The X-Interviews | Design Transformation

Interview #4 - Doug Powell on Designing for Impact

Doug Powell on Designing for Impact

Today we’re talking with Doug Powell about Design Organization Transformation. Doug previously served as the national president of AIGA, the largest and most established design organization in the world. For close to a decade, Doug held several Design leadership roles at IBM, including VP of Design. He left IBM to join the Expedia Group in 2022 as their Vice President of Design Practice Management.

Doug brings a very unique perspective on design organization maturity. His work with IBM was truly transformational and dare I say inspirational. This is Doug’s story about how a scrappy group of designers helped IBM find their mojo.

X-Mentor: Welcome to The X-Mentor, Doug!

Doug: Thanks Greg.

X-Mentor: Doug, we're going to be talking about some of your experiences as you helped steer IBM’s design-centric transformation during your time there between 2013-2021. And before we dive into that, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about your background. Can you share with our readers a little bit about how you got to where you are in your career today as a Design Executive?

Doug: Well, that is a circuitous journey, as I reflect on now over 30 years in the design business. I started out as a graphic designer and that was what I did for the first decade of my career. If you would have told me 30 years ago, here are all of the places, and all of the roles, and eventually as an executive design leader, I mean those words just didn't even fit together 30 years ago. I think more than anything, I've followed the evolution of the profession and practice over my career. Starting in university, before the Macintosh became a required tool for the doing of design. And then shortly thereafter there it was. And I am sure you remember Greg; it was a remarkably instant transformation. In the course of about a year the Macintosh went from not really being a thing, to being a requirement in every design office and in every designer's practice. And that happened many times over the course of the subsequent decades with the emergence of digital media and the Internet. The practice of user experience design and the research that was at its foundation. All sorts of technological advances surrounded that. It required me, and the teams that I was working with and leading, to learn the new thing, to learn the new stuff. To evolve along that journey, in order to be relevant, hopefully to be a little more than relevant, and to be able to produce meaningful work. I joined IBM in 2013, about 10 years ago, and was there for 8 1/2 years. And that was a big part of the journey for me.

X-Mentor:

Yeah, I know what you mean, Doug. When you started talking about those days before the Macintosh, I started thinking about how I used to work with an X-Acto Knife. And I don't think many designers today would know what we mean by a mechanical.

Doug: Right, right.

[Laughs]

What did you find upon arrival at IBM?

X-Mentor: Okay. Let’s dive into the IBM part of your journey. You mentioned you first encountered IBM back when you joined in 2013. Tell us a little bit about what you found when you arrived.

Doug: Well, I think what struck me the most as I was considering joining IBM was the scale that was being envisioned for the design program and the design capacity at the company. We were talking at the time about this unthinkable number of hiring 1,000 new designers into the company. Now, that is a reasonable, even modest, number by 2023 standards. However, in 2013 that was an unthinkable number. That was far beyond what any corporate design program had built. So, there was a big idea for me to get my head around as I considered joining the company. As soon as I got into the company then I realized why that was needed. Because IBM was massive, even more massive at the time. It was close to 400,000 people globally and just a wildly complex organism. We blew past hiring 1,000 designers pretty quickly. And by the time I left there were well over 3,000 practicing designers across the company.

In 2013, IBM, at that time, was a company on its back foot. As I reflect, it was a company that had just celebrated its 100th anniversary. A historic company. One of the reasons that it was, and still is, a historic company is because it's been able to reinvent itself repeatedly, over the course of that now 111 years. And when I first encountered IBM in 2013, it felt like it had forgotten how to reinvent itself. It felt like an old company, and it felt like it was a little stuck. There was a lot of what felt like fear, or just paralysis, among the teams with which we were interacting. And just not a lot of confidence. Not a lot of Moxie or swagger. It felt like they just didn't have their mojo to put it bluntly. That, I thought at the time, was really striking.

X-Mentor: What was the plan at the time, from a design perspective, to come in and address that problem? How did you get started and what did you set out to change?

