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In this episode, Devin and Won You discuss the profound impact of AI on the design and technology sectors. They explore how AI tools have already enhanced productivity in their workflows, raising both opportunities and concerns for the future role of designers. Key topics include the commoditization of design, potential loss of craftsmanship, and broader economic consequences of AI replacing traditional jobs.
Ethical considerations around AI, such as copyright issues and ethical content production, are also examined. The episode highlights advancements in web and product design, speculates on the future work landscape, and emphasizes the value of AI in streamlining tasks, enabling more efficient business operations, and democratizing design capabilities for solopreneurs and creatives. Challenges faced by junior designers and the importance of responsible scaling and apprenticeship models are also discussed.
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:19 The Impact of AI on Design and Society
00:46 Using AI in the Design Process
01:38 Challenges and Limitations of AI in Design
02:41 Experimenting with AI Art
03:44 AI's Role in Client Projects
05:48 The Future of Design Jobs with AI
06:13 Balancing Vision and AI Capabilities
07:21 AI as a Design Partner
08:03 The Evolution of Design and AI
10:21 The Commoditization of Design
11:58 The Role of Craft in a Post-AI World
21:13 The Future of Design Education
34:51 Ethical Considerations in AI Art
37:09 The Ethics and Future of AI
37:45 Job Displacement and AI
39:01 Creativity in the Age of AI
42:25 Capitalism and Value Creation
45:54 Technological Innovations and Their Impact
49:12 The Future of Work and AI
58:35 The Digital Universe and AI
01:06:36 Journey into Design
01:13:12 Evolution of Design Tools
01:13:24 AI and the Future of User Interfaces
01:14:59 AI's Impact on Customer Portals
01:16:55 AI-Generated Dashboards and Design Systems
01:22:27 No-Code Tools and AI-Assisted Development
01:23:35 AI's Role in Product Design Business
01:29:30 Challenges and Opportunities in Design Education
01:31:37 The Case for Apprenticeship Models
01:46:25 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
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A production of Outserve Group LLC. Visit www.experienceleader.com for more.
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Why do we have so many managers, but so few leaders? What does it even mean to be a leader? How do you become one? In this episode, I talk with Jennifer Borchardt, VP of Experience, Financial Services at Publicis Sapient about how to cross over into leadership.
The episode begins with Jennifer reflecting on her journey and how her view of leadership has evolved over time. Jennifer has worked in various roles within the sector, most recently leading an experience practice for financial services at a large global digital transformation consultancy. Jennifer and Devin discuss the difference between management and leadership, with the consensus that the two roles involve different skills and mindsets.
Jennifer emphasizes the importance of sharing a vision with a team and letting individuals figure out how to achieve it. Serious about mentorship, Jennifer shares her experience providing guidance to others in their careers, attributing her success to individuals who poured into her life and offered their insight and wisdom. The conversation concludes with Jennifer’s thoughts on humility, mentorship, meaning in work, and the importance of rest alongside labor.
00:00 Introduction to Leadership vs Management
00:08 The Importance of Vision in Leadership
00:54 Guest Introduction: Jennifer Borschart
02:44 Jennifer's Career Journey and Current Role
04:25 The Path to Leadership and Its Challenges
11:03 The Impact of Leadership on Personal Growth
12:09 The Intersection of Leadership and Personal Interests
15:23 The Role of Humility in Leadership
18:08 The Struggle Between Leadership and Management
27:19 The Role of Leadership in Financial Services
31:20 Taking Control of Your Life Through Financial Understanding
32:50 The Influence of Personal Background on Leadership
33:34 Is Adversity Necessary for Good Leadership?
37:24 The Importance of Rest and Reflection in Leadership
43:59 The Role of Mentorship in Leadership Development
48:43 The Impact of Intrinsic Motivation and Humility in Leadership
52:23 The Significance of Your Work and Its Impact on Others
56:14 Closing Thoughts on Leadership and Career Growth
Join other customer-obsessed product leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter: https://www.devinwsmith.com/subscribe
A production of Outserve Group LLC. Visit www.devinwsmith.com for more.
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Show Notes
Episode OverviewIn this episode, Chris Spiek, a luminary in the product development sector,me to discuss the transformative potential of the Jobs to be Done theory in business strategy. Chris shares his journey of collaborating with Apple to bring the innovative tap-to-pay feature to market, and how one feature born out of JTBD Research created a feature single-handedly responsible for 50% of company revenue. Tune in to hear the story.
Key Takeaways
Quotes
Resources Mentioned
Ways to Connect with Chris Spiek
Connect with Devin
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Horst Schulze, a visionary leader in the hotel industry. He shared his insights on the importance of purpose and belonging in the workplace, the role of leadership, and how his faith has influenced his approach to business and relationships.
