Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
IIIMPACT is a Product UX Design and Development Strategy Consulting Agency.
We emphasize strategic planning, intuitive UX design, and better collaboration between business, design to development. By integrating best practices with our clients, we not only speed up market entry but also enhance the overall quality of software products. We help our clients launch better products, faster.
We explore topics about product, strategy, design and development. Hear stories and learnings on how our experienced team has helped launch 100s of software products in almost every industry vertical.
Many times have we seen where Klim made a feature, a product owner thought that the or the CEO, whoever thought the feature was gonna be valuable, and it turns out nobody's using it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. All the time. In the world of UX, UI, we have a lot of designers out there that that really generate beautiful work. It's creative work, and they're talented artists. But I think where they struggle is make that make their process understandable to those that are not designers.
Speaker 2:Business leaders are not designers by nature. They're business people. They understand the problem. They are subject matter experts in the industries they work in. What I found a lot of times in service or product opportunities, there's a lot of risk associated with taking new ideas to market.
Speaker 2:And what I found is that you can reduce risk through a design process. Alright.
Speaker 1:Welcome to another episode of the Inexperience Impact podcast, where we interview one of the talented designers on our team.
Speaker 2:Where where are they?
Speaker 1:As you know, we are we're filming a few different episodes where we go through and ask specific questions around the members of our team so the audience, anybody listening, can get to know who they are, what they do, if they do anything. And today, we have the infamous Scott Harden, who's been with us for how long now? Say
Speaker 2:Since, 2019, I believe.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:2020 19. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, Scott's been he's been my what we call the the troublemaker who who's the chief product strategist or is it chief troublemaker product strategist? One of those.
Speaker 2:I think they they somewhere, I've seen it written that I was the chief product design strategist.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:But I'd like to tell the clients that I make good trouble helping them, figure out solutions to problems they didn't even know they had.
Speaker 1:Well, welcome to the show. And, Scott, let's let's just jump right in and tell me a little bit about how you got started in UX and what kind of what piqued your interest in getting into the whole user experience design and product strategy?
Speaker 2:Well, that could just take up the whole show, but I'm Scott Harton, chief product design strategist for Impact, and I've been with the organization since 2019. Makoto and I have been friends in the industry for many years prior to that and where we worked together at various, you know, agencies and and projects. And so he felt that he felt that it was important to bring me in and mess things up, so that's what I did. But my journey to to UX, it's a meandering one. It's not something that I went to school for.
Speaker 2:I went to UCLA Film School back in the late nineties and graduated with a film degree, and I came out. And for a number of years after film school, I was a film editor, and I was editing zero budget, films, trying to get them into Sundance, various film festivals. But many of my colleagues, it was hard to live in LA and make a living. I didn't have a rich uncle, and so I had to try to make it in LA while these projects that essentially, you know, were almost 0 to no pay to little low pay. And so from that, I was trying to find a side hustle.
Speaker 2:So I ended up working in this was 90 6, 97, and so, you may have heard about something called the Internet. It came around at that time, and so I was able to teach myself HTML. And I started, get getting into kind of a little design career, and so I ended up, designing web pages, the likes of which you would cringe to look at today, but but I ended up working for clients like, Liz Claiborne, Lucky Jeans, SKECHERS. So a lot of fashion in LA was the opportunity. And so I came sort of had a little name for myself as a early innovator as far as that goes.
Speaker 2:And ran my own started my own business really early on, kind of a little web design agency, and started to make good money doing that. And then as the more people came about and kind of it became more competitive, I ended up partnering up with a partner. We had been on the shores of Venice Beach. We created a Subvergent Media Studios, and we ended up developing really early ecommerce platform and we sold it to a number of clients and that went for a while until the dotcomboom really around the turn of the century, had to lay off all our friends and then my wife is a designer, she was she hated her job. So why don't we work together?
Speaker 2:So I think we created, at the time, one of the first, what I would call, UX, UI agencies around, and we ended up going to work for Mattel, Fisher Price, a lot of education kind of work. We ended up developing some early digital apps for Burger King, Taco Bell, partnered with a few larger agencies like Razorfish and and M&A, that kind of thing. So you create
Speaker 1:so did you create the first Barbie dream house?
Speaker 2:We did. A lot of, like, ecommerce stuff. So it really came up to the world of ecommerce, I would say. You know, we had kids, and it felt less risky to put our eggs in in one basket. So from there, I ended up going to work for a agency called MooDai, very strange name.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I was hired to be sort of a creative director, but early on, I was thrown into some projects that were more, process oriented than deliverables oriented. 1 was with they sent me in as a oh my gosh. It was a sink or swim, low prep, white label project for McKinsey Company, which is a global consultancy. And they said, Scott, we don't know what the job is, but you're gonna go to Cisco for a year, and you're gonna work Monday through Thursday on-site. And it's tons of money, and you're just gonna figure it out.
Speaker 2:Figure out what they need and offer a solution. Well, I got in there on day 1, and I had never worked for a global consultancy before. And I was it they were they were asking for somebody to basically develop, you know, the entire program from understanding the problem in the business to coming up with a design solution and determining ROI for that return on investment for that. And I had done bits and pieces of that stuff, but I had never really been somebody that had to really own the own own the product from the beginning to the end. I shat my pants on that.
Speaker 2:I really just it was so far outside of my comfort zone. I had no script, and, plus, I was working with people that have gone to Harvard, Oxford, every Ivy League you can think of. And so I'd say for 2 weeks, I was pretty much, like, not sleeping at night trying to get my act together. But somehow in the world, I think of just working with clients, having really had a good experience serving clients and understanding them and listening to them and coming up with with strategies and solutions. I learned to listen first and then, you know, develop be kinda look at things from a human centered and got it together and really ended up starting to work together with this team really well, and they appreciated my perspectives on things.
