June 10, 2025 • 18 mins
Design isn't dead, but it's evolving fast
Nick Cawthon, the founder of Gauge, a San Francisco–based consultancy, joins John on this episode of The Disruptor Podcast to explore why traditional enterprise design often fails and how smarter strategies can bridge the gap between creativity and business value.
Highlights
- Why commoditization pushed Nick to reinvent his design career
- Common enterprise pitfalls when integrating design and research
- The false promise of speed without strategic design thinking
- How design and development teams can collaborate more effectively
- What AI and generative tools mean for design’s future
Key Insights / Quotes
- “Design was dying 10 years ago; it was being commoditized and boxed in.”
- “Faster doesn’t always mean better; we need space for user research and real feedback.”
- “Designers must now master both strategic thinking and front-end tech stacks.”
- “Experience matters, especially when discerning signal from noise in AI-generated content.”
Deep Dive Opportunities
Connect with Nick.
He would love to hear from you.
As he says, "Please do make a connection, and we promise to respond back quickly. Life is short."
Visit Gauge.io, a San Francisco–based consultancy helping teams design the right things, faster and smarter.
Connect with Nick:
- Email: hello@gauge.io
- Call: +1 (510) 560-5472
- Slack: gauge-io.slack.com
Comments or Questions? Send us a text
***
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Is design dead?
Saving design in the modernenterprise.
Hi everybody, I'm your host,john Kuntz.
Welcome to another edition ofthe Disruptor podcast.
(00:23):
For those that are new to ourshow, the Disruptor Podcast.
For those that are new to ourshow, the Disruptor Series is
your blueprint forgroundbreaking innovation.
We started this podcast back inDecember of 2022 as a periodic
segment of the Apex Podcast.
Our vision was to go beyondconventional wisdom by
confronting the status quo andexposing the raw power of
(00:44):
disruptive thinking.
Today, we will talk with NickKeltland of Gage as we explore
design in the modern enterprise.
We will discuss valuableinsights and advice on pitfalls
and mistakes many executivesmake in these disruptive times.
Welcome to the show, nick.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Hey, john.
Thank you for having me.
Welcome to the show, nick hey.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
John, thank you for having me.
Good to have you here.
You're my third guest on theshow that we've talked about
design and design thinking andusing principles of design for
different aspects, so I'm superexcited to continue the
discussion and I'm glad thatwe're able to get together.
So let's start with your story.
(01:24):
Tell us a little bit about yourbackground, your education,
your career, life experiences.
How'd you get here?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'll do that again.
Let's rewind the clock maybe 15seconds.
That introduction of gaugedesign is not incorrect.
About 10 years ago I saw thecommoditization of design and
that's just a small piece of thepuzzle and also I wanted to go
upstream, not to be the one thatdesigned things, but to be the
one that decided what to design.
(01:51):
I dropped that moniker from myemail address, from my domain
name, and I just truncated it toGage.
Gage is a measure of assessmentor analysis.
The title of your podcast isDesign Dead.
Well, it was dead in my eyes.
It was dying 10 years agobecause that again, with the
rise of a freelancing workforceall around the world, with the
(02:11):
introduction of design patternlibraries from companies like
Google and Apple, the need forself-expression as an applied
art through design got calledinto question as a sustainable
career for myself.
I built up 10, 15 years ofexperience and realized all of a
sudden that that artifact wasmaybe not the one that was going
(02:34):
to sustain me through and willtry to position myself to be
something different.
And then, even today, thatrepositioning is happening at a
greater rate.
So that wasn't a big orgy story.
But now you're caught up.
Short story I run a smallconsultancy here in the san
francisco bay area.
I caught fire back in 2000,coming out of school with a
visual design degree and ahighly technical background, and
(02:56):
this thing called the internetwas really taking shape and have
jumped into and out oftechnology companies and
startups and about 10 yearsyears ago I decided I wanted to
sort of formalize and do thingson my own and stop freelancing
and become a consultant whichreally had no distinction
between the two, from taxationas well as a representation
(03:18):
purpose.
So that's my background and Iwas sticking to it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
That's excellent.
It's funny it's about 10 yearsago is where I got first
introduced into this concept ofdesign.
My story is a little bitdifferent.