Doug: Well, there was a mission that was articulated by Phil Gilbert, the founding General Manager of Design who took that role in 2012 and he was the visionary of the program. You know Phil very well, Greg. And Phil articulated the mission of “creating a sustainable culture of design and design thinking.” We evolved that language over time, but “sustainable culture” were two very important words in that mission. Sustainable meant we needed to be playing the long game and we need to be thinking not just about the year, the quarter, the next release, the next delivery, the next product cycle, but we needed to be thinking a decade or a generation ahead, and that was a big idea. That mission really drove a lot of what we were about, how we behaved, and some of the moves that we made with that program. And then culture being the other important word. Culture meant that we were trying to impact not just the outer shell of the company, which is a place that design had operated and impacted traditionally. The idea was that we were going to infuse the DNA of this company with a new way of working, a new way of thinking, a new way for teams to operate, and a new way for the company to connect with their customers. So, there were some compelling pieces to that mission that I think really had an impact on how we approached our work.

X-Mentor: You’ve mentioned that there was some resistance to change, not necessarily at the higher levels, but that middle tier of management. I would like to drill down on that. What happened when you started to introduce some of these new concepts?

Doug: We would invite teams into the initial Design Studio here in Austin, TX. We then later built studio spaces around the world. But initially we were operating out of a scrappy studio here in Austin. The contract that we had with teams was that in order for a team to receive Designers, they needed to first come to the studio and participate in what we called a Design Camp, a weeklong training workshop. As you know, Greg, we had a “shadow” talent operation for Design at the time. So, we were controlling the pipeline of designers. And then we were deploying them, for lack of a better word, out to teams in the business. Thus, for a team to receive designers, they would first have to attend this Design Camp training. They would bring the cross-functional members of their team, including Product, Tech, and their new Designers. Occasionally they'd have some marketing folks along with them, some business analysts, or data scientists. And they would bring their current project with them, and we would spend a week with them working through the project and training them in our human-centered design thinking methodology and approach.

There were always some doubters. We’d have 3 or 4 teams in the studio at a time. So, it could be a group of 30 or even 50 people in the studio at a time for this weeklong session. Inevitably, there were a handful of, usually guys to be honest, older guys, engineers who spent their career at IBM and they'd seen it all.

They had seen everything, so they weren't going to be impressed by anything.

Including a bunch of designers trying to teach them a new way to work. And my goodness, just everything from the body language to the way that they were behaving. You could just tell that they were not going to buy what we were trying to sell. Inevitably, we had a really good success rate of winning those doubters over by the end of that week. It was sort of a badge of honor for us that by, say, Thursday of the week they'd start to kind of mosey over to me and, they didn't want anybody to hear this, but they would say, hey, Doug, I wasn't really sure about how this was going to go this week. But I must tell you, I really think we're onto something. I think this is going to help us. I think we can do this and it's going to make us better. So, one by one, we were winning them over.

It's important to think about that person and why they were doubting. We needed to understand what their prior experiences were with new ways of working, and new methodologies that were constantly being introduced in the company. They had a right to be doubtful and skeptical, and maybe a little cynical about this, because a lot of that stuff comes and goes, and it doesn't move the needle.

Additionally, we came to discover that those middle tier leaders in the company are not incentivized to try new things. They aren't. They are incentivized to do their work the way that they have always done it.

X-Mentor: Here’s some perspective for our readers; I have encountered employees at IBM that had been there 20 years, 30 years, some even longer. Some are even second-generation IBMers.

Doug: Oh yeah.

X-Mentor: This is something I've never encountered in technology companies before, not like IBM.

Doug: And they were rewarded. How should I say it? Almost, the longer you were there, the more their stature in the company grew, and grew, and grew. So many of these leaders that we encountered in those days, Greg, you are absolutely right. They were like the rock stars of the company.

X-Mentor: I'm thinking about design org maturity (e.g., DMI or McKinsey Design Index) in the context of all of this. Where would you say IBM was on that scale of one to five of design org maturity when you first met them in 2013?

Doug: Not even one.

X-Mentor: [Laughs!] Not even one! Maybe a .5, yeah?

Doug: Maybe a .5, a point-five. Yeah.

X-Mentor: Okay, so… [sigh]

Doug: I mean, there simply wasn't a serious practice or program or way of doing design. There were not enough designers to even get to 1 to be honest.

