I've decided to retire from IBM after 36 amazing years because my job is finally done. Let me share how I got that job, the moments I’m the most proud of in carrying it out over the years, why I now consider that job to be finally done, and what I’m planning next.
Being Recruited
I was recruited out of my PhD program based on some design and research work I did on a new evidence-based design paradigm that I presented at a conference which struck a cord with the press and led to several interviews. Those interviews led to a call from IBM asking “have you ever considered working for IBM?” I answered honestly “no, but I’m willing to consider it”. The reason I was willing to consider IBM is a book that I had read a year earlier called “A business and its beliefs: The ideas that helped build IBM”. I was so impressed by the beliefs and values that the founders of IBM, TJ Watson Sr. and TJ Watson Jr., espoused and practiced like respect for the individual, the importance of community, etc. that it led me to agree to come in and then to take the job I was offered, thinking to myself that I would try it for a year. Still to this day, I have no idea what inspired me to read that book but I’m glad that I did because it inspired me to start my 36 year journey at IBM.
My Job
I was hired by IBM Canada to develop a world-class design and UX research program because IBM was going to split up and the Toronto lab would need to survive and thrive on its own as an independent software company. And to do that it would need to improve the design of its products.
IBM User-Centered Design
The company didn't break up but I continued the work on the new design and research program now for the benefit of IBM outside of the Toronto Lab as well. I had asked for six staff members and six months to ideate, develop, and pilot test my new program. I met with design and research leaders at all the top companies in our industry, read widely (including Don Norman’s book User-Centered Systems Design), and innovated on what I learned to develop an approach for IBM. I included several innovations, such as:
Involving users and decision-makers in studies together throughout the discovery to delivery phases given that both roles are important to the use and purchase-decision of enterprise software and then asking satisfaction of the former and purchase-intent questions to the latter,
Having users of competitor products provide input to and evaluation of our evolving products (that’s the way you learn how to win over a competitor) and carrying out direct head-to-head competitor benchmark studies of the user experience of both products,
Focusing on the total user experience, from discovery to upgrade,
Working together as a multidisciplinary team led by a Total User Experience Leader and including UX design, visual design, content design, UX research, PM, and dev,
Setting business goals with metrics, being rigorous with data, carrying out statistical analyses, and meticulously tracking impact with an executive dashboard.
All of that work led to the development of the IBM User-Centered Design (UCD) program. Well before the six months were up, the results of the pilots were so promising that I was asked to present them to the head of the Software unit, Steve Mills.
Steve was so impressed that he asked me to lead the deployment of UCD across all of Software. Shortly after that, CEO Lou Gerstner wanted to have IBM UCD imbedded into the Integrated Product Development (IPD) process he had asked to be created so that every part of IBM would use the same process to develop their products. I did the work to integrate it. Before a team could have the money to develop a product with the UCD integrated into IPD, they had to exit a “Concept Checkpoint” which involved showing the results of generative research with users and specifying how the insights from that research were incorporated into the product’s conceptual design.
My team and I developed a three day education/activation bootcamp for product teams and a half-day version for executives. We also developed a UCD Toolkit for recruiting users, doing surveys, running user studies, testing accessibility, etc.
UCD had many successes, like taking the IBM Thinkpad to number one in customer satisfaction, making dramatic improvements to products like Websphere and DB2 making them industry-leading. We redesigned the systems IBM provided to run the Olympics too with great success. I also wrote a book together with two colleagues entitled “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach” which described the program, our experience with it at IBM, and what we advised everyone to do. Some years later, I learned the book was used as a textbook in design schools and universities.
IBM One UI
Beyond UCD integrated into IPD, the company needed a visual signature, a set of design patterns, and a toolkit for developers to use in order to implement them. After the acquired company Lotus had some success with a system they called One UI (developed by Charlie Hill), I led a new IBM One UI project for all of IBM which was the predecessor to IBM Carbon. I hired and led a design and research team in North America and the UK as well as a development team in Shanghai, China. IBM One UI included a full set of design patterns, a distinctive IBM brand visual signature, and a developer toolkit.
My project was the first to provide a unified and consistent user experience across all of our products and the toolkit ensured that every product was fully globalized and accessible, a first in the industry. The IBM Carbon system continues this tradition.
Becoming a Design Director
My boss at the time, Bob Biamonte, said that he wanted to promote me to the position of Design Director. However, there was no such title or code in the IBM HR system. So, I worked with HR and created one. I filled out the requisite forms, had them approved, and then my manager promoted me into the position I created. So, I have the distinction of being the first IBM Design Director.