We bought a company while I wasworking at IBM and I was trying
to sell this technology of thisSaaS startup that we bought and
(03:43):
we were struggling and I got abunch of really smart people in
a room down in Austin, texas,who had happened to really
gauged up our design and ourdesign research team and I
brought these folks into ourmeeting and they opened my eyes
up on how do you look at theproblem from the user's
perspective and ever since thenI've been super intrigued on how
(04:07):
do you take different aspectsof what has traditionally been
the back room in productdevelopment and product
management and, as you said, howdo you look more at what to
design?
And I was using it to what do wewant to actually sell our
clients because what do theyreally need and what can we
deliver?
It's why I got super excitedwhen you reached out Wanted to
(04:31):
talk about what's going on inthe world.
When I was at IBM before Iretired, we saw a big ramp up in
design.
Everybody, we were all requiredto take design thinking classes
, no matter what your role was,and then, as fast as they ramped
up, they began to de-emphasizedesign, the common mistakes or
pitfalls that you're starting tosee with enterprises, product
managers, engineers and theexecutives when they are taking
(04:54):
this what we just described as amore traditional approach to
design.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, the more modern approach, we're seeing pitfalls
that we didn't know existed.
I just got off a call with afront-end engineer that I've
been working with for a longtime.
I bring him in on projects whenI don't know what I don't know.
We've come up with aprototyping project where you'd
asked me six months ago to dothis.
I would have given youillustrated representations of
(05:21):
the interface, but in this case,the last three months have been
building out a real-worldprototype, the front end tech
stack that the developers willthen take to implement, and the
pitfalls was what I was tryingto really uncover.
I got code reviews over the weekwith this development team.
We're delivering this code baseto say is there magic here?
(05:45):
Is this just going to be atotal mess to integrate?
Is there magic here?
Is this just going to be atotal mess to integrate?
Because before you had tointerpret it, I would give you a
graphic representation and youwould have to go and code it or
translate it from the designtool into your development
environment.
Now I can use the sameconstraints, libraries and
frameworks that you're buildingwith today and have the user
(06:08):
experience be exactly how I wantit to be.
And is this too good to be true, because so that's been.
Really.
Where I'm trying to investigateis finding these pitfalls of
increased velocity.
Now, from an organizationstandpoint, from a strategic
standpoint, what happens whenthere is a perception of
(06:28):
efficiency and velocity on thatdesign and development cycle
where you feel like you can getto go a lot faster, is it that
we just turn up the dial andmake those expectations higher
and those timelines shorter?
Do we allow for hey, let's goback into user research and
acceptance testing and allowthat to make sure we're
(06:51):
designing the right thing?
And from an organizationalstandpoint, I think that is
going to be a reckoning pointfrom a budgetary resource and a
timing and a planningperspective for PMs, development
leads and design leaders.
How do we deal with a newengine in this car?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So elaborate on that a little bit for me, because so
are you saying that things aremoving faster and therefore the
traditional approach to usingdesign in, let's say, a product
management or a productengineering role is changing.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, I think we're going to be asking our designers
to be a lot more strategic.
The introduction of userexperience research of maybe
seven or eight years ago wasasking the designers to go to be
able to do qualitativehuman-computer interaction,
human factors testing, to makesure that what they chose as a
(07:50):
representation of an interfacemade sense, delivered a good
experience, and that's anapplied skill.
That is a professional practicethat preceding 2015 was
something that you couldspecialize in for your career,
and there are many who do and doit excellent.
Now we're asking that to be asubset of a designer's toolkit.
We're seeing Salesforceresearch reports under design,
(08:11):
whereas before it was aside-by-side partnership, and
design and research now reportunder product and product
reports, under engineering andso on and so on.
Designers to be a lot morestrategic in how they've made
the choice and how they'vechosen to implement the ideas
that they have around a positiveuser experience.
(08:34):
We're seeing also a reductionin the gap between design and
development.
As I sort of illustrated thatscenario, this prototype that I
can hand off on a silver platterto the development team to say
here's all the error conditionsand all the logic and all the
mapping, and I used a SQLitedatabase to create this
prototype so you could see howthe data transformation is
(08:56):
working from step to step.
These are the things that buildthe internet.
It's not the visualrepresentation anymore.
It's the interaction andtransmitting and receiving of
data from the internet.
I think that understandingthese new technologies and how
we can decrease that gap betweendesign and development, Are the
people you're working with, theengineers or the product
(09:16):
managers?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
are they a little more receptive to that approach?