Speaker 2:And before you know it, 6 months went by, and I'm leading the program for Cisco, you know, sales to accelerate their their Internet router business. And so I fell in love with I think at that point, what happened is I really fell in love with the intersection of design and business. We have a lot of you you know, in the world of UX, UI, there's a lot of design. We have a lot of designers out there that that really generate beautiful work. It's creative work, and it and they're talented artists, so to speak.
Speaker 2:But I think where they struggle is extending that process to or make that make their process understandable to those that are not designers. Design, I would say, by and large, design is not a very accessible process. And in some cases, you know, the they, I think, let experts do what they do. But, on the other side of the coin, business leaders are not designers by nature. They're business people.
Speaker 2:They understand the problem. They are subject matter experts in the industries they work in, but they're also not sure they've a lot of what I found a lot of times in service or product opportunities. There's a lot of risk associated with taking new ideas to market. And a lot of times, there's this sort of this is sort of your swim kind of mentality. And what I found is that that you can reduce risk through a design process.
Speaker 2:There's a process called design thinking, which is really centered around this kind of came out of IDEO in the mid 2000, and it was perfected at Stanford University d School, where you reduce risk by by looking at innovation and new opportunities through a human centered lens, and you basically prototype your ideas as quickly and as simply as as you can to validate a good idea. And in the process of doing that, you bring in an interdisciplinary approach where you bring in people across the organization, and they and they work together, as design practices to come up with innovative solutions. And it what it does is it makes the design process less precious, and it makes it more of a collaborative effort. And you get I think I fell in love with that process at McKinsey, and I think I became a better designer for it. And I also became learned how to demystify that process for people who not don't normally think like designers.
Speaker 2:So all of that is to say that I went through that journey. I spent 2 years living out of a suitcase, and then that opportunity ended. When I came home one day, my kids jumped in my arms and said, I'm so glad, Danny, that you're done with that crummy job where you were never at home. And I went to work for this gentleman, the co current at Impact. And it's been a it's been a wild ride taking that expertise, bringing it to Impact, helping the clients at Impact, and I and that's where I am today.
Speaker 2:So it's been a long meandering journey to get where I am. It did not I did not. It's hard to tell up and comers. Don't follow my path because I certainly, did not take the straight the straight route together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, that's a that's a very short story there, Scott. I I mean, do you want more time to
Speaker 2:tell? There's no way to compress it anymore because there's just too many pieces to it. And it's really it takes that is the short story, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's I like the point that you made, especially, you know, what we teach our team and what I've noticed maturing in in in UX is, yeah, you just don't wanna be so focused on just the user when you're designing the application, but you have to involve all the other parties, the development constraints, the business goals, you know, marketing, everything because that plays a huge role into what the application looks like. And so we you know, that just naturally gets into what you and I have now done for many clients, and we've evolved it, and I think it's gotten to a point where it's pretty pretty valuable. We like you said, we're we're de risking, prioritizing as quickly as possible in a in just a matter of days would normally take months and what we call our product immersion process.
Speaker 1:And I don't know if you wanna get into a little bit. I know you got into a little bit before, but maybe tell some success stories of how we've you know, what clients face when developing their product and some of the the common pitfalls and what we've done to help mitigate a lot of those risks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think what I found when I went to work for Impact is that some of the clients that Impact already had were moving forward on on, you know, delivering on on on stuff. You know? In other words, they had some that they had generated or had come from internal or external inputs. And they were making things.
Speaker 2:They were just churning stuff out, and that's fine. I mean, that's productivity to this to an extent. But what I found is with some of the clients, they weren't really they were doing a lot of work, but and I I was looking at it and saying, you know, there's not a lot I'm not seeing a real focus on value and customer value. And why are we making this stuff? Why are why is the business churning out what they're churning?
Speaker 2:What to what end? And so I I said, in some of these cases, let's take a step back and let's look at why you know, what is the why behind the work that Impact is designing? Now clients were not necessarily asking Impact. Ask the why question. They were, I think, relying on impact to execute on directions and requirements that were being and that's fine.
Speaker 2:That's what, you know, agencies can sometimes do. UXUI agencies can be the executor or the implementer of someone else's strategy. But when there isn't a strategy or the strategy is a weak one or it's a top down, you know, middle management strategy from or or And
Speaker 1:not communicated well or assumed. You know?
Speaker 2:It may not be communicated well. And the other the part of it is that the folks who have to make the stuff that that comes from that, it aren't clear on or don't have on of why we're doing this and what success looks like. It's there's not a lot of excitement around doing the work. So I when I came in, I said, look. You know, Makoto, I think we need to, and some of these clients, try to inject a little bit of intention into the work that we're doing.
Speaker 2:That's risky. You know? I mean, you come to a client has hired us to do a certain thing, and now we've got somebody coming in who's saying, well, let's pump the brakes. Let's take a step back, maybe sit down with you and help on and help partner with you on pro our product or your product strategy. We'd like to be more of a partner in that.
Speaker 2:We'd like to help you because you have experience in building, you know, or through our various all of us working together in our various pursuits to this job have experience in building effective products. And so I think a few of our early engagements when I was on board, and this is where the chief troublemaker piece comes into it, is to try to inject a little bit of of product strategy into our service model. And I you know, to be honest with you, I think there was some pushback from some clients. It's like, woah. You know, I'm staying your lane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you think that is? I mean, what is what's been the job?
