The X-Interviews | Re-Thinking Design

Interview #14 - Robert Fabricant on Design's Shifting Landscape

Robert Fabricant on Design’s Shifting Landscape

Today on the X-Mentor, it’s Robert Fabricant on why top design leaders are hitting the panic button and what their concerns reveal about the shifting landscape of design in a business-centric world.

Robert is a Co-Founder and Partner at Dalberg Design, where he leads a multi-disciplinary studio with teams in Dakar, London, Mumbai, Nairobi, and New York to co-design solutions for global challenges, focusing on impact and inclusivity.

Robert also contributed to the book "User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way we Live, Work and Play," a New York Times-acclaimed work exploring the evolution of user experience design.

His career also includes key roles at frog, where he served as a Fellow and Vice President, Creative, leading major client relationships and advancing the company's social impact accelerator. Robert has a wealth of experience in shaping creative strategy and fostering cross-functional design teams across various industries.

The X-Mentor: Welcome to The X-Mentor, Robert. I very much appreciate you being with us today!

Robert: Good be here, Greg.

Design Leadership is “Freaking-out”

The X-Mentor: So far in 2024, you have written two articles for Fast Company that report on some concerning trends in strategic design. In the first article, The Big Design Freak-out, describes how a number of big companies, such as IBM and Expedia, have eliminated their top design executive positions.

What else have you learned about what’s happening and what it means?

Why are these executive design roles being eliminated?

Robert: There has been some great feedback on the piece and that was the purpose of it: to pull some things together and put something out that could bring together and spark a range of discussions that were already going on. I don't think it was news to a lot of people. However, I think the folks at Fast Company felt like it reached a place where it was newsworthy. And I would say there are a few viewpoints that have come up. For example, there was a group of people who felt that designers were just blaming themselves for the end of easy money for a lot of tech enabled companies.

So, the article led to a nice set of follow up conversations. I really appreciated other folks weighing in both directly with me and in other forums. And there is certainly more learning coming out all the time. As a person who maybe galvanized this conversation a bit with that piece, I don't sit inside a big company. And while at a few points in my career, I toyed with that idea, it's not something I've done. So, I want to be clear that there are people with much more direct experience. Maybe it gave me a perspective that was useful, but the circumstances are going to be different in different industries and they're going to be different across different sectors.

There were a bunch of people who came back to me and said, you know, we've got to stop blaming ourselves for a rough economic cycle. The fact that there was a lot of easy money that led to a run up and design became part of the fashionable way that you built a tech company, a startup company, and leadership looked for it and wanted it, but didn't always know how to use it.

So, there's definitely a group of people who I think were pushing back a little on the negative tone, on the idea that we're blaming ourselves for something. Somebody specifically said, you know, if somebody hired you and they didn't think through the business model of how and why design would be a sustainable advantage to them and deliver sustainable value for the business, that's not your fault, it's their fault. People said that and I think there's a degree of truth to it. I think people also noted that engineering teams, and many other teams are going through a lot of cost cutting right now.

So, I've wrestled with what makes this moment a little bit unique. And I do think it was a particular run up that design hadn't really been through to that degree before. And I think it stands out as a cycle for designers and I think we're still trying to pull the lessons out of it, in terms of what it means. I think design had the potential to and, in many ways, did fill a gap. There was such a strong engineering-driven product mindset and I think design helped shift that a bit and crack that open.

But that wasn't enough, in particular, for design leaders to sustain their individual value, and still be able to point to the unique differentiator that the design leader plays.

And that was the focus of the first Fast Company piece. Just having some baseline design capabilities enabled a lot of product-level work that was happening in some kind of companies, service level work happening in other kind of companies, or consulting work that needed to consider more creative solution development as part of their value proposition.

The X-Mentor: In your first article, you mentioned how some executive recruiters are putting together design collectives, these design networks of design leaders.

Do you have any updates on how executive design recruiters are responding?

Robert: The follow up article, Design Leaders are in their Reinvention Era, takes a broad look at these emerging networks. And to be fair, not all are recruiter-led.  One of them in particular, Design Leaders Community, has a recruiter who spawned it. But it's probably not going to be sustained just based on the value of the relationship to a recruiter. More broadly, there are a number of different types of networks opening up. And I think that's a real positive. I think the design community doesn't have a vision for this late-stage career work for continued leadership beyond the founder model that existed and dominated for so long. And I think there's a lot of room for different types of professional networks to strengthen the mission and purpose and language we use to talk about the continued strategic role of design leadership as well as to build alliances and relationships that will drive the next layer of organizations.