Key Takeaways
Resources
Connect with Horst Schulze
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
In this episode of Experience Leader, Devin talks with legendary hotelier, co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and founder of Capella Hotel Group, Horst Schulze. They talk about his remarkable story and how he creates the best hotels in the world. This is the first part of a two-part series that will get you fired up to pursue excellence in your life and work.
Enjoy the conversation.
Join other industry leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter.
A production of Experience Leader LLC.
LinksLearn more about Horst SchulzeLearn more about host Devin Smith
Learn more about the Experience Leader Podcast
Some people just get the need for great CX because it’s a part of who they are, and it is definitely a part of Ashley Jones, CEO and Founder of Love Not Lost.
Love Not Lost is a non-profit that provides portrait photography for people who have a terminally ill loved one so that they can capture memories together while they still can.
In this episode, Devin talks with Ashley about how she started Love Not Lost and the way the organization cares for donors, photographers, and benefactors.
Enjoy the conversation.
Join other industry leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter.
A production of Experience Leader LLC.
LinksLearn more about Love Not LostConnect with Ashley Jones on LinkedInLearn more about host Devin Smith
Learn more about the Experience Leader Podcast
Have you ever encountered pure energy? Devin comes close when he sits down with Nate Brown, Co-Founder of the CX Accelerator and Senior Director of CX at Arise.
Nate and Devin talk about their experience at CX Forums Experience Atlanta ‘23 and
about why experience matters!
Enjoy the conversation.
Join other industry leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter.
A production of Experience Leader LLC.
Links
Connect with Nate Brown on LinkedINListen to the Experience Matters (Podcast) with Nate BrownLearn more about hosts Devin Smith
Learn more about the Experience Leader Podcast
On this episode, Devin chats with his colleague Joe Rapoza, Senior Manager of UX Design at Charles Schwab, about whether UX Designers make good entrepreneurs.
Enjoy the conversation.
CX Forums ATL 23 is coming. Use Discount Code “Devin20” to save 20% on tickets! Get tickets HERE.
Join other industry leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter HERE.
A production of Experience Leader LLC.
Links:
Learn more about Joe Rapoza.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith.
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
On this episode, Devin sits down with Utibe Bassey (Head of Customer Experience, Dominion Energy) to discuss her revolutionary idea of LOVE as a KPI for any business that wishes to dominate its category. She breaks down the tenets as;
L - Leadership
O - Offer (Products & Services)
V - Value Proposition
E - Engagement
Enjoy the conversation.
Join other industry leaders by signing up for the Experience Leader Newsletter HERE.
A production of Experience Leader LLC.
Links:
Learn more about Utibe Bassey.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith .
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Does Design Thinking oversimplify design to the point that it misrepresents what design is or devalues it as a practice and role in the world? Steve Nedvideck and Devin Smith talk about it in our latest episode.
How do you create a consistently great customer experience in the SaaS business world? We find out from Sydney Sloan, whose storied career has included serving as CMO of Salesloft as well as senior marketing leadership positions at Adobe and Marketo.
Your next star performer might not have the traditional background you're looking for, but you can find them, and Derek Greenacre is with us this week to show the way.
How do you apply the Theory of Jobs to be Done to Sales? Bob Moesta is with us this week to talk about how he has done it, as outlined in his book, Demand-Side Sales 101.
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David are back for the second installment of this series on sales, marketing, and how both can work better together. Last week focused on marketing, this week is about sales!
While sales and marketing may feel like they are from different planets, both have to work together to ensure the best experience for the customer. The main goal for the company is how to orient itself around the customer, and to help the customer make the right buying choice for them. So the question is, how do you make a customer-centric sales process that works hand-in-hand with marketing? Devin and David answer this question in three main steps that will help both sales and marketing win.
First, you must make sure you understand the context of the customer. By the time the customer comes to a salesperson, they have already researched and formed opinions about the company. Even so, it is the job of the salesperson to still ask questions, find out what problem the customer is facing and what they’ve done to try to solve it so far. After that, you can better serve the customer by helping them understand what your company offers and the outcomes your offerings can produce to help the customer make progress.
The next stop on the customer journey is helping them identify the trade-offs they will face and discussing the service from the customer’s perspective. The customer has too many options and each organization is competing for their time and attention. The point in sales is not to just get numbers, but to understand what the customer needs and give them your opinion on what steps they should take. The salesperson needs to build trust with the customer and help the customer make the right choice for them. You can win trust as a company by helping the customer make the right buying decision, and discussing the ramifications and benefits for the options they have.