I also led the company-wide design and research team for many years, hosting design community calls, heading up the company’s design managers, and putting on major internal conferences.
Naming IBM Design
My organization over the years had titles like Ease of Use, Consumability, UCD, and UX Design. I thought it was time to realize that design was mature enough to be called “design” without any descriptors or qualifiers. Against objections that developers also do design and that we should therefore preface the term, I persisted and called our organization IBM Design. And, that name stuck for the past 20 years.
Rebooting IBM Design
When Ginni Rometty became IBM’s CEO, she came to Toronto on her second day. I was in the front row during her presentation that day and was thrilled to hear that she intended to make the client experience the North Star during her tenure. I immediately worked with my team of IBM Design Managers to assess our staffing numbers, our product coverage, and our various design systems. I presented the results of that research together with my colleague VP Sal Vella to Robert LeBlanc (SVP, IBM Software) which showed that we had only 230 designers and researchers with 56% of them working on more than one product (with an average of three). I recommended that we hire many more designers and researchers, that we adopt design thinking, and that Phil Gilbert should lead IBM Design instead of me. Robert called Ginni Rometty after that meeting as he was already also talking with Phil and that launched our big IBM Design reboot. Our current 3,000 designers and researchers and design practices now have significant impact on IBM’s success.
Enterprise Design Thinking
Products
When I started working with Phil, he mentioned that he’d only been with the company for about three years and he knew that I had been leading design, knew the company so well, and had a pretty significant network due to my long tenure. He therefore asked me to evangelize our new IBM Design system including EDT by flying to each of our product labs all around the world giving town hall talks, having meetings with local design teams, and the location executive teams (see the picture below of my “New Era of IBM Design” town hall presentations in Littleton, Massachusetts, USA and in Boëblingen, Germany). I also talked separately with leaders, typically senior architects or senior dev managers, who had questions about our program. To even my surprise, I didn’t run into any resistance to the “New Era of IBM Design” that I was ushering in.
My introduction of EDT to the product business units together with the activation work the rest of our amazing Design Program Office team did led to significant improvements in our products and in the case of IBM Z, a 70% increase in sales (see the Harvard Business Review case IBM: Design Thinking).
Consulting Services
During my performance review the next year, Phil and I only spent about five minutes on the assessment when I said, “we should be using EDT in our consulting practice with clients”. Phil said, “I agree, do you want to do it?” to which I answered, “yes'‘. I immediately sent an email to Paul Pappas who was the head of IBM Consulting’s iX design practice. I got his reply in minutes, saying “YES! HOW SOON CAN YOU GET TO NEW YORK?” That led to another world tour starting the first few months in Europe given Matt Candy’s enthusiastic support. I would teach the consulting staff EDT for four days in a location and then on the fifth day I would work with the Partners and Associate Parters, to teach them and to focus on how to sell EDT for Consulting. I would have two to three apprentices with me learning how to teach or what we preferred to call it, activate EDT (see the picture above of my co-facilitators and one of the first sessions held in the rather unusual design studio in Groningen, The Netherlands with artificial grass and two tree houses). In time I also ran large train-the-trainer sessions to further scale my activation of the whole organization.
My introduction and activation of teams in IBM Consulting resulted in IBM being able to help clients bring products to market twice as fast, with a 300% return on investment, and with a 50% reduction in design defects according to Forrester.
Technology Services
As was now customary, I next suggested to Phil that our Global Technology Services organization could hugely benefit from using EDT especially for our outsourcing business which involves us taking over and running a client’s IT systems. Communication, collaboration, and trust are key in this business. The interdependency between the client and our teams is like what is required of a successful marriage. I believed that I could use EDT during the crucially important negotiations to renew these multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts. I ran my education and activation play again but this time I also personally facilitated strategy workshops with our most important clients (the picture above was taken in what was one of my favorite locations, our old Spadina Design Studio in Toronto). I was told that the deals I provided EDT workshopping to support yielded an increase of $5B in revenue compared with the deals that we didn’t use EDT to support. That business unit was later spun off from IBM and is now Kyndryl. I’m absolutely delighted that they are still continuing with the program and in fact have further enhanced it.