Speaker 2:It's trust. You know? It's that that we didn't hire you to do that. So you're coming back and offering us something we didn't hire you to do. Completely reasonable for a client to say you're getting out of your lane a little bit on this.
Speaker 2:But I think that we had so there's defensiveness. This is an industry where people prove their worth, and you're only as good as the last thing you did. And and so I think, you know, people that are less little less secure in their position in the company or their middle management, they haven't been given you know, people that we're dealing with aren't in a position to affect change in their organization. And so they would feel in a little bit of pushback in that. You know?
Speaker 2:You're asking to to make changes and escalate, you know, a change in process that I don't even have an authority to give you. So all of that is completely reasonable, but I think we did have a few clients that said, okay. You know, let's talk about that. And so what I did early on is try to I think one of the things as a designer that I've evolved in my career has been less about that I started making you know, as a designer early on, I started making things. I delivered things.
Speaker 2:I created wireframes. I built you know, I applied visual design to, you know, low fidelity work and ship it to clients, and that was great. But now moved into more of rather than a purveyor of output, I'm more of a purveyor of process and outcomes. And that's just as much design as it is, you know, pixel moves around on the screen. It's just a different part of the process.
Speaker 2:And so what I try to do with these clients is say, okay. Let's start with a process that gets us all on the same page, helps, communicate and articulate the strategy of where we're going both in the short term and the long term. So we did that a few times, a couple of engagements where we said, okay. You wanna do something new with your product, your existing product. So let's sit down, and let's look at what we wanna do from so let's humanize this process, and let's start with the business value.
Speaker 2:So that means, what are you what is the business trying to do or achieve? What is the outcome that you're trying to achieve with this initiative? So answer and so they were able to answer those questions. Okay. Great.
Speaker 2:And so now we have essentially a a few articulated outcomes from doing the work. Now, you know, we make this stuff for people, and so let's talk about them and in the form of either customers or users or both. What do they want? What do we think they want? And in some cases, the business would know that answer.
Speaker 2:But in some cases, they might only assume that answer. And so what I have learned I've learned in my career is let's not get let's not get blocked by what we don't what that we don't absolutely. Let's make some guesses. And then we'll go back later and validate those guesses and make sure that we're we were right. But let's just move forward.
Speaker 2:So I have them then as a second step say, what is the customer value on this? What do we think what change or what behavior change are we gonna initiate with this new work? And then we would answer those questions. Then the next step is that we would say, based if we know what the business wants, we know what the we know what we think the customer wants, now we can start to articulate solutions that will get us to those assumptions, those outcomes. And what that does is it focuses if we talk about a new software product, you know, all software products have features.
Speaker 2:So now when we talk about features, we're constrained in the lens of a really specified set of outcomes for the customer and business. And I always say that creativity thrives in constraints, so that if you tell a group of people in the organization, hey. Brainstorm a solution. We've got we've got a bunch of problems, but now we need you to come up with a bunch of solutions. You're just gonna be all over the map.
Speaker 2:And so if we've been able to really articulate the problem, now we can really, constrain the solutions that we come up with because we know the problem that we're trying to solve, and we know the outcomes that we're moving towards. If what I'm saying starts to sound familiar to business people, because there's nothing new under the sun, and this is in fact a lean canvas that we're talking about. So in the world of 6 sigma and lean thinking, a lean canvas is about all about this. There's a, you know, 7 or 8 step process, and that's effectively what we're bringing to the customer. And so then from the feature from a set of features that then we can narrow down to, we believe these are the core features that will address this problem, both for the business and the customer.
Speaker 2:We can then, at that point, really hone in on a set of features that would then we can sketch ideas towards. And all of this leads to a product road map that's in the user and business focused. And we can triage what we did how we're what we're going to do as impact traditionally as impact. We will then take those solutions identified and do the work we've always done, which is to build wireframes, prototypes, you know, fully fleshed out designs. But then the work is focused and all of it maps back to that initial intention.
Speaker 2:And so we don't have to worry that we're building something that's way out in the field that that is you know, doesn't have purpose behind it. And then that answers the why question. Now we've gotten to a point, we've done this enough times with customers, where we have kind of a thing going. It's been successful. And so we started how can we brand service as a solution kind of, you know, model?
Speaker 2:We can we can what kind of name can we apply to this that will that's something we can brand, something we can own? And so we came up with the name Immersion. And so now when we engage with a client, they throw Scott Bull, Scott Hurdon in first, and the first thing that we do is we get a group of 8 to 10 ideally in the organization. And it's not just product team. It's product owner.
Speaker 2:It's operations. It's the if we can get the c that's great. But we can get members of the c suite, finance, sales, support. It's gotta be in inter in marketing. It's gotta be in inter interdisciplinary group.
Speaker 1:And the leaders who make decisions.
Speaker 2:That's right. These are the people that can actually affect the change that we design when we come up with the product road map. So we call it immersion. It's the we insist now that this is the way to kick off a project with impact. And the biggest and clients are when they call us up and wanna work with us, they're they often will say, let's get to work.
Speaker 2:But we always say, woah. Engage with us for a few days to your team because the time you're gonna spend in the in these in this workshop with us is gonna pay dividends down the road because Yeah.
Speaker 1:It sounds like a lot, but this is actually done within less than a week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, then that's the thing. Right? So the pushback that you might get was, well, I don't have 3 solid you know, if it takes 3 solid days to do this. But this the pushback the pushback from us is, otherwise, we're going around doing discovery, trying to get requirements, you know, talking to individuals.
Speaker 2:One person's views may be different from another, which is always the case. And so we think, let's get us all together in a room. And often, it's we call it it's almost like design therapy because you'll find out that leaders of the organization aren't always on the same page even though they tell you that they are.