What I'm learning is that, behind that wave of networks, is a growing wave of entrepreneurship. And a lot of these efforts have designers in principal roles, but they’re launching very hybrid businesses. They're not just going back and saying I'm going to build another agency or I'm going to build another consulting firm or services firm. Or I'm going to pin my future on my ability to build a slightly better AI-enabled piece of electronics than somebody else.

They're exploring much more layered business models that show their increased savviness in terms of business. Particularly in B2B, with very specialized, high value business applications of things like AI. Designers are putting together mixes of strategic advisory work, capacity building and training and toolkit work, and AI enabled, automated products. Things that have either off-the-shelf value or things they can repurpose.

So, there are very rich business models that are emerging, and I think designers are much better prepared to explore them today.  And in that sense, design may not be the headline for what some of these future businesses are. But I think they're going to be very varied and innovative in the different value propositions they offer.

Design Leadership’s Value

The X-Mentor: I’d like to go back to your comment on design leaders and their ability to sustain the individual value that design leadership brings.

The question is about the approach to execution. For example, do design leaders think in terms of managing their business like a cost center vs. a profit center?

Have you heard any discussions about change in their approach to execution?

Robert: The first thing I'll say is in this particular buildup of design leadership the sense I have is that the value proposition started much more with opening up new possibilities for businesses and new kind of ways of thinking about business models, particularly different demand side business models, and thinking about capacity building and collaboration with outside partners and internally. And so, this value proposition had a lot to do with change. And to varying degrees, I think designers were able to generate buy-in for greater investment in this sort of change.

But it wasn't a value proposition about execution. What I heard from the people I spoke with is that the mandate became less about growing and building a new capability and making the case and generating the buy-in and inspiring people and shifted towards execution and optimization.

There was a shift on a personal level in terms of how satisfying these roles were. A shift in skills that businesses were looking for. And to some degree I think a leveling up of more contributing level designers to a baseline level of management. A lot of the people who joined in leadership roles never went through that full journey. Many came from outside firms. There were no strong management cultures, processes, and skills being inculcated in that leadership group. So, you have a mid-tier that I think is handling a lot of management and execution.

I do think that the world is changing, at least within tech firms specifically. But I would say overall for a lot of the design leaders that I talked to, they're just reacting to the fact that their roles became much more about execution and optimization. Their skill sets, and their own identity and their own sense of purpose went through a few cycles because you can't build a big team unless you can execute in the first round or two of that. You're executing in service of owning that mandate, but that only lasts so long. So, I do think that that there's a shift now towards execution on product, on platform, on service which is not lead by design teams specifically.

The X-Mentor: In your first article, you talked about designers having to “communicate the value of their skills and experience all over again.” You quoted Lindsey Mosby, a senior design strategist, saying, “How many ‘six-ways-to-Sunday’ do I need to justify my worth to you.” Then in your follow-up article you quote Class35 stating, “The strategic design gold rush is over.” You also write, “Tech companies, too, are downsizing their in-house design functions with design increasingly seen as a subordinate capability in product-led organizations.”

So, with that I'm thinking about the responsibility of senior design leaders from a business perspective and how they hold the space for creating value and behavior change. The fact is that much of design has now found itself locked out of decision-making at the strategic level, and as you stated, is viewed as a “subordinate capability.”

It didn’t start out that way, in fact it was precisely the opposite. Product Design pioneers were the people who led product decision-making and drove business impact. Somehow, we found ourselves over time locked closer and closer to smaller interactions around UI and didn’t maintain that overall strategic view of the market opportunity.

For example, here’s a couple of excerpts from X-Interviews with pioneers of UX.

• The X-Interview with Karen Holtzblatt – Contextual Design started as the answer to the question, “How can we know what to make?” From the very beginning of her work at DEC, Karen wanted to “figure out the right product to produce so that it will be bought, and money is made by the company.”

• The X-Interview with Jakob Nielsen – Between 1993 and 1994, the web itself went from text based to graphic based UI, which resulted in a whopping 2,010% growth rate. Jakob said, “User interfaces do matter.” Then he qualified his remarks by saying, “I think there's a double multiplier in that I do something and then hundreds of thousands of people will read it. And then hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, will then benefit from those improved designs.” Jakob’s business impact on UI is literally almost too big to quantify.

Somehow, along the journey we’ve lost that strategic element, or at least the common perception that design has responsibility for strategy. Now we seem to be more focused on the surface of UI.

