The Disruptor Podcast
"The Disruptor Series," your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation, started as a periodic segment of the Apex Podcast. This is not your standard conversation around Design Thinking or Product Market Fit—this is the series that dares to go beyond conventional wisdom, confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking.
Our journey begins with intensely provocative dialogues that set the stage for the unexpected. With a focus on Experience Disruptors, Product Market Fit, and a host of other captivating topics, we bring you face-to-face with the ideas that are flipping the script on traditional buying and selling experiences.
But we don't stop at ideas; we dive into their real-world applications. "The Disruptor" brings you an unfiltered look into the lives and minds of those who are either being disrupted, creating disruption, or strategically navigating through disruption.
Our guests range from industry veterans to daring newcomers, all willing to share their experiences in shifting the paradigms that define their stakeholders' experiences.
If you're tired of business as usual and eager to question the preconceived notions that hold back innovation, "The Disruptor Series" is your ticket to a transformative journey. Tune in, disrupt yourself, and become an agent of change in an ever-evolving landscape.
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The Disruptor Podcast
Is Design Dead? Saving Design in the Modern Enterprise
Design isn't dead, but it's evolving fast
Nick Cawthon, the founder of Gauge, a San Francisco–based consultancy, joins John on this episode of The Disruptor Podcast to explore why traditional enterprise design often fails and how smarter strategies can bridge the gap between creativity and business value.
Highlights
- Why commoditization pushed Nick to reinvent his design career
- Common enterprise pitfalls when integrating design and research
- The false promise of speed without strategic design thinking
- How design and development teams can collaborate more effectively
- What AI and generative tools mean for design’s future
Key Insights / Quotes
- “Design was dying 10 years ago; it was being commoditized and boxed in.”
- “Faster doesn’t always mean better; we need space for user research and real feedback.”
- “Designers must now master both strategic thinking and front-end tech stacks.”
- “Experience matters, especially when discerning signal from noise in AI-generated content.”
Deep Dive Opportunities
Connect with Nick.
He would love to hear from you.
As he says, "Please do make a connection, and we promise to respond back quickly. Life is short."
Visit Gauge.io, a San Francisco–based consultancy helping teams design the right things, faster and smarter.
Connect with Nick:
- Email: hello@gauge.io
- Call: +1 (510) 560-5472
- Slack: gauge-io.slack.com
Comments or Questions? Send us a text
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Is design dead? Saving design in the modern enterprise. Hi everybody, I'm your host, john Kuntz. Welcome to another edition of the Disruptor podcast. For those that are new to our show, the Disruptor Podcast. For those that are new to our show, the Disruptor Series is your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation. We started this podcast back in December of 2022 as a periodic segment of the Apex Podcast. Our vision was to go beyond conventional wisdom by confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking. Today, we will talk with Nick Keltland of Gage as we explore design in the modern enterprise. We will discuss valuable insights and advice on pitfalls and mistakes many executives make in these disruptive times. Welcome to the show, nick.
Speaker 2:Hey, john. Thank you for having me. Welcome to the show, nick hey.
Speaker 1:John, thank you for having me. Good to have you here. You're my third guest on the show that we've talked about design and design thinking and using principles of design for different aspects, so I'm super excited to continue the discussion and I'm glad that we're able to get together. So let's start with your story. Tell us a little bit about your background, your education, your career, life experiences. How'd you get here?
Speaker 2:I'll do that again. Let's rewind the clock maybe 15 seconds. That introduction of gauge design is not incorrect. About 10 years ago I saw the commoditization of design and that's just a small piece of the puzzle and also I wanted to go upstream, not to be the one that designed things, but to be the one that decided what to design. I dropped that moniker from my email address, from my domain name, and I just truncated it to Gage. Gage is a measure of assessment or analysis.
Speaker 2:The title of your podcast is Design Dead. Well, it was dead in my eyes. It was dying 10 years ago because that again, with the rise of a freelancing workforce all around the world, with the introduction of design pattern libraries from companies like Google and Apple, the need for self-expression as an applied art through design got called into question as a sustainable career for myself. I built up 10, 15 years of experience and realized all of a sudden that that artifact was maybe not the one that was going to sustain me through and will try to position myself to be something different. And then, even today, that repositioning is happening at a greater rate. So that wasn't a big orgy story. But now you're caught up.
Speaker 2:Short story I run a small consultancy here in the san francisco bay area. I caught fire back in 2000, coming out of school with a visual design degree and a highly technical background, and this thing called the internet was really taking shape and have jumped into and out of technology companies and startups and about 10 years years ago I decided I wanted to sort of formalize and do things on my own and stop freelancing and become a consultant which really had no distinction between the two, from taxation as well as a representation purpose. So that's my background and I was sticking to it.