Speaker 1:It's ego busting design therapy.
Speaker 2:Well, that's it. Right? Like, I'm glad you brought up the word ego because it's like there's a I mean, running a company, there's there has to be some ego. You know? You got you're entrusted to do some stuff, and you're really you've come up through the world and you've got as you mature through your career, you develop an ego.
Speaker 2:It's human nature. Our job is to go in there and say, we're all about, we're in this together, which is often a cliche, but the reality is we have each other's back. This is a if you think about servant leadership, a lot of people that I run into that I think are effective leaders in the organization, They take on a leadership style that's about, I can't do this without my team, that it this isn't about this is about we. It's not about me. And I actually find that as you if you can embody that style of leadership, you actually become a stronger leader rather than somebody who says this is all because of me.
Speaker 2:It's my ego. It's top down.
Speaker 1:You're leading from the back versus a front.
Speaker 2:If you lead from the back, I stand behind my team, and I'm we're gonna win because I enable a process by which you, as people who work for me, feel about shared ownership and success. I'm gonna share my power, and I'm gonna share my success with my team. And as a result, we're gonna move forward together. We've got each other's back, And you just I found that you just that's the way to go. You have better outcomes.
Speaker 2:You have loyalty like there's no tomorrow. You have a shared purpose. You have a community. You have positive morale. I mean, these are all things that come out of servant leadership.
Speaker 2:And to your credit, Makoto, and this I don't wanna, you know, puff it.
Speaker 1:Oh, please do.
Speaker 2:Wow. But you foster that kind of culture and impact. And you stand behind your team, and you're insanely loyal to the people who do the work. You recognize that we're experts at what we do, and you you let success happen. And so I think that's the kind of maturity that we wanna impart in organizations that we work with is take a step back, let your team shine.
Speaker 2:Everybody nobody knows everything, but together, we're gonna figure this out. And it I think it hasn't been successful every time, but it's been successful enough where we know we're on the right path. And people say that when once they we've kicked off an engagement in this way, in the right way with Immersion, that they never they're insanely loyal to us as an agency, and so they're you know, working with Impact has been a game changer for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think there's a few definitely a few points there. You know, from working with especially, I'm not gonna name which client, but we have a a one wonderful client that we work with, an individual that we work with a couple times, and he's even said, I get it now. It's something that, you know, that depends on your maturity of your organization, depends on the egos of people in the room. You know this is something that is hard to do, it's hard to infect change, and there's gonna be resistance towards any type of strategic and process change within their organization.
Speaker 1:And we've seen this until what the one client who has said, you don't know what good is until you've gone through it. And so your perception of what you think you need to be done to succeed is different than after you've gone through what good UX, what good project strategy is, and this is something that if we can impart this process to people who aren't sure, who've never gone through with it, but then see the value because it isn't you're not investing that much time as compared to the alternative. And if you invest just in this amount of time to bring people together, to really leave the egos at the room, forget the we know what we know mantra, and really try to go through a good process that we've really helped a lot of clients help launch their products. I think they see the value. I mean, really fast, they see this value happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, like, I think if I touched on something that you said is it builds a culture and then so it doesn't stop with immersion. So in other words so we'd be you know, if we've gone through a successful immersion with the client, then now we've built this team with them. It's not about impact versus the client. It's about us together.
Speaker 2:So it's a you know, I said this before. It's kind of a we mentality. We're all one team working together for success, business and customer success. And then now we form this this bond. And so now we there's we go to work.
Speaker 2:And in our process, what we try to do is separate SureFire bets that we know are their customers will love, and we and so we don't need to, you know, we don't need to mess around. We can just get we can just get to work. And then there's other work that is out of the immersion process. We've we've come up with some good ideas, but we don't like, goes back to that point I made is we think it these things will be valuable and innovative, but we don't know for sure. And so to build something out that's if if you put it in a bucket of we don't know for sure and need to start building that and shipping it, Well, that's there's some risk there because we might ship something with the client just because it's bullshit.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use this. This isn't this this doesn't solve a problem for me. And so then oops. And that oops might have cost the organization a lot of money. It could have been 1,000,000 of dollars later that you find that out.
Speaker 2:So what we try to do is segregate the work between we we're not we think so, but we're not sure to we're pretty damn sure. And so the first track that they that we don't know, we're not sure, goes into a track of work called discovery. And then we have and then concurrently, we segment the stuff that, hey. This is pretty we're pretty damn sure this is valuable to a track called implementation. And so discovery so if we look at the discovery track, it's about developing the idea to make sure we've got it right.
Speaker 2:And so we follow and so then we go to work in things that and many agents, there's there's nothing proprietary here. We start doing things like design sprints. When we talk about design sprints, they're really concept rapid prototyping. And so we go through a a traditional process. You may have heard of it, the sprint, Jake Knapp, the sprint book.
Speaker 2:It's a Google Ventures process by which you spend a few days together and you take an idea and you target opportunity and then you sketch out everybody sketches their ideas and then we vote on the best ideas and then we build a prototype. And then we test that prototype with customers. So we take this sort of half baked idea that that came out of immersion, and we say, let's take that idea. Let's build a prototype, and let's sit with the customer. And if the cuss after we spend a few days with that.
Speaker 2:And so if the customer looks at the prototype and says, not feeling it. Well, in a waterfall world where we spent a bunch of money and they tell us that, oh my god. That would be bad. But in our world of rapid prototyping, that's actually a gift because we spent 3 to 4 days coming to the outcome of, yeah, this isn't that valuable to me. Okay.