So, to my question, have any of these design leaders that you've talked with acknowledged that design is not in the position it used to be in terms of deciding what product to build?

Are design leaders talking about strategic decision-making as part of the problem to be solved?

Robert: I want to make sure, Greg, I'm getting to the exact question you asked. What I heard is that if you reflect on the early days there was a potential for a much bigger mandate. Whether it was led by designers or not, the hope was that some form of user-led thinking about product and experience would have a bigger impact on the bigger decisions and investments of companies making as they go to market. And that with the rise and the buildout of a more robust and extensive set of design functions, things got a bit more technical in terms of what these folks were enabling and executing on.

The X-Mentor: For example, Jesse James Garrett has this model of the elements of user experience. And so that's really what I'm invoking with my question. Today, I'm hearing that we're more focused on “Surface” and “Skeleton” than “Scope” and “Strategy” – which is where design used to start the engagement.

Think RACI chart: Design used to be “Responsible” and now is merely “Involved” in strategy. At DEC, product strategy would be informed by Contextual Inquiry, which was used to inform what product to build. Now, strategy is led by Product Management, whose ranks typically have no prior experience, or have not mastered or developed any proficiency, with rigorous research methodologies. Product isn’t answering questions like “How can we know what to make?” They’re not conducting rigorous research. Rather, they will “talk to” a customer, then tell developers what to make. In Jared Spool parlance, “They’re guessing.”

Somehow, design has yielded that strategic responsibility over to others. So, the question that I was putting back to you was, have these design leaders that you have talked with acknowledged this yielding of strategic responsibility as part of the problem to be solved?

Robert: What I have definitely heard from folks goes back to what we were discussing about opening up new capabilities, and organization building versus execution and optimization. Over time, it does sound like design was more in service of a broader set of needs in an organization. And that comes with good and bad. It allows you to grow teams. It creates more room for leadership and Investment. But may not allow you to focus your efforts as singularly on the big new opportunity spaces that an organization might be thinking about.

If I go back to my own experience growing up at a place like Frog, here's what I noticed. Companies would come to us only when they were considering making a big, much riskier investment of the kind that Karen was talking about. Design people only went in-house for those cycles, and then they left. There was a sense that certain businesses at certain points in time were considering making a much more transformative commitment to new products, new capabilities, new markets, and that's when design showed up and then design didn't necessarily stay to enable everything else.

The problem with that way of thinking is we saw a lot of crap come through that model. Karen Holtzblatt makes the case that a business might commit to the right product idea, and in the first iteration they might be willing to over-invest in certain elements of that product experience to open that market, to set the standard. You know, the way Amazon did with the first Kindle. But then after that, you see a lot of crap products and crap services come through that same pipeline. So, think about banking relationships. That is a huge sector that's changed a lot and has invested in design and design capacity internally for quite some time. Sure, there are moments where a very new product or a very new kind of offering is introduced. But a lot of the value is in a cumulative experience that for each of us is affected by lots of little service touch points. If you want to influence and improve those, that’s a different problem.

You could argue that that problem, if you do it well, has much more impact than the occasional big bet on a new mobile app for banking, if you look at Capital One, let's say they did. But you're enabling and mobilizing a lot of change across a lot of parts of an organization. And the effort is more diffused.

I think the most effective design leaders wanted to still rally people around a more singular vision.

And I think in some industries, that’s easier than others. It lends itself to certain kinds of brands, certain kinds of product offerings, to have a very singular vision. And in service businesses, for example, those opportunities are harder to find.

 From a leadership perspective, I don't think that design capabilities are going away in Barclays Bank any time soon. Now the organization has brought in and adopted things that they should never have stopped doing, like prototyping, user research. The truth is that those are distributed responsibilities. They’re responsibilities that touch a lot of little tactical touch points and hopefully add up to a better experience. I can see it in some of the industries that I participate in as a consumer, like airlines. Delta just does it better than anybody else in the US right now. I don't know why and it's not because I can point to a CEO at Delta. But the little digital touch points are better. They just did a horrible thing with their rewards program, but nonetheless, a lot of other things work better.

So, I don't know the answer. I don't know if that was a defeat for design or to some degree by digging your own grave. I certainly don't look at it that way.

Re-Articulating Design’s Value

The X-Mentor: My hypothesis is more based on conversations with design leaders and other people in the field who believe that design evolved and so did the rest of the product management and development organizations. And as that happened over time, design relinquished much of the strategy responsibility in favor of focusing on the more visible UI screens, navigation, and workflow aspects of product design.