Because in my experience, Istarted to feel like they felt
that the design teams wereslowing them down from the do,
that they either didn't know howto do or didn't want to do, and
you just want to get and buildsomething and get it out the
door.
And so there was.
At the end of my last workingin the team.
There was friction betweendesign researchers, product
(09:40):
managers and the engineers.
Sounds like what you're doingmight help make that.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I've always been lucky enough to, or cursed
enough to, work with veryengineering focused teams the
WattCore, the only designer inengineering based startups or
have been technical enough to beintegrated into engineering
teams, and so I also knew whowas buttering my bread, who was
building my designs, and wantedto have empathy and
(10:06):
understanding of constraints.
I had an engineering friendgave me this great quote of
sometimes you got to makewhiskey and sometimes you got to
make gin, meaning there arethings that you can get done
very quickly that's the ginaspect and there are things that
you need to stick into barrelsfor 10 to 12 years to then see
that payoff down the road.
And that's always sort of beenthe front of mind, because
(10:27):
design can be made inincremental improvements or can
be made in massive leaps andboundaries, and the good
designer is able to anticipateboth.
What can they do in this sprintor what can they do in this
quarter or this year?
The tension will always exist.
You mentioned IBM.
Ge was another organizationthat slashed their design teams,
(10:48):
grew it to be thousands, if nottens of thousands, and then
took a very hard, pivot of whichimpacted many of the people in
my network still to this day atIBM and then caused that sort of
questioning you described ofwhat just happened.
Why that pivot?
Do we not see the value indesign anymore, or are we just
(11:09):
offshoring and outsourcing andthen getting rid of our domestic
workforce?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So that's my question .
Having been not I'm not anengineer and I'm not a product
manager I was always on thebusiness development side or
consulting side of our businessand I saw time and time again
we'd build great stuff.
Nobody wanted to buy it.
My theory was, because wedidn't really listen to the user
, we gave them a crappy userexperience.
(11:35):
Most of the time we'd buildstuff they didn't need or the
price points where they wouldn'tbuy it.
So, certainly at IBM, I gotyears and years and years of
examples of that, and so again,this is where I have this
conundrum of where we're goingwith all of this.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I read articles about startups that have the same
thing.
So, whether it be IBM with thequarter million employees or
whether it be a startup with twoemployees, it's like are you
sure you're doing the right?
Is there a market fit here, orare you building it just because
you want to see it built?
You know the tinkerer by trade,and the joke is that the person
that works on the car in theirdriveway is that once they
(12:14):
finally, after years of makingthis classic automobile, once
they finally get to drive it,it's time to sell it and then
buy another fixer upper.
Is that are we building justfor the sake of seeing what's
possible, or are we reallymaking sure it's the right one
that comes through good research?
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, so that actually goes into my next
question.
So what guidance would you giveenterprises or teams that want
to integrate this approach to bemore effective into their
organization?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, I mean seeing generative tools.
Ai harkens back to digitaltransformation and I'm old
enough that I remember thatsense of disruption here on the
Disruptor podcast that occurredaround this notion of digital
transformation.
And now that word is cringe, asthe youth say.
(13:01):
You wouldn't find anybody usingthat term in a modern setting
and not raise eyebrows of whatera are you from?
However, it still applies andit still should be echoed
because we're seeing somethingsimilar and if you're in an
enterprise, that means you'vebeen around long enough and
(13:21):
you're a successful companyenough and mature enough to have
seen the cause and effect ofdigital transformation to a
workforce, to a training regimen, to a rethinking of how we do
these things, as you mentioned,with the design team, to the
headcount and the allocationaround, who's being transformed
and what's getting left behind.
(13:42):
And so, as we look at these newtools, new generative tools,
things are going to betransformed.
My advice to you, enterprisecompanies, is what was the
ethical, what was the efficient,what was the correct thing to
do back then and where did itreally fall apart?
(14:02):
As we adopted the MicrosoftOffice suite 20 years ago with
hopes of newfound efficiency andeffectiveness, it gave us
Clippy.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah, that little paper clip at the bottom of the
screen.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
It's Godfonder of prompt-based engineering.
Right, clippy knew what we weredoing and we just needed to
tell it, like a gpt, that wewere writing a letter, it would
come a long way to say in thecommercials.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So how do you believe , or what you know, your more
disruptive approach here?