Speaker 2:We can abandon it. You know? We spent no time. We haven't built we haven't written any code. And when I say rapid prototypes, these things are like sketches that are stitched together just enough of the ideas that we can take it to a customer and say, are we on the right track or not?
Speaker 2:Now if we're on the right track, that's great because now we can take that into then we can drop that I that, gosh, we didn't know idea to the other track of work, which is called implementation. And so that that segues into the implementation track. So if we look at that track of work, that's filled with stuff that has been proven. We can establish definition and requirements, or if you're in the user story world, agile world, we can write user stories against. We can really break down that into a very tactical stream of work.
Speaker 2:And then impact goes straight to work in terms of wireframes, high fidelity design, artifacts. We can apply, you know, design systems to that stuff. It's the it's what one might say the, you know, kind of meat and potatoes of UX UI design. And that all of that is very focused on trying to make something as quickly as possible and get it out the door to customers. So I find that if organizations and and and keep in mind, a lot of our clients aren't set up that way.
Speaker 2:You know, they've got a very waterfall approach where they, you know, some somebody from on high comes up with business requirements, and then they say, okay. You guys are gonna go build this thing. And everybody starts making, you know, keyboards or mouses or clicking, and they start making things without really having you know, validated a lot of the high risk stuff. And what you find is you just got a lot of turnover in product organizations because somebody spent a bunch of money building a bunch of shit that didn't really catch on with customers, and so risk. And that's typically how we find a client when we engage with them is Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very waterfall process. The risk, the high turnover, people coming and going, and the business is spending a shit ton of money trying to get to that to to that moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How many times have we seen where Climb made a feature, product owner thought that the or the CEO, whoever thought the feature was gonna be valuable, and it turns out nobody's using it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. All the time. And all the time. More often than not, a check. And so we come in and say, look.
Speaker 2:We think of us think of Impact as forget all of the the buzzwords. We're here to reduce your risk. Like, think of us as saviors of derisking your enterprise through design. And if you put it in that lens, customers like us I mean, I mean, not customers, but, you know, people that we work with, product owners, operations folks, product managers, product, you know, product chiefs of product are like, yeah. I mean, that that's something that that I didn't need I mean, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I realized that your true value impact is reducing the risk of my enterprise. And, by the way, you're burning on top of it too. And I, you know, I think that for an organization our size, that's a pretty mature way to look at things. I often say that in some sense, in some of the work we do, we're kind of like a little Manny Mackenzie when it comes to this kind of when especially when it comes to carving out innovation and helping clients accelerate their visions faster. You know, we do what we do.
Speaker 2:We do the work of what organizations who are 50 times the size, charge 50 times as much, are 50 times less agile, you can hire us. We come in. We're your little derisking crackerjack, you know, SWAT team. Drop us, you know, in parachutes into your boardroom. Somebody once said it's like it's from, you know what was that?
Speaker 1:From board to code.
Speaker 2:From board to code. I mean but if you look at that, like, you know, it might be kind of a one off comment, but it's really there's something to it. It's like we can take something that's ethereal and go along the entire design life cycle from ideation, business says, hey. This is a great idea, through innovation, through implementation, and then validation, and deployment. And it's we're there in every stage of the way, and we and that's value.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of organizations that are our size that can deliver on that, and I think that's pretty unique.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think, you know, one one of the questions, obviously, is sets our company apart from others in the industry. And I think you nailed it right there where, you know, some companies will do some of that strategic work upfront, deliver, we're done, good luck with you. And we know after that happens, when development gets in there, when people start to look into things deeper, all these constraints and changes can happen. And if you're not in there during the process, guess what?
Speaker 1:You're gonna have to hire that company back over, charge for all those different changes. We know whatever we recommend, we stand behind. We're not order takers. We have a lot of experience where we know and we wanna suggest. Even if it's hard to hear, what are some good suggestions?
Speaker 1:And if it doesn't work out, we stand behind making sure that we follow through and say, hey. Well, let's come up with a better solution that works within the constraints that we or whatever the feedback is, let's change it to make it for the better.
Speaker 2:I think that the unique one of the unique value propositions of impact is that we have so much skill from strategy to deliver to implementation that we can plug in anywhere in that journey. And it's sure. We'd love to have the entire piece of the pie, right, or the entire pie, I guess, is what I should say. We're just as we're agile enough to come in at any stage in that journey and deliver value. And because we work in such a in such a inclusive way and that we're so accessible and we communicate design really well to the client, I think that it we find that over time, even if we were only brought in for a segment of the design journey, we end up capturing more of it and pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:And, you know, this may sound gushy and mushy, but we've made I think that because of the way we work and that we're so accessible and so approachable, we've made some lifelong friends in the work that we do, you know, and I'm really proud that we in most of the engagements that we have, we've become they become friends. They become members of the family. I mean, you know, each of us go on to do other things in our lives that are not just design related. We get so close to these clients that we share about our private lives with these clients, and they become fans of and vice versa. And so, you know, I remember Makoto and I flew to Houston the other day and, you know, just sat down with our clients in a personal setting, and we they just they're just friends.
Speaker 2:And so all of that has become really that that's why I I love the culture that we have at Impact because it's not, you know, I I haven't seen that everywhere. You know, a lot of people, when I talk to my friends, my colleagues who are in work for other, you know, organizations, they're like, oh, wow. You did that? Oh, you guys are doing that kind of work? I mean, that's just that's amazing.
Speaker 2:I think part of also what makes it work is we're very we're a very lean organization, and and and all of our impactors are very adapted at crossing all kinds of areas of expertise. We're jacks of all trades to some extent. And so
Speaker 1:I think we've been in almost every industry at this point.