Sales
The success of working directly with clients during a sales cycle led to another conversation with Phil about using EDT with the sales teams on our largest and most important accounts. This time I had a co-lead in the person of Nigel Prentice and six or so dedicated staff on our own team. Everything I’d done thus far with the product, consulting, and technology services teams I did solo and had to rely entirely on my leadership and persuasion skills. We chose four of our top accounts and used EDT on their sales pursuits. Our work led to a 76% increase in sales opportunities, a 54% higher NPS, and a 40% higher win rate. These results were outstanding but we subsequently wanted to see if we could run a version of the approach without dedicated staff and simply teaching the sales teams but that was far less successful. The success with dedicated staff was one of the inspirations for the establishment of IBM Client Engineering, an organization that hired a couple of hundred designers and researchers (the picture below shows our facilitation team in the top left and working with European sales teams in Madrid, Spain in the top right and the bottom picture is of an activation session I ran with 500 or so of our technical sellers in a hotel ballroom in Dallas, Texas).
Clients
During this time, I personally ran EDT workshops with the senior team at hundreds of our clients, often with members of the c-suite, in virtually every industry and in many countries around the world (the picture is of a session I ran in our Austin studio with a large healthcare organization). I absolutely loved working with our clients and it developed in me a laser-focus on how IBM could better serve clients with everything I subsequently did. My lens was on helping to make the customer successful in what they did and in doing so, also make money for IBM as opposed to simply trying to sell customers whatever “we had on the truck” so to speak.
Design Schools & Universities
I met with our design team early on in our IBM Design reboot at our Hursley, UK studio and they told me that they had been interviewing candidates all day before I met with them. They said that none of the eight candidates that they had interviewed managed to meet our stringent hiring criteria and they asked me what should they do. They were worried that they would lose the hiring tickets so they were considering making an exception and lowering our bar. I said that they should keep the bar high and I would ensure that they could keep their hiring tickets until they found candidates that that met or exceeded the bar.
After that conversation in Hursley, I traveled to London to meet with the President of the UK Design Council. I discussed my concerns about designer education with him, not just about UK schools but more generally. He shared my view and said that he would follow up with the UK schools. He and I were then interviewed by the press. I shared my concerns with the journalist interviewing me and the resulting article (see below) embellished what I said somewhat but the headline read, “IBM’s design director: UK universities need to create better designers and more of them”. I was also quoted as saying that our IBM Design three month bootcamp was the missing semester of design school and university. The article led to several requests from education institutions mostly in the UK for me to share with them what I believed their curricula were missing.
I was also approached by McMaster, a university local to me, and asked to meet for lunch with the Dean, Len Waverman, and Associate Dean, Michael Hartmann, at a prestigious exclusive club in downtown Toronto. They said that they had a large amount of money from a benefactor and asked whether I would help them develop a design-based curriculum for the business school, the medical school, and for a pan-university program. I agreed and after a review of my academic credentials, I was appointed Industry Professor and I continue to teach variations of those programs today.
During one of my many visits to our Austin studio, Phil said that he knew that I’d been creating curricula and teaching for a few years on weekends and he asked me to share what I’d been doing. After that conversation, he asked me to work with the top design schools and design programs within universities and develop an IBM Design Academic Programs initiative. We were still needing to hire many more designers and researchers and we wanted to hire them from the top schools. So I assigned each of our most senior designers and executives to a particular school, often to their alma matter. They and I then visited with the presidents of design schools and university deans to introduce my program which included a variety of things we could do with and for them, including workshopping with the faculty to improve their curricula, doing guest lectures, giving a campus-wide talk, hosting an IBM Day, having our designers who graduated from the school provide a career panel discussion, and running capstone projects with IBM product teams working with the students (see picture above of our IBM Day at the University of Pennsylvania).
During one of those capstone projects at the University of California, San Diego I met with the then head of the program, Don Norman. He and I had met previously a few years prior to that when we were keynote speakers together at a design conference in Nanjing, China. We discovered that we both felt that design education needed to be significantly improved. Don then asked me, “do you want to do something about it?” I said, “yeah, let’s do it”. That’s how the Future of Design Education initiative started and after a vegan dinner together in Toronto during which we selected whom we wanted to form the Steering Committee with, the initiative was launched. Working groups were formed from the more than 700 volunteers and thanks to the final heroic editorial efforts of Meredith Davis, the curricular guidance was published in a special issue of the She Ji Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. My IBM volunteer team of designers and researchers also contributed to the initiative in many ways including the building of the Future of Design Education website.
My work with the top design schools globally doubled our hiring from those schools and many of IBM's 3,000 highly talented designers were hired from them. My co-founding and leading with Don Norman of the Future of Design Education initiative has led to curricular guidance for design schools globally and recognition for IBM as well.
Outreach
Keynotes, Panels, & Workshops
I’ve been asked to give keynote presentations, panel sessions, and workshops at professional conferences over the entire time I’ve been with IBM. I particularly enjoyed introducing novel ideas and approaches.