Transformation by Design

X-Mentor: This is a curious thing to me because we both know the famous quote from Thomas J. Watson Jr. “Good design is good business.”

So, I mean, did design exist at one point in time at IBM, then just disappeared? What happened?

Doug: It's a very interesting history. In fact, the design whisperer for Thomas Watson Jr. in those years in the late 50s through the early to mid 70s was Elliot Noyes, who was an architect from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Noyes was quite a notable architect who was the first Director of Design at IBM. He was a consultant. He was not an employee, but he was close to Watson Jr. and I suspect that he was actually the ghostwriter of that line for Watson Jr. Not to say that Watson Jr. didn't really internalize that idea. I think he really did. And he was an important figure. Elliot Noyes, in this role of Design Director, assembled an ecosystem of design consultants who were some of the most notable designers of the 20th century: Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer. Later Richard Sapper, just massive, Paul Rand, of course, who designed the brand and visual identity. These were just towering figures. Importantly though, they were all consultants. They weren't embedded in the company. Eliot Noyes eventually passed away, he died at a fairly early age. Thomas Watson Jr. eventually retired, of course, and moved on.

That's why design faded at IBM.

So, back to that sustainable piece of the of the Design mission that Phil Gilbert set for us was so important. He saw that design was so impactful to the company in the middle of the 20th century and then it evaporated. So, it was important to Phil to say, no, we've got to make sure that 25 years from now, whatever we're doing right now has roots to last.

X-Mentor: Going back to that design org maturity from where you met IBM and thinking about those typical layers of getting from below 1 ranking in the design org maturity chart to the higher levels. What did that transformation look like for IBM?

Doug: Well, as I mentioned, we first needed to get enough designers into the company to even get to 1 so that we could even be at that level of tactical delivery. That was why the sort of “thumb to the wind,” of 1,000 designers was important in those early years. We were just hell bent, we gotta get there as fast as we can because we can't even get to the starting line until we get to at least a base level of scale. And in doing that, then that poses all sorts of questions and problems that need to be addressed. OK, you're going to find 1,000 designers. Where are you going to find them? How are you going to convince them to come to this company that has no design story, or design culture for them? So, that’s how the shadow design talent program came in.

That was important because we couldn't leave the talent acquisition to the IBM corporate talent machine, that would have been a disaster.

Then, OK, we've hired them. How are we going to onboard them and integrate them into the company? Then how is the rest of the company going to receive them and understand how to work with this new type of talent? And this new approach to solving problems? So, each of those questions then led to a different aspect of our program, from our onboarding of new designers to our enterprise design thinking program at the time that was about these cross functional teams, working in a human centered way. Right. With designers in their presence. It was about the career framework so that designers could advance in their career at the company over time. The design leadership programming, so that eventually executive design leaders could be placed across the company. That was not in place at the time. All of that we needed to build. The studios network for where and how we are going to do design. If we are working either in Supercomputer labs or in cubicle farms, those aren't suitable for doing the type of design that we're envisioning. So, we needed to create a whole new kind of workspace.

X-Mentor: I understand this is something that went on over the course of five or six years as design migrated out into the business and became distributed and embedded. Over the years it made improvements and started to move up that maturity scale. Then once you get executive design leadership, you're starting to have broader, more regular impact. Is that right?

Doug: Yup. Yup.

Measurement

X-Mentor: At what stage of design maturity did the notion of measuring stuff come in? What was IBM measuring when you first encountered them? How did that progress over time?

Doug: Well, the company at the time was in the midst of, I don't know how many quarters, of missed revenue projections and declining earnings. That's what the company was measuring. They were obsessed with that and how are we going to climb our way out of this slump? To be honest, I think that's one of the areas that we weren't sharp enough as we launched the design program. If I had it to do over again, I'm guessing some of my colleagues from that original leadership team would have probably said, yeah, we should have been baselining, we should have been measuring everything in that first year. Because, even in the first couple of years, we moved the needle. But we couldn't tell that story because we didn't know how much the needle had moved.

X-Mentor: Yeah, yeah.

Doug: It was a couple of years later that we started to implement some rudimentary CX measurements in the form of Net Promoter Score, which is an imperfect way to do it, but it was something that we could scale at the time and gauge our progress.