And this is where Product Management and Developers stepped in to assign what the necessary parts of the product would be. And their proposed solutions are coming from a place of inherent bias. E.g., The developer has an idea for a feature that they want to ship in a product. Or the Product Manager “talked to” a customer who told them they would buy a product if only it has “Feature X” as part of the solution. In both examples, neither answers the question, “How can we know what to make?” Then Agile added another layer or challenge to the problem, because of the short sprints and philosophy of not doing big up-front requirements. Hugh Beyer, at InContext Design, noticed how Agile software development was conflicting with the needs of UX design. Karen Holtzblatt and I discussed this problem in our X-Interview.

Later, in an X-Interview with Tom Greever, you may recall his book Articulating Design Decisions, we discussed this idea of Articulating Design Value. Here, Tom and I talked about the different dimensions of the way customers perceive value, specifically “Experiential value” and “Symbolic value.” Tom said, “You know, symbolism, you know, is something that people clearly pay more for symbolic moments. They pay more for that, and that's more value.” He says “customers have a perception of value.”

Tom is saying that people pay more for these symbolic moments. However, our ability to articulate that kind of value from a design leadership perspective, Tom was saying, we're not doing a good job of that, to be able to articulate value well and demonstrate value.

The question to you is, has design leadership looked at our ability to articulate value and demonstrate value as a part of what might be contributing to where design leadership is today?

Robert: So, the question of symbolic value in the way you framed it, I don't think, came up in many of the conversations I've had. I'll be honest with you.

What I heard and what I observed in my own work working with some big companies like GE when I was back at Frog, is that there was an executive who created the opportunity and credibility for a senior design leader to come in and ask big questions. There was generally an executive who created that space.

Very rarely did design leaders come in on their own and create that space for themselves.

And the reason I bring that up is I think that partnership is quite important. And I think as many companies began this cycle, there was often an executive counterpart to the design leader. I know this was the case for IBM and many different types of organizations like the Mayo Clinic. That partnership was so powerful. And the reason I bring that up is that in my experience, the person who's often best positioned to articulate the value of design is that executive, not the design leader, at least initially, because they know the company, and they hold the credibility. They've already built business value in the company, so it's not just their words, not just the symbolism of what they do. They have a proven track record of delivering value.

So that partnership to me was often the starting point. The tricky part is, that person often cycles out and moves on to the next thing. Because that person is by nature probably a creative thinker about business. They get something going, they see the value of design. They get design embedded and then there's something else they're interested in doing. And often I feel like the design leader is left with a deficit without that partner. Not all of them.

There is a class of design leaders who are still incredibly successful inside businesses right now. And I don't think I spoke to many of those individuals. But I think we know some of the names of who those folks are. And they managed to now hold that space themselves. But it's harder. And I think that maybe there's symbolism to that too. I saw in the design run up with GE and working with the head of their aircraft business at the time who is a very credible person and basically made the case for them building a corporate level design capability. You know, he created a stage and symbolic moments for design to have elevated presence which created draw and pull within the organization. For example, they had a big convening every year in Orlando in which they get a bunch of business leaders on the stage to talk about what they're doing. In the Jack Welch days, that was just about presenting a spreadsheet. In the post Steve Jobs days under Jeff Immelt, you have to get up and show some very compelling vision of a product experience, often a UX-enabled product experience. And it was very symbolic and created a different feeling of what leadership was inside GE. And a lot of people followed that idea of leadership. Most of them, again, were not just running design organizations, they were running full businesses.

So, I do think that there is something there. And I think there's probably again a cycle to it. But I think for a lot of designers coming into business in senior roles from the beginning, they didn't think they were going to lose that partnership.

Somewhere along the line it just naturally shifted, and they found themselves increasingly trying to make the case for more day-to-day business value as a more day-to-day function.

And on the one hand, I think it was self-justifying in that, if you could make that case, you had a better chance at holding the space. And this is something I think that probably wasn't talked about so much in the article, but I think there was a desire to create a certain culture around design in companies and you wanted to hold that space. So that designers would come in and not just work at company X but feel like they're part of a creative environment and a creative culture. Feel that sense of excitement and purpose.

I think that became very hard to justify, you know, and very hard to hold. And I think for many leaders that was a huge stress point. Their teams were much more at the mercy of a lot of small tactical, functional needs within the business. And that's OK if you're still able to hold the design culture and the creative culture together. But I think it became very hard for a lot of people, being accountable for that. That burden was one of the sources of burnout for people who had been part of that first wave.