Speaker 2:Well, not only every industry, but every discipline within design. So, like, we all can we're all good designers from outputs, standpoint, but but many of us can also, you know, pick up and help with facilitating, you know, these workshops that we do.
Speaker 1:I think you're still the master at the facilitation. If people think it's it's easier to facilitate and to hurt cats, it's not.
Speaker 2:Well, I love doing it. And that's the thing. It's like we talked about this. It's like being a purveyor of process rather than the actual output that the organization creates. I've become a little rusty when it comes to actually picking up Figma and and designing something.
Speaker 2:It takes me, you know, 8 hours that it would take Makoto or someone else an hour to do. I my my tools are, you know, whiteboard markers and sticky notes and voting dots. It's very old school. But that's design all the same. It's just that you're, like I said asset.
Speaker 2:Become the purveyor of the means to the end. And in that work, it's a you just get involved in so many areas of subject matter expertise that it's like business school. You know, you go you engage with the client, and I'm just like, what am I gonna learn in this process that I didn't know? You know, what area of business am I gonna what market am I gonna learn more about just by doing the engagement? Because the process is consistent.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter what it is you're trying to that's why we're it's we're it's sort of like making a product out of the service model that we have because we can apply the same design thinking framework to anything. It doesn't matter whether it could be education. It could be medical. It could be engineering. It could be anything.
Speaker 2:And in fact, the solutions that we come up with don't always have to be digital. They can be service. They can be, operations. You know, we were called at one time to reduce the business outcome was, you know, to reduce, onboarding a new customer 80%. And we came in there, and the solutions some of those solution portfolio solution was digital.
Speaker 2:You know, design a 5 minutes or less, you know, website building tool to get the customer into the ecommerce world really quickly through an innovative wizard. But part of it was also how can the organization deploy hardware to the customer faster. And that's service model, service design. Right? That's operations stuff.
Speaker 2:And those prototypes look different than digital prototypes do. I remember another engagement that we had where, you know, how do we extol the virtue of our in restaurant service offering? And so our and so the solution ended up being create a customer engagement center at the headquarters of the business, and that's totally physical. I mean, it's designing the space. We brought in an architect, a designer to create a three-dimensional walk through what that's that customer engagement center would look like, and that's, you know, not the outcome is not digital.
Speaker 2:The outcome is physical, but the process by which getting to that solution is the same as if it was physical or digital. It does not matter. And that's nice about it because we know the process works. So every client is like, well, my situation is different than anything we see on your website. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter because we're gonna take you through the same immersion. We're gonna take you through the same canvas building. And then when we identify solutions to the problems, the design thinking that we're gonna employ to get to those outcomes is gonna be the same. Maybe the artifact at the end is different, but the process is the same.
Speaker 1:And we've I mean, not only from an immersion process standpoint, but also I mean, we've done groups of what we always recommend is 8 to 10, but it always tends to be much larger. But you've even done immersions at and even, what, KPIs and things like that where we've run through some of those workshops where it could be I think we had, what, 50 people?
Speaker 2:Well yeah. And so there's a different you know, when when a client says, you know, we really have to align the entire organization, and that's over 50 people. Like you said, it's a it's a large group. We and so what we've done in those cases is we rented a you know, or set up in a, like, a hotel or a convention center or something like that. And then it's about breaking the group breaking the groups into sub working groups and then coming back as a whole.
Speaker 2:And then that process does change a little bit because you have to manage really large groups of people in a way so that when they're thinking about ideas, when they're focusing on a particular problem, you do still get to those kind of 8, you know, the magic number for being focused on a problem and coming up with an with the solution, the reason why I say 8 to 10. Any less than that, and you risk not having a group that's diverse enough. And then that, you start duplicating the represent the parity that you have in the group, and it's more likely that you're gonna take longer to execute. That the whole idea of creating interdisciplinary groups working together in in workshops like this is to get to outcomes faster. And so you lose that benefit when you have, you know, a huge cluster of people in a room.
Speaker 2:So even when you do have, like, 50 people, you have to work out ways. You know, that's why hackathons are the way that they are is that, you know, you come up in a large group setting, you define the problem, and then you break it to, you know, small group working methodologies,
Speaker 1:and then they
Speaker 2:come back together, but they're still working in smaller groups. It's just a lot of concurrent work is going on. I personally had a service design engagement where I had to go engage with a school district, and we had a we had a solution generating event at the convention center with 300 people. That was really tough. But we were able to break them into working groups and get to it took one day, and we were able to get to where we needed to get to at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:And it was you really had to even though it was 300 people, you were able to break it down. We used all the rooms in the lower level of this convention center to really, get those groups into smaller groups so that they can actually work functionally well together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can imagine the personalities in that room.
Speaker 2:Yes. A lot of personalities. And that's that's part of the work of being, being a facilitator of this process is anybody who's gonna do that work has to be they have to love people, and they have to love them for who they are. And, you know, a lot of times I go through life trying to change the people that we're working with. Like, if you could just be more of this, if you could just be more of that, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:And people are flawed, and they're humans. And as designers, we go into this organization think we go into this line of work thinking, we I mean, we're doing this work to make people's lives better in some capacity, whether it's I wanna order food faster, I want to, you know, onboard a customer faster, I wanna make sure the customer makes more money. There's always we're trying to improve people's lives in some way. I mean, that's why we say we do the work that we do. This kind of facilitation work that I'm doing requires empathy in that, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna make this work with the personalities that I have in the room, and there's always a dick in the room.