X-Mentor: When I first encountered IBM, the number one metric was revenue. People were hesitant to enter (revenue) performance targets into any tool for fear that not hitting their target would have consequences, like losing their job. NPS was just being introduced, so there was no mature practice. Later, some of the leadership started using OKRs (Objectives, and Key Results) for their organizations. Then we saw designers embedded in those organizations trying to figure out how to use OKRs as an Experience Metric, which it’s not. OKRs are an internal Operational performance [goal setting] metric. E.g., what’s your business objective? Did you achieve your goal?

So, this was the challenge I initially saw at IBM. Trying to get that overall driver architecture in place, from leading Experiential metrics, to driving up near-term organizational outcomes (i.e., Operational metrics), to then improving IBM’s overall relationship metric (i.e., lagging Beacon metric), which at IBM is NPS.

Do you know where IBM is today in terms of maturing that measurement practice?

Doug: Well, I can't speak for today. I left the company at the end of 2021. So, I can certainly speak to what I was seeing at that time. I think, if we want to use our maturity scale from earlier in the conversation, most teams were probably at a 2.x something. We had gotten from mediocre to goodish with pockets of great. There were certainly some teams that were way ahead of the curve and doing truly excellent work in pockets of the company. But that was not consistent.

X-Mentor: Yeah, I saw that “pocket of excellence” in Watson, for example, where they tended to overachieve (e.g., Optimized – processes proactively, continuously improved). Then everyone else was functioning at a level 2 (e.g., Repeatable – basic project management) or level 3 (e.g., Defined – standardized processes). One thing that I saw, and maybe you can speak to this Doug, is the perception that it’s not Design’s job to measure experiences. I saw varying degrees of designer interest and embrace, as well as designer resistance to that notion at IBM.

Let me read from a book by Audrey Crane called What CEOs Need to Know About Design. This book was recommended by Katrina Alcorn, the new General Manager of Design at IBM, in her Medium article, Good Design Is (Still) Good Business.

Crane writes: “Designers often don’t learn about business, and aren’t expected to be conversant about business. However, you can’t build a software company without design any more than you can build one without code. And if your Designers aren’t speaking or thinking business, it’s hard to make them a meaningful part of the team.”

Speaking the language of business is, of course, are we making money? Are we advancing the goals of the business? Are we managing change and measuring progress? You can't manage what you can’t measure. These are business views and perceptions. Right?

So, Doug, what would you say is the role of a Designer in today's business climate?

The Role of a Designer

Doug: Well, I think the role of the designer is the same that it's been for the last generation. And that is to be the champion of the user, to be the voice of the user in a complex cross-functional team. No one else does that. And to be the shepherd of that user’s experience, that person’s experience. That customer’s experience. The engineering team is concerned with how it's built. The product management team is concerned with how it goes to market and how it fits in the market, competitively and otherwise. Other functions have their own concerns and design is concerned with the experience that a person has. And so, to your point then, how can we be articulating that Experience? The value and the importance of that experience?

“How can we be articulating that Experience? The value and the importance of that experience? And the measurement of that experience to the rest of the business in a way that they can consume?”

And the measurement of that experience to the rest of the business in a way that they can consume? Not in our language. To your point, in a language that they use. And that they understand and that they can place in the context of the other things that they are measuring.

And if we can't do that, then we're perpetually going to be marginalized.

X-Mentor: So, it's the intent of what we're trying to achieve for the experience from the user perspective and what we also must achieve from the business perspective.

Doug: Uh-huh.

X-Mentor: Then there’s what Designers believe about their role, and how they feel about their contributions to the business. There's some misalignment there, and this tends to confuse what we mean when we say the word “Design.” To a businessperson, for example, Design might conjure up this image of someone who’s providing the UI or providing the overall Design System. However, they’re not necessarily thinking about the person who’s providing the overall strategy (i.e., the opportunity and how to act on it), or the scope (i.e., the problem we must solve together), and structure (i.e., the essential components of the solution).

In a recent X-Interview, Karen Holtzblatt points out that the role of Product Design is to answer the question: “What should we build?” Therefore, answering this question encompasses all the elements of user experience: strategy, scope, structure, including all the surface aspects of the product.

