For 10 years across three Design Leadership roles, I’ve strategically driven discovery to align user needs with business value, resulting in new market expansion, customer retention, and consistent revenue growth - contributing to $14.7M ARR at Ozmo for example.

User insights, education and inclusion as strategic influence

Within leadership strategy exercises I regularly offer Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis and, of course, user insights to influence company strategy.

I regularly approach strategic influence from a perspective of education and inclusion. It isn’t always obvious how Design can create business value, however, by exposing Design’s understanding of human behaviors and including cross-functional folks in research and ethnographic initiatives, I consistently create internal alignment and investment.

Here's an example where I introduced Discovery to influence how projects were scoped and delivered:

💼 Case:

At Exadel, working as a consultancy in software, our customers often came to us with a partially shaped goal in mind.

⚠️ The problem:

Estimates were often issued without a clear understanding of the needs of the customer, leading to projects going beyond budgets and strained relationships.

🛠️ Process:

I began leading both internal cohorts and external stakeholders through set-cost Discovery processes where we would understand more about the customer and their needs before our larger SOW.

✅ Results

As I led several responses to larger RFP’s, I utilized this approach and won consistent business and reduced discrepancies with scope and delivery. One potential project for example, a larger contract with a scientific journal platform, was won successfully after an initial period of Discovery to truly understand their publishing process and reveal that there was a family of branded journals within the customer’s portfolio. I was able to study the usability of the platform and while we proposed a solution, I offered insights into the potential business value being left on the table by existing experience issues.

Ultimately, the approach became the standardized, adopted process to set scope and requirements more accurately.

View a detailed look at the Impact Journals work ⇨

Discovery even became a service offering at Exadel. We were approached by a Coloradan Toll Road Company to investigate and improve license plate processing times. I led my team through a Service-level Usability Study. While this project was focused on improving the handle time and general productivity of License Plate reviewers, they were already dramatically efficient with a 6 second processing time. As we investigated their environment, software and working habits, I took a transparent approach to sharing what we were investigating and why. This enabled my team and I to update the customer regularly and educate stakeholders about psychological concepts like Flow state and Autonomy, both important in our final recommendations.

We found that the image reviewers were extremely satisfied and productive due to their autonomous working environment and schedule and, possibly most important - incredibly fast when able to achieve a flow state with their processing. Of course we also modernized their software - simplifying the interface to support their focused activity and raise visibility of the license plate images they were attempting to decipher.

Ultimately I was able to accomplish 15% faster transaction times as a result of our improvements.

View a detailed look at the E470 work ⇨