The last step is having sales and marketing work closely together to receive feedback and adjust accordingly. Just like the customer is researching your company, the sales and marketing team also need to receive intel on the customer to make sure they are the right fit for the company. In order to learn about the customer, you need to have conversations with them and ask questions. Then, you can share those assertions with the sales team, but also be willing to tighten and reframe those assertions about the customer. Both teams need to be able to receive feedback, reset, and try again. If it doesn’t work out with a customer, both teams need to find out why and work hand-in-hand together to improve. In every company, leaders need to give sales and marketing the ability to have conversations and make adjustments. The key to winning on both sides, is to continuously improve and to keep the focus on helping the customer make progress on their job to be done.
Links:
Learn more about theExperience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hostsDevin Smith andDavid Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsorActive Digital.
David and I got to hang out with over 350 product professionals at Productfest RVA 2022 in Richmond, VA. It was a blast, and we got to talk with product pros from CarMax, Capital One, and HBO Max. Tune in to hear about the event and the careers of these pros doing big things at major companies.
How often have you thought, “I wish sales and marketing would work more closely together. Heck, I wish they spoke the same language.” Just this morning, right? It’s a common problem because sales generally has to deliver revenue in the short term to generate cash flow, and marketing, at its best, is a long game that delivers massive brand value and opportunities. Opposites should attract, but differing motivations can cause your sales pros and your marketing pros to think they have different goals. This week, David and I get into this two-part series by starting with how marketing can orient its actions around the customer's buying journey.
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David discuss customer experience tech, specifically diving into customer relationship management.
Since David is our resident CRM expert, he fills the role of guest as Devin runs the interview! Devin first wants to explore David's history with CRM, which includes experience building a CRM platform. From his early CRM experiences, including such things as rudimentary efforts using Excel and Access, and onward, David has seen all the flavors of what's out there. He first became heavily involved in work on CRMs when he participated in building a CRM for a college sports program. This process, he explains, prompted him to think about the full customer life cycle; for a prospective college athlete, this life cycle actually extends from pre-college athletics through the rest of life as a student and alum. The question was, how could David and his team build a system for this market to help different aspects of the business keep up with the customers (athletes)? There were tricky nuances to navigate, especially if the CRM platform was to function smoothly—like an extension of human touch.
At their best, CRM platforms work with humans to augment their efforts; thus, they must be designed around the layers of relevant use cases and different aspects of a business. Since some companies' touchpoints with customers never leave the digital realm, these companies' CRM platforms are the employees' only means of customer interaction. In these instances, it is especially crucial for the platform to represent customers well and thoroughly. David explains how business leaders can help employees who feel burdened by the task of keeping up with customer information input, highlighting the need for proper information to meet customer needs and expectations in the moment. As the conversation wraps up, he and Devin talk about empowering employees to deliver a great customer experience by using CRM for prioritizing, business optimization, and personalization. CRM is not only good for customers, David goes on to share, but is also a tool by which leaders can empower their employers!
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
If you have any questions on this episode, send them to Devin@ExperienceLeader.com
Welcome to the Experience Leader podcast, and to this episode brought to you by Active Digital! Do you want to de-commoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue, and have more control over your pricing? If so, you're in the right place! Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experiences and how to orient your company to enable them. In today's episode, hosts Devin and David have a conversation about product and service excellence.
To begin, Devin stresses the importance of always asking if the main intent of your product is to help customers meet their goal. As someone who has run a product company himself, David shares his thoughts on this. While it may sound obvious, this task is a hard one to do. Small scale businesses have limited resources, so it’s crucial to make tradeoffs which will actually resonate with the customer. That being said, customer goals are rarely linear. You run into big problems when you begin thinking of customer needs as a one-size-fits-all. Customer feedback, both positive and negative, is essential to this process. In both Devin’s and David’s experience, not all feedback is created equally, so it’s important to single out feedback from customers with the job to be done that you are targeting. Similarly, you must have realistic expectations which map to gradual innovation.
Innovation is about being able to deliver more in a way that helps the customer solve that problem in a way they couldn’t before. While it is a cultural force, there is a need to give people the latitude to make those decisions. Most companies don’t allow a sufficient amount of time to ask why something didn’t advance progress like it should’ve. If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll often find that you weren’t very far off from success at all. Another way to nail product and service in the software world is to keep employing agile. David shares that if the adherence to the process becomes more important than the outcome of the work done, you need to reevaluate. Most importantly, you need to care about the impact of your product.
If you find that your product is not helping the customer reach their intent, you need to feel comfortable enough to stop what you’re doing and find out why. However, it’s never easy to slow the train down, especially in a large organization. Most of the time, it all comes down to how well you understand your customer. David explains that excellence comes from a place of understanding and demands latitude to solve problems. Finally, Devin offers parting advice for achieving excellence.