How does it benefit these guysthat are trying to navigate
today's challenges?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
how does ai how to have general tools benefit
people who are trying tonavigate challenges?
It gives us every answer to anyquestion we ever had.
I think that's much like theInternet Back 20 years ago.
But as we talked about pitfalls, I think that with more
information, there is more noise.
(15:00):
There is more noise, and thatto be able to discern the
difference between signal andnoise is going to be somebody
like yourself that has hadenough experience to know that
this is just noise and this isthe signal, and you need to pay
attention to how to trim thatout and be able to guide
yourself away from from stout.
(15:22):
That's going to be a greatbenefit for those who have been
in the industry and to have seenthese mistakes being made.
After wave and wave oftechnology has washed over our
starboard bow, to be able tokind of guide that ship to the
point where, yes, this isworking for us and yes, this is
(15:42):
improving efficiency, but no, wedon't need this flock and it
can only be used correctly inthis context.
So I think that that sort ofweight of experience is going to
be extremely helpful goingforward agreed, I think this.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
You still need some level domain expertise,
regardless of where you are,what you're doing, but there's a
lot of opportunities to againdo it differently, do things
faster.
Anyway, I want to wrap this up.
Is there anything I haven'tasked you that you'd like to
share with our audience or yourpeers in the design community?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
You know this notion of disruption as somebody again
you've come off of theenterprise world and into more
non-traditional, maybefragmented, leadership roles,
that notion of when to disruptas that come into these
companies, of knowing that thisis a workflow or a process
(16:41):
that's outdated or needs to bedisrupted or needs to be called
into question, of what is thatappropriate and what needs to be
constrained.
So what I've tried to do ismeasure disruption enough to
show that you're really tryingbut not so much as for those of
you who play Dungeons andDragons to be chaotic, evil,
(17:03):
where you're pulling thingsapart for the sake of doing so.
And that's the balance that I'mtrying to find is to be
disruptive, but in a responsiblemanner, not so much as a
question, more of a reflection.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Well, cool, well, appreciate you and thank you for
sharing all your insights, yourexperiences.
How can people learn more aboutyou, your services, what are
your socials?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, no, I've issued social media for mental health
purposes, but you can still findme on LinkedIn and you can
visit me at gageio.
That's U-G-E and I'd love tohear from you.
Please do reach out and let'smake a connection.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I'd highly recommend it.
We'll for sure put both ofthose links into the show notes.
Please don't forget to reachout to Nick, either on LinkedIn
or through his website.
Anyway, nick, I'll give you thelast word before we wrap up the
show.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
John, thanks for having me on Safe travels.
Enjoy the rest of the summer.
Let's connect again in thevault.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah, ditto, loved it .
Loved talking about this topic.
Thanks again.
So I'm John Kuntz.
Thanks for joining us on thisedition of the Disruptor Podcast
.
Have a great day.
Is design dead?
Saving design in the modernenterprise.
Hi everybody, I'm your host,john Kuntz.
Welcome to another edition ofthe Disruptor podcast.
(00:23):
For those that are new to ourshow, the Disruptor Podcast.
For those that are new to ourshow, the Disruptor Series is
your blueprint forgroundbreaking innovation.
We started this podcast back inDecember of 2022 as a periodic
segment of the Apex Podcast.
Our vision was to go beyondconventional wisdom by
confronting the status quo andexposing the raw power of
(00:44):
disruptive thinking.
Today, we will talk with NickKeltland of Gage as we explore
design in the modern enterprise.
We will discuss valuableinsights and advice on pitfalls
and mistakes many executivesmake in these disruptive times.
Welcome to the show, nick.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Hey, john.
Thank you for having me.
Welcome to the show, nick hey.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
John, thank you for having me.
Good to have you here.
You're my third guest on theshow that we've talked about
design and design thinking andusing principles of design for
different aspects, so I'm superexcited to continue the
discussion and I'm glad thatwe're able to get together.
So let's start with your story.
(01:24):
Tell us a little bit about yourbackground, your education,
your career, life experiences.
How'd you get here?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'll do that again.
Let's rewind the clock maybe 15seconds.
That introduction of gaugedesign is not incorrect.
About 10 years ago I saw thecommoditization of design and
that's just a small piece of thepuzzle and also I wanted to go
upstream, not to be the one thatdesigned things, but to be the
one that decided what to design.