The X-Mentor: Today, we’re seeing not only a generation of design leader’s positions eliminated entirely, but also designers who once reported into those leaders now reporting into a Product leader or Technical leader. Design is now more embedded and distributed out instead of centralized. Embedding designers in a team is nothing new, it’s a common practice. However, what’s different is now there’s no “hub” for design in the organization to hold that space. So, that’s now something that’s also seemingly disappearing.

And so, my observation here is similar to some of the observations that Maxie Schmidt revealed in her X-Interview from her research at Forrester Research. She said, “We predicted that the CX teams will vanish on the surface as a prediction.” Then Maxie goes on to say that these CX teams will either lose people or “be subsumed into other teams where they’re not having the same responsibility or get downgraded in their organization.” When I asked Maxie what’s the causation, she reported, “people in CX aren’t embedded enough and haven’t proven that they add value to the organization.” Maxie also attributed some of this to the business environment “getting more short-term.”

Based on your reporting, what are the elements out there that could be contributing to designers being more distributed and less centralized?

And how do these senior design leaders see the problem to be solved?

Robert: I think I'm hanging on to your last statement there. Is that the problem to be solved?

The X-Mentor: Yes, it’s seen as a problem to be solved. For example, again, Maxie at Forrester reports that it limits the impact of CX. Similarly, can we expect limits to UX impact based on what’s happening with design leadership?

Robert: As design functions matured, as product functions matured, KPIs and measurement and accountability matured, right? There's a natural direction of travel to all that, and designers can still have an integral role in CX functions and CX decisions. But it feels like it's somewhat inevitable if more organizations are trying to compete on how they can bring different parts of a customer experience together across many distributed channels. It's inevitable that there is a continued need for designers to participate in that. And that, by definition, they are going to be answerable to very different metrics and accountable to very different metrics.

So, is that the problem to be solved now? I don't think so. I don't think the goal is to try and reverse that if that's what you're saying.

Liberating Design

EDITOR’S NOTES: We have evidence that CX & UX are merging. In the X-Interview with Neilsen Norman Group’s Kim Salazar, Kim states, “The CX World and the UX World are both scaling toward each other, with journeys being that unit of change.” So, it’s measuring these “Journey-level” metrics that will matter most.

The X-Mentor: Collectively, are these design leaders talking about this as part of the problem to be solved and how to solve it? Do they think “it’s inevitable” that designers are going to be accountable for metrics?

Robert: I think the question is what problem do designers want to solve? And I think for some, the idea of being liberated from these sorts of granular CX metrics is very appealing.

The X-Mentor: Specifically, liberated from what?

Robert: Liberated from being answerable to day-to-day CX KPIs. For example, liberated from trying to justify their value based on their ability to run teams of designers who can deliver on those KPI's across an organization.  I think the idea that we may have reached a point where the problem that designers want to solve now may be something very different. So, there were designers that I spoke to who were very interested in using design for scenario planning and future state alternatives for businesses. I'm not saying you can get a large budget to build a big team to do that. But as a design leader, that can be a much more creative space to engage with inside a company than being accountable for the day-to-day CX KPIs.

So, if you're asking me what I'm hearing from design leaders? For some of them, I think there is a sense that without designers at the table, that KPI engine won't lead to and deliver on high enough quality experiences for companies to be successful. I think there's a belief that we just need to articulate that value better. But I think there's a whole other set of folks who are looking further out and saying, OK, where else does my kind of thinking and my understanding of a business sector, my level of experience, where else does it add value and what else could be fulfilling to me as a design leader? But you have plenty of other folks who you're interviewing who probably are better positioned to have the conversation around how we take better control of the CX engine that's out there.

The X-Mentor: That's true! My very first X-Interview was with Peter Bull, where we discussed Performance Management and Design-as-a-Hub. In that X-Interview, Peter talked about how “leadership people are looking for key metrics that they identify with.” Peter is a CTO with an amazing design sensibility. And he’s very skilled at connecting business value with technology and customer experience, particularly in the domain of measuring business impact and driving business performance. Peter said, “If you think about what design is fundamentally doing, they really should be one of the preeminent lead indicators.”

He explained how experience outcomes give a “very clear relationship to ongoing operational aspects of the company as well as ultimately in the financials.” Peter also made this important observation, “You need to plan for how your design team and design operations are going to contribute. Every other area has a plan, so it should be the same.”