Today, I don't think Design Systems, for example, answers “What should we build?” Right?

Doug: Well, yeah. I mean, to return to our theme of maturity. I think that a consistent application of research-driven and contextual foundation approach is a signal of a higher level of maturity. And you mentioned design systems and UI and I think by and large as we look across the industry and certainly IBM, Microsoft, Expedia where I've been more recently, they have in place, and in the case of IBM, a highly regarded and highly rated design system. The IBM Carbon design system is extraordinary. And now that IBM has gotten consistent adoption of that system across the company, that again, that is a marker of maturity. What you also mentioned though is how design influences and drives strategy. And that, at least when I was at IBM, almost never happened.

X-Mentor: Thinking about strategy, I think it is important for us to talk about the pathways to get down to the core of what the business needs. And how those needs can be addressed from the experiences that we create, the products we create, services create, for customers and their users.

Doug: I think we need the right people in the right places and in the right roles with the right access in not just IBM or Expedia or Microsoft, but in every company. In order to achieve that, you need executive design leaders placed and given access. By access I mean reporting into the right parts of the business that give them access to those upstream conversations that are happening with somebody. In most cases, those conversations do not include a design leader.

X-Mentor: Yeah, the CDO (Chief Design Officer).

Doug: A blanket statement. But unless that starts happening more consistently, then we're not gonna achieve that.

X-Mentor: Yeah, the CDO is a new concept. There are people that we know that are acting in that role today, but they haven't been doing it for a decade. However, it is something that we can see shifting.

Doug: Yes, things are shifting, and we are seeing that Chief Design Officer role in more companies. What will be interesting is to see if that Chief Design Officer truly has the access and the authority and the influence that they should have if they’ve got that title. And I am concerned that that's not the case. And part of my concern is because it wasn't the case at Expedia where I just left.

X-Mentor: Right.

Doug: Partly because we had essentially that person in place and with that CDO title and the shit-hit-the-plan and they weren't at the table in the conversation, so.

X-Mentor: It’s fits and starts, right, Doug?

Doug: Yup!

X-Mentor: I think you're right. It’s trying to convey truly what design contributes to the business.

Doug: Yup.

X-Mentor:  Design contributes to an experience of a customer; it contributes to the experience of a user. And when the business finally figures out that it is the emotional reaction that stirs up inside those customers and users during their interactions with our products, our services, and our brands - that is what drives consumer behavior. That's when the business will not only understand why customers are choosing to purchase what we have to offer, but also why they’re deciding to stay with what we have to offer over a longer period of time or even a lifetime. That customer perception is driven by emotions, and I think it’s that human connection that designers bring. And that's fundamental to everything that happens in business.

Doug: Uh-huh.

X-Mentor:  In other words, there's not a single business transaction that happens without some form of emotion having happened inside the head of some customer or some user.

Doug: Yup!

The Business Impact of Design Thinking

X-Mentor:  Doug, I would like to wrap up our conversation today by highlighting the Value-To-Customer that IBM was able to achieve. As you’ve mentioned, IBM’s design-centric transformation started at a very low ranking on the Design Org Maturity scale. But then change happened and the company started to realize it was having an impact on customer outcomes.

Can you share what you learned from the Forrester Total Economic Impact study of IBM’s customers?

And can you tell us how IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking practice played a central role in those outcomes?

Doug: This was a study that Forrester conducted on the value of IBM’s design thinking practice. They studied multiple IBM client companies in an array of industries and geos who had adopted and integrated this practice using the IBM Design playbook. Forrester found that these companies saw a 2x improvement in the velocity of their cross-functional delivery teams moving from idea to market; they found that those teams were 80% more aligned around a common business mission; and they found that those companies saw a 300% ROI on the economic investment they made in design. There were also some surprising ancillary findings, for instance they found a sharp improvement in employee engagement scores among teams applying this practice. It’s a fascinating report, and still available online. I’d encourage your readers to check it out.

X-Mentor: Doug, thank you for joining us on The X-Mentor today and sharing your insights, advice, and perspectives on driving Design Transformation and telling some of the back story and lessons learned on IBM’s design-centric transformation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Doug Powell is an award-winning designer and executive design leader who played a central role in the transformation of IBM Design.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.