(01:51):
I dropped that moniker from myemail address, from my domain
name, and I just truncated it toGage.
Gage is a measure of assessmentor analysis.
The title of your podcast isDesign Dead.
Well, it was dead in my eyes.
It was dying 10 years agobecause that again, with the
rise of a freelancing workforceall around the world, with the
(02:11):
introduction of design patternlibraries from companies like
Google and Apple, the need forself-expression as an applied
art through design got calledinto question as a sustainable
career for myself.
I built up 10, 15 years ofexperience and realized all of a
sudden that that artifact wasmaybe not the one that was going
(02:34):
to sustain me through and willtry to position myself to be
something different.
And then, even today, thatrepositioning is happening at a
greater rate.
So that wasn't a big orgy story.
But now you're caught up.
Short story I run a smallconsultancy here in the san
francisco bay area.
I caught fire back in 2000,coming out of school with a
visual design degree and ahighly technical background, and
(02:56):
this thing called the internetwas really taking shape and have
jumped into and out oftechnology companies and
startups and about 10 yearsyears ago I decided I wanted to
sort of formalize and do thingson my own and stop freelancing
and become a consultant whichreally had no distinction
between the two, from taxationas well as a representation
(03:18):
purpose.
So that's my background and Iwas sticking to it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
That's excellent.
It's funny it's about 10 yearsago is where I got first
introduced into this concept ofdesign.
My story is a little bitdifferent.
We bought a company while I wasworking at IBM and I was trying
to sell this technology of thisSaaS startup that we bought and
(03:43):
we were struggling and I got abunch of really smart people in
a room down in Austin, texas,who had happened to really
gauged up our design and ourdesign research team and I
brought these folks into ourmeeting and they opened my eyes
up on how do you look at theproblem from the user's
perspective and ever since thenI've been super intrigued on how
(04:07):
do you take different aspectsof what has traditionally been
the back room in productdevelopment and product
management and, as you said, howdo you look more at what to
design?
And I was using it to what do wewant to actually sell our
clients because what do theyreally need and what can we
deliver?
It's why I got super excitedwhen you reached out Wanted to
(04:31):
talk about what's going on inthe world.
When I was at IBM before Iretired, we saw a big ramp up in
design.
Everybody, we were all requiredto take design thinking classes
, no matter what your role was,and then, as fast as they ramped
up, they began to de-emphasizedesign, the common mistakes or
pitfalls that you're starting tosee with enterprises, product
managers, engineers and theexecutives when they are taking
(04:54):
this what we just described as amore traditional approach to
design.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, the more modern approach, we're seeing pitfalls
that we didn't know existed.
I just got off a call with afront-end engineer that I've
been working with for a longtime.
I bring him in on projects whenI don't know what I don't know.
We've come up with aprototyping project where you'd
asked me six months ago to dothis.
I would have given youillustrated representations of
(05:21):
the interface, but in this case,the last three months have been
building out a real-worldprototype, the front end tech
stack that the developers willthen take to implement, and the
pitfalls was what I was tryingto really uncover.
I got code reviews over the weekwith this development team.
We're delivering this code baseto say is there magic here?
(05:45):
Is this just going to be atotal mess to integrate?
Is there magic here?
Is this just going to be atotal mess to integrate?
Because before you had tointerpret it, I would give you a
graphic representation and youwould have to go and code it or
translate it from the designtool into your development
environment.
Now I can use the sameconstraints, libraries and
frameworks that you're buildingwith today and have the user
(06:08):
experience be exactly how I wantit to be.
And is this too good to be true, because so that's been.
Really.
Where I'm trying to investigateis finding these pitfalls of
increased velocity.
Now, from an organizationstandpoint, from a strategic
standpoint, what happens whenthere is a perception of
(06:28):
efficiency and velocity on thatdesign and development cycle
where you feel like you can getto go a lot faster, is it that
we just turn up the dial andmake those expectations higher
and those timelines shorter?
Do we allow for hey, let's goback into user research and
acceptance testing and allowthat to make sure we're
(06:51):
designing the right thing?
And from an organizationalstandpoint, I think that is
going to be a reckoning pointfrom a budgetary resource and a
timing and a planningperspective for PMs, development
leads and design leaders.
How do we deal with a newengine in this car?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So elaborate on that a little bit for me, because so
are you saying that things aremoving faster and therefore the
traditional approach to usingdesign in, let's say, a product
management or a productengineering role is changing.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, I think we're going to be asking our designers
to be a lot more strategic.