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
How well do you know your customers? It's a tough thing to get down to the bottom of what your customer's intent is. It's tougher still to then continuously refresh and refine your knowledge of customer intent, and create awareness of it as an organization. Today, David and I talk about how to get better at understanding your customer.
We cover:
This episode is sponsored by Active Digital, where we help customer-obsessed companies become destination brands. Learn more at www.activedigital.com
You might think that you can't innovate in the chicken business, but Steve Nedvidek says otherwise. Over his 30 year career with Chick-fil-A, Inc., Steve has done everything from cook chicken to creating an entire innovation center.
We talk about
Check out Steve's graphic novel series, Jekyll Island Chronicles!
This episode is brought to you by Active Digital. We help customer-obsessed companies become destination brands. www.activedigital.com
It is the foundation of your company's strategic decision-making ability. It is core to your brand identity. It is the key to motivating your employees. We're talking about your company's purpose. Research has shown that companies with a strong sense of purpose that guides decision-making outperform the S&P 500 by 400%. Interested yet?
In this episode we cover the impact of purpose on your company's:
This episode is brought to you by Active Digital, where customer-obsessed companies go to become destination brands. Learn more at www.activedigital.com
This we walk to Joseph Michelli about his work on a massive CX transformation at Mercedes-Benz USA and the book he wrote to chronicle the journey.
We cover:
Pick up Joseph's book, Driven to Delight on Amazon or your favorite book store!
This episode is sponsored by Active Digital, where customer-obsessed companies go to become destination brands. Learn more at activedigital.com
This week, David and Devin talk about communication through the lens of Conway's Law.
Conway's Law
Organizations who design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of those organizations.
We cover:
This episode is sponsored by Active Digital, where customer-obsessed companies go on their path to become destination brands. www.activedigital.com
In this episode we conclude our talk about what we learned from Patrick Lencioni's book, Getting Naked, a business fable about how to treat your customers, and the culture necessary to make that possible.
This time we cover Patrick's Principles of Naked Service:
Send in questions to devin@experienceleader.com.
This episode is brought to you by Active Digital. www.activedigital.com
In this episode we talk about what we learned from Patrick Lencioni's book, Getting Naked, a business fable about how to treat your customers, and the culture necessary to make that possible.
We cover the Three Fears from the book:
This episode is brought to you by Active Digital. www.activedigital.com
In today's episode, we introduce my friend, colleague, and new co-host, David Antoline while talking about the importance of authentic company values. We chat about:
Today's episode is sponsored by Active Digital. Learn more about how Active Digital helps customer-obsessed companies become destination brands at www.activedigital.com.
In this packed episode, we invite Bob Moesta on the show to show us how to do interviews that uncover Jobs to Be Done.
In this episode:
Key Takeaways:
Books mentioned:
Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss
Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan
Demand-Side Sales 101, Bob Moesta and Greg Engle
OUR SPONSOR:
This episode is brought to you by Active Digital.
This week on Experience Leader, I do a primer on Jobs to Be Done and share about my journey trying to apply the theory to the real world. If you have heard a lot about it, especially from me, but need more clarity, this episode is for you!
This week I speak with NYT bestselling author and former editor of Harvard Business Review, Karen Dillon about Competing Against Luck—the seminal work on the Theory of Jobs To Be Done that she coauthored with Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan, and most notably, the late Clayton Christensen.
This week, I share my conclusions on the five primary factors that influence your total customer experience.
For more on the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, read Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan
This week I bring Assaf Weinberg back on the show to have a conversation about what strategy is, and why it is important to your business success.
Show Notes:
Find me online: www.devinwsmith.com
Ask me a question: devin@experienceleader.com
Today we talk to Joseph Michelli, author of The New Gold Standard, about his in-depth study on the Ritz Carlton. We talk about the pursuit of perfection, the need for making an emotional connection, and much more.
This week we talk to Dan Miller, author of 48 Days to the Work and Life You Love, about finding work you love, entrepreneurship, and having a place that attracts talented people who love what they do to your team.
Get Dan's book and other goodies: www.48days.com/elp
Connect with me: www.devinwsmith.com
How do you lead a team to be at its best so that your team can do their best for your customers? Assaf Weinberg, Director of Product Engineering at Emporos gives us powerful insights that you can put into practice immediately.
How do you innovate at a company that has been in business for nearly 100 years. How do you bring innovation out of the lab and into business as usual operations? Tons of business leaders want to know, and Nicole Jones, Global Head of Innovation at Delta Airlines is going to give fantastic insights into how to pull it off.
Before we get to our first full episode, I'd like to give you an idea of why I started this show and what you can expect from it.