Its interesting to reflect back on the maturity of our discipline over the course of my career presenting at these conferences. I used to ask “raise your hand if you’re the only designer in your company” and most of the hands would go up. Today of course that’s totally different. More recently, I’ve asked the same question regarding researchers. While IBM has had researchers from Day 1, after all I was one, many other companies are still maturing and developing their research capability.
I continue to get asked to give guest lectures at design schools and universities and I’ve done those throughout my IBM tenure too. While I do virtual sessions, I particularly enjoy being on campus and lecturing in person. There’s something about university campuses that I find invigorating.
Websites & Socials
I hand-coded our first design websites, secured the www.ibm.com/design and w3.ibm.com/design domains, created the /ibmdesign Twitter and Facebook accounts, personally grew followers to 60K, and provided guidance to the team that was first developing the fledgling IBM social media accounts.
TV Shows
After George Floyd’s murder, Phil brought our team together to ideate on what we could and should do. That resulted in the formation of our amazing Racial Equity in Design initiative led by Nigel Prentice. Check out the awesome work this team has done.
When we were ideating on ways that we could make a difference in the world outside IBM, we came up with the idea of doing a TV segment about our racial equity work. I had the honor of starting and guiding that project to fruition, a segment on the TV show America by Design. It prominently featured Shani Sandy and Nigel Prentice as well as many members of our Racial Equity in Design leaders. It was broadcast at prime time on all the major networks in the US. Our goal was to inspire young Black kids who have an interest in design by seeing successful IBM designers on TV talking about how they’re helping to make the company more diverse and inclusive. The show was viewed by more than 4.5 million people. I was proud to play my part as what Nigel calls a “second pillar” otherwise known as an ally in producing this TV segment.
I led the production of another TV segment the following year showcasing the work our IBM Consulting iX team had done on an app for the US Open tennis tournament.
Design Challenge
I had presented a keynote at the Design for America conference in Chicago toward the end of 2019 at which I made the case for designers and researchers to not only use their skills for improving their companies but also to make a positive impact on the world. Little did I know that just a few months later the world was immersed in the Covid 19 pandemic. I decided to make real the proposal I was making at the conference by contacting the Rebecca Breuer, the Executive Director of Design for America (DFA) and through a call with Bertrand Jerome, the Managing Director of the World Design Organization (WDO), learning that WDO’s President, Srini Srinivasan, had been wanting to do something similar. Rebecca also confirmed that DFA’s co-founder, Liz Gerber, was all in too. We brought together our communities with a total of 225 people, half of whom were from IBM, to workshop what designers and researchers could do to make a positive difference in dealing with the pandemic. We formulated 7 challenges, formed 21 teams from 33 countries across 17 timezones, and in three weeks, led by IBM EDT Coaches came up with practical and impactful projects. Check out the website the team of volunteers put together after the event.
One of the IBMers who took part in the event, Felix Portnoy, was so moved by the experience and how it brought people together working on a common cause that he said to me afterwards, “we should do this with the design community at IBM”. I agreed and helped Felix found the IBM Spark Design Festival.
Leadership, Careers, & Community
Phil next asked me to take on design careers and community as well as leading the Design Leadership Review Board which has the responsibility for reviewing and appointing Design Principals and Distinguished Designers. I teamed up on this with Lauren Swanson whom I’ve worked closely with ever since. We workshopped improvements to the board, its processes, and forms.
I also thought that we needed a board to govern everything else beyond careers, given that IBM doesn’t have a Chief Design Officer, so I created the Design Executive Team with representation from all business units of the company. Lauren helped me run that board too. We created dedicated workstreams including one that focused on tooling. We did a competitive evaluation of design tools and chose Figma as the winner and that’s what all designers at IBM still work with today.
We also put on monthly leadership calls to provide updates to everyone, workshopped solutions to problems, and simply provided a forum for leaders from across the company to connect. Once a year, we put on a Design Leadership Conference which was hugely popular.
We also hired Renee Albert onto the team and she handled our events. We regularly innovated together and came up with programs like the Design Mavens series where we interviewed top designers at IBM, like visual and typeface designer Mike Abbink, had them share nuggets of insights from their careers and to come up with one actionable idea that everyone listening to the show could do differently the next day to be more effective and successful as designers (the picture above shows Renee, Lauren, and me recently when we were in California together).
IBM Toronto Studio
During almost all of my tenure at IBM, I’ve had responsibility for the executive leadership of the IBM Canada Design Studios and more recently just our consolidated IBM Design studio in Toronto/Markham along with head of studio Gord Davison. While my core role has always been global and cross business unit, it is my local studio and the designers and researchers in it who have kept me grounded.