The introduction of userexperience research of maybe
seven or eight years ago wasasking the designers to go to be
able to do qualitativehuman-computer interaction,
human factors testing, to makesure that what they chose as a
(07:50):
representation of an interfacemade sense, delivered a good
experience, and that's anapplied skill.
That is a professional practicethat preceding 2015 was
something that you couldspecialize in for your career,
and there are many who do and doit excellent.
Now we're asking that to be asubset of a designer's toolkit.
We're seeing Salesforceresearch reports under design,
(08:11):
whereas before it was aside-by-side partnership, and
design and research now reportunder product and product
reports, under engineering andso on and so on.
Designers to be a lot morestrategic in how they've made
the choice and how they'vechosen to implement the ideas
that they have around a positiveuser experience.
(08:34):
We're seeing also a reductionin the gap between design and
development.
As I sort of illustrated thatscenario, this prototype that I
can hand off on a silver platterto the development team to say
here's all the error conditionsand all the logic and all the
mapping, and I used a SQLitedatabase to create this
prototype so you could see howthe data transformation is
(08:56):
working from step to step.
These are the things that buildthe internet.
It's not the visualrepresentation anymore.
It's the interaction andtransmitting and receiving of
data from the internet.
I think that understandingthese new technologies and how
we can decrease that gap betweendesign and development, Are the
people you're working with, theengineers or the product
(09:16):
managers?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
are they a little more receptive to that approach?
Because in my experience, Istarted to feel like they felt
that the design teams wereslowing them down from the do,
that they either didn't know howto do or didn't want to do, and
you just want to get and buildsomething and get it out the
door.
And so there was.
At the end of my last workingin the team.
There was friction betweendesign researchers, product
(09:40):
managers and the engineers.
Sounds like what you're doingmight help make that.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I've always been lucky enough to, or cursed
enough to, work with veryengineering focused teams the
WattCore, the only designer inengineering based startups or
have been technical enough to beintegrated into engineering
teams, and so I also knew whowas buttering my bread, who was
building my designs, and wantedto have empathy and
(10:06):
understanding of constraints.
I had an engineering friendgave me this great quote of
sometimes you got to makewhiskey and sometimes you got to
make gin, meaning there arethings that you can get done
very quickly that's the ginaspect and there are things that
you need to stick into barrelsfor 10 to 12 years to then see
that payoff down the road.
And that's always sort of beenthe front of mind, because
(10:27):
design can be made inincremental improvements or can
be made in massive leaps andboundaries, and the good
designer is able to anticipateboth.
What can they do in this sprintor what can they do in this
quarter or this year?
The tension will always exist.
You mentioned IBM.
Ge was another organizationthat slashed their design teams,
(10:48):
grew it to be thousands, if nottens of thousands, and then
took a very hard, pivot of whichimpacted many of the people in
my network still to this day atIBM and then caused that sort of
questioning you described ofwhat just happened.
Why that pivot?
Do we not see the value indesign anymore, or are we just
(11:09):
offshoring and outsourcing andthen getting rid of our domestic
workforce?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So that's my question .
Having been not I'm not anengineer and I'm not a product
manager I was always on thebusiness development side or
consulting side of our businessand I saw time and time again
we'd build great stuff.
Nobody wanted to buy it.
My theory was, because wedidn't really listen to the user
, we gave them a crappy userexperience.
(11:35):
Most of the time we'd buildstuff they didn't need or the
price points where they wouldn'tbuy it.
So, certainly at IBM, I gotyears and years and years of
examples of that, and so again,this is where I have this
conundrum of where we're goingwith all of this.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I read articles about startups that have the same
thing.
So, whether it be IBM with thequarter million employees or
whether it be a startup with twoemployees, it's like are you
sure you're doing the right?
Is there a market fit here, orare you building it just because
you want to see it built?
You know the tinkerer by trade,and the joke is that the person
that works on the car in theirdriveway is that once they
(12:14):
finally, after years of makingthis classic automobile, once
they finally get to drive it,it's time to sell it and then
buy another fixer upper.
Is that are we building justfor the sake of seeing what's
possible, or are we reallymaking sure it's the right one
that comes through good research?
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, so that actually goes into my next
question.