Speaker 2:There's always somebody who wants to please. There's always a you know, that's the beauty of this work is there's not you know, in in a great in an environment like this, you have to learn to kinda leverage the personalities. Sometimes it's great to have somebody in the room who is a naysayer because they're your reality check. Like, they're gonna look at the this marvelous new idea that we come up with as a design team, and they're gonna throw darts at it. And, frankly, that's the world we live in.
Speaker 2:There's always you're never gonna please everyone, so it's nice to have somebody who's grounded in, you know, a little bit, you know, a bit of a downer just as much as it's great to have somebody who's a total optimist in the room. And, you know, my experience working at McKinsey was interesting because they when they create tiger teams to go to the client and helps solve problems, they go through a Myers Briggs process where they try to build these teams, where it's not just interdisciplinary subject matter expertise but it's also personality differentiation. I'm an eternal optimist. I mean, I'm always I've got a smile on my face, we can make it if we try, you know. I'm an eternal, like, eighties movie type of person where it's like, you know, at the end the guy gets a girl and everybody's so happy and, yeah, we jump up in the air and there's a freeze frame.
Speaker 2:That's my personality.
Speaker 1:But Knight Rider, Airwolf, or MacGyver?
Speaker 2:Total Knight Rider. And there's always a great ending, you know, and it's great. And but I probably need to be paired with somebody who's a little bit of a downer because, otherwise, I'm gonna be in the clouds the whole time. And I may may actually miss catching a real reality that we'll have to solve for when we generate a solution. My wife is the opposite.
Speaker 2:She's, like, firmly both feet on the ground. Like, come back, Scott. Back. And that's why we work so well together because she keeps me in check. Otherwise, yeah, like I said, I'd be out in the stratosphere, and she's very grounded in reality.
Speaker 2:So you need that kind of yin and yang to not misappropriate a cultural term in some way, but to say, you know, that there's balance to parity. And that's why we advocate for this 8 to 10 number of people that's ideal for when you're trying to solve a problem because you've got a balance of personalities in the room. You actually absolutely need that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have not yet seen any negative reaction to any of the workshops that you have led with I don't know how many we've done so far, but everybody usually comes out pretty positive. They're going in there a little bit skeptical at first, but then when they come out, I think the track record has been pretty much batting a 100%. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the biggest risk to failure after the work that we do Mhmm. Thank you for that. But I think the biggest risk that we see is that the people that we had in the room, and this goes back to what I something I said earlier about, they are not the people empowered to affect the change that we designed. And so we try to get better as we engage with clients to say, you know, not just say, oh, you know, here's a group of people.
Speaker 2:Have fun with those people that we have assigned to this project, but just to say, wait a minute. Take a step back here and look at, are these the right people who are gonna advocate for this change when we're done? And do they have the power to advocate for it? It doesn't necessarily mean that the c suite has to be in the room. It but the c suite has to have blessed the plan, and they're the ones that need to give share some of their power with the people in the room because they did the work.
Speaker 2:There's 2 clarifications I wanna make about this kind of about design thinking. The biggest criticism of design thinking is, oh, it's ruled by committee. Absolutely not. What it is a group of experts telling someone whom I call the decider, the person who's accountable for the solution, they think he or she should do. And so in this work that we do, we always one of the first things we do is say, who in this room is the decider?
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision. And while the work that we do in the workshops might be we take votes on things, we share opinion, we come to consensus, we come to some determination. All that does is it's meant to tell the decider, this is what your team, whom you you empowered to help me figure out what the f I'm gonna do and forces that person, that decider, to turn around at the end once they've done all that and say, I agree with you or I don't agree with you. But I'll tell you this. In the room, we've seen a decider turn around and say, I disagree.
Speaker 2:This is what we're gonna do. And you know what? That's not necessarily a bad thing, but they have to articulate their reasoning for that in front of this group. Because what we see in siloed organizations is a bunch of people say, this is what I think you should do 1 at a time. And then the decider goes off and just does their own thing, and nobody understands why.
Speaker 2:They feel disenfranchised. The nice thing about, you know, this design thinking process is that this team with the decider has to give voice and convince the decider what they think he or she should do, and then the decider can agree with them or disagree with them. But it happens in the room, and it's entire it's incredibly motivating even if they decide to do something different.
Speaker 1:So you're taking a logical approach to thinking by understanding other people's perspectives and bringing that into a corporate environment, which they tend to block, allow that lot of Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the decision maker. Way. You yeah. You that's a great way of summarizing because I think that's exactly what it is. Like, we're trying to bring democracy into corporate corporations, and democracy is messy.
Speaker 2:This is a you know, I don't have maybe we can superimpose the graphic, but there's this classic model of design thinking to try to get from uncertainty to certainty. There's a squiggly line and it goes, it's all crazy. It looks like, you know, intertwined, you know, string. And over the course of from left to right on the graphic, you have the squiggliness of uncertainty, and then slowly, the line smooths out. And by the end, it's completely smooth.
Speaker 2:And so when you embrace this type of working, you come into a problem, and you have a bunch of people. One of the first things I say is embrace discomfort, embrace disorder because this in the beginning, we're gonna be going in different directions to try to get to the right answer, but we are absolutely gonna get to the right answer. Don't even worry about that. But it's gonna take some discomfort. Trust the process, and we will get to a desired outcome by the end of this.
Speaker 2:And that's like you said before, a client who's not used to this way of working is extremely uncomfortable in that environment sometimes. They might even try to shut it down, but we always say just stick with us because we we are gonna get to a focused, defined outcome by the end of this as long as everyone stays engaged. That and the biggest thing about that is people have to stay engaged. And this is maybe this opens up up sort of discussion around virtual versus in per in person. So a lot of this work that we when I came on board at Impact, this was before the pandemic.
