is to create business user groups based on their behavior. The fruits of this project will support operations across the company, especially product development, strategy, marketing, and sales.
“For instance, we’ve found what we call prosumers (a group between consumers and professional sellers). They’re big clients of OLX Group platforms in terms of the volume of items sold, but not necessarily when it comes to revenue”.
Identifying sellers like these has enabled Matylda and the team to better segment users on the OLX Group platforms. They’re doing more than just segmenting sellers based on business size and volume and frequency of sales. They also created different behavioural profiles based on the users’ sales strategy and business maturity.
“We’re refining clusters of information and now have a more nuanced way of looking at sellers on the platform. All this work stems from our focus on collaboration between teams and the use of real-time data modeling. We’re still building that cathedral, and it’s looking better the more we explore and create.”
“And I love to listen to the stars at night. It is like listening to five hundred million little bells.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unexpected changes to the OLX Group. And Matylda’s embrace of this change has led her research to surprising places.
“COVID-19 has forced us to work remotely. Remote work has allowed us to include a way more diverse pool of profiles in our research. Research sessions done only at our offices are now managed remotely, which means users from all across Poland can participate.”
With so many different markets and so many different types of users within each market, Matylda and the team have focused on inclusiveness with the OLX Group platforms. This requires keeping an open mind. As the quote from The Little Prince says, you should listen to all the stars!
Some of the guidelines in this article summarize how the team at OLX is building a more inclusive product. The design team is:
- Looking for inequities, which requires challenging assumptions and screening for diversity during research
- Thoughtfully address sensitive topics by being conscious of language and understanding the impact of researcher biases
- Putting stakeholders in users’ shoes and staying committed to the OLX Group mission of empowering people to upgrade their lives
“There’s no limit on where our users can come from. We must take steps to serve everyone.”
“Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”
Matylda often reflects on her work at OLX Group and all of this change throughout her career and life. She stays motivated by remembering her personal mission and purpose.
“I want to empower people to use their own resources and become their best self. That’s why I’ve decided to become a certified breathworker,” affirms Matylda.
Matylda not only wants to empower people through her work at OLX Group, but also in her personal life. She’s big into yoga, meditation, and surfing. And she wants to help people explore their passions and find happiness and fulfillment. During her time at BCG DV, she took a 3 months sabbatical from her career in order to improve self-consciousness, bring out her potential to achieve new goals, and focus on meditation, breath-work and surfing.
“I’m really into caring for your mental health. Recently, I became a certified breathing coach. I want to help people live better.”
To bring it all back, living better also depends on embracing change.
“There’s no clear path from A to B. To get to a beautiful destination, you need the right mindset and work ethic.”
Surf the waves
That concludes our discussion with Matylda. We hope The Little Prince quotes have inspired you and we hope you’ve learned a lot about the power of service design and what the future holds for the OLX Group.
Remember: The essential things are invisible to the eye. Surf along the waves and keep looking out on the horizon. You’ll find the hidden treasures.