We’ve had a lot of fun together and learned a lot too. We put on an annual conference with largely local keynote speakers and panelists, studio meetups where new hires provide an introduction to themselves and their prior work, studio members share vacation pictures, we celebrated studio members who had a birthday that month, workshopped ways to improve the studio, held Halloween parties where everyone got dressed up, held potluck lunches, hosted presentations by visiting executives, had meetings and tours with key clients and government dignitaries, and much more.
UX Research
During the last two years as Vice President of Global UX Research, I've established and grown a user experience research specialization across the company as a distinct discipline that provides the crucially important client and user insights to develop winning products, ensured that the importance and use of UX research is understood by PMs and product teams, that my researchers have a laser-focus on ensuring that the insights they derive from clients get into product roadmaps and then into the products that clients then use, that the discover, learn, try, and buy funnel prospect experience is optimized to enable the acquisition of new logo clients, and that tools are available to provide access to users and ready access to user insights (the picture below shows some of my Austin staff on the top left, some of our Red Hat colleagues on the top right, my direct report leadership team on the bottom left, and some of my Dublin staff on the bottom right).
My taking the role was conditional on Lauren Swanson moving with me and we later arranged for Renee Albert to join us as well. The programming for staff that we put together included workshopping to understand the staff and their concerns and desires, a weekly video update from me to my staff, regular VP Office Hours with the IBM research community, town hall calls, studio visits, regular blog posts, quarterly mental health days, and much more.
Being Headhunted
I’ve been headhunted numerous times over my career and while I’m flattered by the companies, the jobs, and the salaries, I’ve said each time, that my job at IBM isn’t done. My job that is to do my part in the various roles that I’ve had to make design, research, and design thinking activated and practiced in all parts of the company. While further improvements can always be made and are as I write this, I believe that my job is truly done now.
Post IBM
It's time for me to step down and take retirement from IBM to pursue my many other interests outside of the company. Those who follow me on LinkedIn know that I have a passion for going beyond feeding my wallet and making IBM successful to feeding my soul through my board director roles with animal and climate non-profits, my Life Habits podcast, my teaching as an Industry Professor in a business and medical school, and my keynoting, workshopping, and documentary projects focused on improving the world. I'm also have a UXR Leadership Council of research leaders from the top companies across the industry initially working on the Future of UX Research Education and generative AI for UX Research initiatives. I’ll be naming an IBM UXR representative for the council when I leave. I’ll continue to mentor individuals and consult with companies. I’m also working on a documentary and my second book. While I've been doing all these things in my spare time, I'll now be able to devote myself fully to them as well as to my music, health, family, and friends.
Thank You!
I'd like to thank IBM for 36 amazing years and all of you for the part you played. I particularly want to acknowledge the special role that Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert have played in closely collaborating with me during my last two roles and the amazing work they’ve done. Phil Gilbert and Katrina Alcorn played pivotal roles in enabling much of what I’ve accomplished over the past eleven years. I’ve appreciated Justin Youngblood, my current and last manager, for his support of my retirement planning and ways I’d like to wrap up my IBM tenure. My fellow VP of Product Design colleagues are special for the collaborations we’ve had and the fact that they will now lead my UX research staff. I appreciate Ellen Kolsto, my now UX Research DD, for her technical leadership to further hone our UXR craft and impact metrics.
I appreciate and want to acknowledge the members of the Design Executive Team and Research Leadership Team for what we’ve accomplished together and Gord Davison and the members of the Toronto Studio for my wonderful home studio. And it goes without saying, but let me say it explicitly, that I’ve absolutely loved working with my global UX research staff and community, the IBM Design organization, and all the thousands of other IBMers I’ve had the opportunity to connect with over the years.
It's often said that the term "family" shouldn't be used when talking about a company. While a company is rarely a family, I believe particular teams can be and I consider all the teams I’ve had over the years to be my work family. I will dearly miss you all, though I hope that many of you will stay in touch outside of work (please connect with me on LinkedIn). I’m also planning to do a version of my VP Office Hours, essentially an external AMA-style Zoom call, on particular topics chosen by LinkedIn followers. So look out for more details in time on LinkedIn.
Unlike when someone resigns and wants to quickly leave for their next company, I care deeply about IBM and the design and research organization, so I'm planning to spend the time necessary to ensure all the details of the new organization are all set, that the transition goes smoothly, and that I leave some time to visit some of the key studios one last time to share my career insights and to say goodbye in person before I leave which will likely be sometime before the middle of the year.