Speaker 2:And, Makoto, you and I were flying all over the country, like Mhmm. Doing the doing these kinds of exercises in our clients' offices, in boardrooms, or wherever we do it. And then the pandemic came and shut all that down. And so we had to learn to adopt or adapt rather this the work that we're doing in a virtual model, and that was tough. We can spend all day with in a room with your colleagues with, you know, refreshments and lunch and candy and all that good stuff.
Speaker 2:And you could power through a 9 to 5 in a space together because it's you're up, you're moving, but suddenly, you're shutting all that down and you're on, you know, Miro or some whiteboarding tool on a Zoom call. You can't spend a whole day sitting at your desk in front of a in front of a computer. You've gotta break it up. And so what we found was we had to take an all day session and break it into multiple segments separated by at least a couple of hours of doing that. So it did extend the time frames a little bit in some of the, you know, value proposition of the work they were doing where we said you could do this in a number of days.
Speaker 2:It might take a little longer just because it's online. But now that pandemic is over, it we still offer the choice. You know? Can we do this virtually? Can we do it in person?
Speaker 2:I don't know what your preference is. I still kind of I'm an old school kinda guy. I like the in person piece of it, going back and being in a room where I can see faces. You know? So if somebody's not engaged or they're bored or they're not, you know, participating, I can zero it on that.
Speaker 2:It's a little harder in a Zoom meeting to have a little feedback.
Speaker 1:I mean, the personal face to face has always strengthened our relationship with clients versus virtual. But I understand budget wise, timing, whatever, if everybody's distributed, virtual is more convenient for this type of things in that respect. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:We can just It's like and I think that's a discussion. And if we ever get into a discussion about literally step by step what the process is and how we do it, there's so many learned things from I'll say this, doing a virtual if we're using a digital tool like Miro to do the work, it's much easier to organize the work, you know, digitally than it is you should we should superimpose some pictures of what the rooms look like when we do these kinds of workshops in person. There isn't a space on the wall that doesn't have notes and writing and butcher paper and all kinds of it's really that's one of the most satisfying things is after, you know, 2 to 3 days with our clients and every surface in the room is covered with stuff, and that's pretty a satisfying feeling. It's like and and then, of course, having to capture all that and synthesize it down and break it down into, you know, something that that's digital later is a bit of effort. But it's just it's neat.
Speaker 2:It's like we've gotten our everything that's in our brains is now on the wall. And so now you can look back and say this is the group's mind, hive mind, you know, splayed out on these walls. It's pretty cool. It actually kinda looks like a crime scene. Like, we're doing some sort of, you know, analysis of the murder that took place in this room.
Speaker 2:The, you know, lines of yarn from one thing to the next and, you know, trying to draw relationships between ideas. And somebody who hadn't been in the room and hadn't seen that thought process play out would say, you know, what the fuck's going on in here?
Speaker 1:Just need somebody with the sunglasses that takes it off and play some music.
Speaker 2:And then has sunglasses underneath.
Speaker 1:I I think this might be a good time to maybe ask you one final question before we wrap up. So if you could work on any type of project or with any client, what would your dream project be?
Speaker 2:Well, my heart, as you know, Makoto, my heart is in education. And, you know, I've over the years, I have my kids are in public school. And so I've really fallen in love with the of education in our community. I think world well, worldwide and nationwide, we do not prioritize education the way it should be prioritized. So I would love to work on something that's education related and possibly not for profit here, which, you know, I I think that's the thing.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think there's improvements that we need to make on the service model of delivering education to kids. We fall down so often in in helping our marginalized communities really get the right education they need to succeed, go on to college, and have a career. So I would love to work at you know, it would be great if we could partner with an education nonprofit or the US government for that matter to think about how we can effect effectively use both digital and physical tools close achievement gaps. And that's a big that's a big that's a big window to drive opportunity through, but I we have been successful, I think, in we we're in so many market sectors, energy, entertainment
Speaker 1:Robotics.
Speaker 2:Robotics.
Speaker 1:To energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All those things. I think we're strong in a lot of different areas. I think we're not as strong as we could be in education. I would love to get more into that space.
Speaker 2:There's just so much opportunity there. And how does AI play a role in education? I mean, I think that we're just starting to think about how we can automate certain process and actually not only automate, but differentiate instruction. I think that's really what it comes down to is I'm I learn differently than you do. We're all individuals when it comes to learning.
Speaker 2:I have a child that's really, you know, twice exceptional from learning. She's a nerd, and so AI, I think, can be a strong you get into to really give her the kind of differentiated instruction she needs to succeed in school. You know, our classroom models are, like, you know, 43 kids in a classroom, and there's 1 teacher. And maybe, if you're lucky, 10% of the classroom is is picking up on the material, the rest are looking out the window. And so how does AI become a partner in helping the teacher reach all of those kids in the way that's, you know, specific for them?
Speaker 2:So I'd love to for us to get into that space. I think there's so much opportunity there. So get to work and go to and get some service design opportunities and education that would be the way to go.
Speaker 1:There you go. Well, hopefully, that can happen. Definitely wanna encourage any listeners, to share their thoughts and and experiences on the topics we've discussed today. Wanna thank Scott. As always, a pleasure to talk to you, joke around, and we'll do many
Speaker 2:of these other things.
Speaker 1:Obviously, any listeners who wanna submit questions or future episode suggestions, please do in the comments. Do all the great likes, subscribe, and review, whatever you can, to support us. And check out our website, impact, three i's, not anymore, any not any less, dot I o. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you on the next episode.