Design has been the one area of the business that has not come back with the plan of how they're going to have the financial return on investment. And so, the question then became, is it really the role of designers to come up with an ROI model like other areas of the business do? And of course, Peter’s answer was, “Oh, yeah. Wow! We’re gonna sit down and define a model of how our design practice is gonna generate the return for the business and organization? Where do we even start?”

However, perhaps DesignOps does indeed have a role to play here where they monitor and manage the business impact of design.  

And this would allow designers, as you put it, to be “liberated from being answerable to day-to-day CX KPIs.” So, the Experience Management would go to DesignOps, or perhaps a separate “Insights” organization that reports into the C-Suite like at Netflix.

Have you, or any of the senior design leaders you’ve talked with, given any thought to the notion that DesignOps is not really “planning for how design operations are going to contribute” in the same way that other areas of the business traditionally have being doing for decades?

Robert: That's a good question. I think design on one hand, has probably gotten closer than it was a decade ago. More of the things we do have data and metrics associated with them. But I generally think from designers, I heard two things.

1. Trying to isolate design ROI hasn't been a very successful effort. You know, engineering ROI, maybe you can isolate based on builds based on features. But even then, you're not really isolating engineering because so many things go into a product.

2. The unit has become a product for many organizations. For many of the folks I spoke to, not all the unit has become a product. And the designers who are interested in making that case, many of them, have moved into more broad product leadership roles. Because that's the role where you make that case.

So, when you have a cross functional design team, just like when you have other cross functional teams, the ROI gets to be much harder to isolate. But I think those cross functional teams are in most cases a bit more niche in terms of trying to provide certain very specific skills as a service to the business. And ROIs are often just based on the demand for those skills within the business. You know, and willingness for other parts of the organization to pay for them, and that's pretty quantifiable actually.

But I think many of them are just going to move into product leadership roles, and I think that's the right thing. It's great. There's nothing better than having a super design-oriented product as far as I'm concerned. That's a win.

The X-Mentor: Do you have any thoughts about how change management ideally should work?

How do these senior design leaders that you've talked with think about change management?

Robert: The conversations I had were a lot about organizational change and culture change within organizations. It seemed like some design leaders, particularly successful ones, had started to develop approaches for how to drive these sorts of changes. But it had all been kind of bespoke learning by the individual. We didn’t really have a playbook for it as creatives. And I think that was one of the things that set us back pretty quickly. Particularly in some of the leadership transitions I have written about and some of the different org business cycles that have happened over the last 10 years, even during the initial run up. There was a lack of a playbook. There was too much faith in a certain kind of creative theater and inspiration to drive and sustain change. So, I think it would be great if what came out of this diaspora was a clearer playbook for culture change within a design-led organization. Certainly some, even some outside firms really have specialized in it more and more. I think there is really a different value proposition for design in this area.

But you have to be inspired by that kind of work. Some design leaders have turned into coaches in part to try and enable that without necessarily having to be answerable for specific KPI’s, like did or didn't I drive that change. There are some people who've been very successful and have survived several rounds of significant changes in business strategy within the companies they’ve worked in because they know how to lead this sort of change. It's something we should admire. I think design leaders have gotten better at a lot of things, but I'm not sure that org change is one of them.

The X-Mentor: Yeah, I had a piece of that conversation with Doug Powell in our X-Interview. He was describing how some of his colleagues in that original design leadership team were not able to tell the full story of how IBM Design was “moving the needle” because they were not benchmarking and measuring.

In the past, we really haven't had the ability to integrate financial data with experiential data to be able to show that impact in a customer journey. But today, data integration is no longer an excuse. It’s not only possible, but we’re seeing examples of how it’s being applied.

It's yet to be seen as to what design will do with that opportunity. But what we're seeing, for those of us who do look at the data, is the number one driver of business outcomes is coming from the outputs of experience design. That is why I'm paying very close attention to the business impact of design and that’s the reason I’m doing these interviews and related research with The X-Mentor.

I'm curious to know if these design leaders are tuned into this aspect of Experience Management at that level and curious to know what they are doing to intercept where Experience Management is ultimately going.

The X-Mentor: It’s been great to discuss this topic with you, Robert! I find your perspective to be very interesting. I cannot wait to hear what you have to say as this story continues to unfold. And I appreciate you taking time to speak with me today on The X-Mentor.

Robert: Thanks, Greg. It was fun and your questions were great. You definitely helped me think a bit differently about some of the things I reported on for my recent piece. And hopefully some of the things we discussed will make it into another piece soon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Robert Fabricant is Co-Founder and Partner at Dalberg Design, where he leads teams in Dakar, London, Mumbai, Nairobi, and New York.

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