So what guidance would you giveenterprises or teams that want
to integrate this approach to bemore effective into their
organization?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, I mean seeing generative tools.
Ai harkens back to digitaltransformation and I'm old
enough that I remember thatsense of disruption here on the
Disruptor podcast that occurredaround this notion of digital
transformation.
And now that word is cringe, asthe youth say.
(13:01):
You wouldn't find anybody usingthat term in a modern setting
and not raise eyebrows of whatera are you from?
However, it still applies andit still should be echoed
because we're seeing somethingsimilar and if you're in an
enterprise, that means you'vebeen around long enough and
(13:21):
you're a successful companyenough and mature enough to have
seen the cause and effect ofdigital transformation to a
workforce, to a training regimen, to a rethinking of how we do
these things, as you mentioned,with the design team, to the
headcount and the allocationaround, who's being transformed
and what's getting left behind.
(13:42):
And so, as we look at these newtools, new generative tools,
things are going to betransformed.
My advice to you, enterprisecompanies, is what was the
ethical, what was the efficient,what was the correct thing to
do back then and where did itreally fall apart?
(14:02):
As we adopted the MicrosoftOffice suite 20 years ago with
hopes of newfound efficiency andeffectiveness, it gave us
Clippy.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah, that little paper clip at the bottom of the
screen.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
It's Godfonder of prompt-based engineering.
Right, clippy knew what we weredoing and we just needed to
tell it, like a gpt, that wewere writing a letter, it would
come a long way to say in thecommercials.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So how do you believe , or what you know, your more
disruptive approach here?
How does it benefit these guysthat are trying to navigate
today's challenges?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
how does ai how to have general tools benefit
people who are trying tonavigate challenges?
It gives us every answer to anyquestion we ever had.
I think that's much like theInternet Back 20 years ago.
But as we talked about pitfalls, I think that with more
information, there is more noise.
(15:00):
There is more noise, and thatto be able to discern the
difference between signal andnoise is going to be somebody
like yourself that has hadenough experience to know that
this is just noise and this isthe signal, and you need to pay
attention to how to trim thatout and be able to guide
yourself away from from stout.
(15:22):
That's going to be a greatbenefit for those who have been
in the industry and to have seenthese mistakes being made.
After wave and wave oftechnology has washed over our
starboard bow, to be able tokind of guide that ship to the
point where, yes, this isworking for us and yes, this is
(15:42):
improving efficiency, but no, wedon't need this flock and it
can only be used correctly inthis context.
So I think that that sort ofweight of experience is going to
be extremely helpful goingforward agreed, I think this.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
You still need some level domain expertise,
regardless of where you are,what you're doing, but there's a
lot of opportunities to againdo it differently, do things
faster.
Anyway, I want to wrap this up.
Is there anything I haven'tasked you that you'd like to
share with our audience or yourpeers in the design community?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
You know this notion of disruption as somebody again
you've come off of theenterprise world and into more
non-traditional, maybefragmented, leadership roles,
that notion of when to disruptas that come into these
companies, of knowing that thisis a workflow or a process
(16:41):
that's outdated or needs to bedisrupted or needs to be called
into question, of what is thatappropriate and what needs to be
constrained.
So what I've tried to do ismeasure disruption enough to
show that you're really tryingbut not so much as for those of
you who play Dungeons andDragons to be chaotic, evil,
(17:03):
where you're pulling thingsapart for the sake of doing so.
And that's the balance that I'mtrying to find is to be
disruptive, but in a responsiblemanner, not so much as a
question, more of a reflection.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Well, cool, well, appreciate you and thank you for
sharing all your insights, yourexperiences.
How can people learn more aboutyou, your services, what are
your socials?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, no, I've issued social media for mental health
purposes, but you can still findme on LinkedIn and you can
visit me at gageio.
That's U-G-E and I'd love tohear from you.
Please do reach out and let'smake a connection.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I'd highly recommend it.
We'll for sure put both ofthose links into the show notes.
Please don't forget to reachout to Nick, either on LinkedIn
or through his website.
Anyway, nick, I'll give you thelast word before we wrap up the
show.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
John, thanks for having me on Safe travels.
Enjoy the rest of the summer.
Let's connect again in thevault.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah, ditto, loved it .
Loved talking about this topic.
Thanks again.
So I'm John Kuntz.
Thanks for joining us on thisedition of the Disruptor Podcast
.
Have a great day.
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