Speaker 1:That's excellent. It's funny it's about 10 years ago is where I got first introduced into this concept of design. My story is a little bit different. We bought a company while I was working at IBM and I was trying to sell this technology of this SaaS startup that we bought and we were struggling and I got a bunch of really smart people in a room down in Austin, texas, who had happened to really gauged up our design and our design research team and I brought these folks into our meeting and they opened my eyes up on how do you look at the problem from the user's perspective and ever since then I've been super intrigued on how do you take different aspects of what has traditionally been the back room in product development and product management and, as you said, how do you look more at what to design?
Speaker 1:And I was using it to what do we want to actually sell our clients because what do they really need and what can we deliver? It's why I got super excited when you reached out Wanted to talk about what's going on in the world. When I was at IBM before I retired, we saw a big ramp up in design. Everybody, we were all required to take design thinking classes, no matter what your role was, and then, as fast as they ramped up, they began to de-emphasize design, the common mistakes or pitfalls that you're starting to see with enterprises, product managers, engineers and the executives when they are taking this what we just described as a more traditional approach to design.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the more modern approach, we're seeing pitfalls that we didn't know existed. I just got off a call with a front-end engineer that I've been working with for a long time. I bring him in on projects when I don't know what I don't know. We've come up with a prototyping project where you'd asked me six months ago to do this. I would have given you illustrated representations of the interface, but in this case, the last three months have been building out a real-world prototype, the front end tech stack that the developers will then take to implement, and the pitfalls was what I was trying to really uncover.
Speaker 2:I got code reviews over the week with this development team. We're delivering this code base to say is there magic here? Is this just going to be a total mess to integrate? Is there magic here? Is this just going to be a total mess to integrate? Because before you had to interpret it, I would give you a graphic representation and you would have to go and code it or translate it from the design tool into your development environment. Now I can use the same constraints, libraries and frameworks that you're building with today and have the user experience be exactly how I want it to be. And is this too good to be true, because so that's been. Really.
Speaker 2:Where I'm trying to investigate is finding these pitfalls of increased velocity. Now, from an organization standpoint, from a strategic standpoint, what happens when there is a perception of efficiency and velocity on that design and development cycle where you feel like you can get to go a lot faster, is it that we just turn up the dial and make those expectations higher and those timelines shorter? Do we allow for hey, let's go back into user research and acceptance testing and allow that to make sure we're designing the right thing? And from an organizational standpoint, I think that is going to be a reckoning point from a budgetary resource and a timing and a planning perspective for PMs, development leads and design leaders. How do we deal with a new engine in this car?
Speaker 1:So elaborate on that a little bit for me, because so are you saying that things are moving faster and therefore the traditional approach to using design in, let's say, a product management or a product engineering role is changing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we're going to be asking our designers to be a lot more strategic. The introduction of user experience research of maybe seven or eight years ago was asking the designers to go to be able to do qualitative human-computer interaction, human factors testing, to make sure that what they chose as a representation of an interface made sense, delivered a good experience, and that's an applied skill. That is a professional practice that preceding 2015 was something that you could specialize in for your career, and there are many who do and do it excellent. Now we're asking that to be a subset of a designer's toolkit. We're seeing Salesforce research reports under design, whereas before it was a side-by-side partnership, and design and research now report under product and product reports, under engineering and so on and so on.
Speaker 2:Designers to be a lot more strategic in how they've made the choice and how they've chosen to implement the ideas that they have around a positive user experience. We're seeing also a reduction in the gap between design and development. As I sort of illustrated that scenario, this prototype that I can hand off on a silver platter to the development team to say here's all the error conditions and all the logic and all the mapping, and I used a SQLite database to create this prototype so you could see how the data transformation is working from step to step. These are the things that build the internet. It's not the visual representation anymore. It's the interaction and transmitting and receiving of data from the internet. I think that understanding these new technologies and how we can decrease that gap between design and development, Are the people you're working with, the engineers or the product managers?
Speaker 1:are they a little more receptive to that approach? Because in my experience, I started to feel like they felt that the design teams were slowing them down from the do, that they either didn't know how to do or didn't want to do, and you just want to get and build something and get it out the door. And so there was. At the end of my last working in the team. There was friction between design researchers, product managers and the engineers. Sounds like what you're doing might help make that.
Speaker 2:I've always been lucky enough to, or cursed enough to, work with very engineering focused teams the WattCore, the only designer in engineering based startups or have been technical enough to be integrated into engineering teams, and so I also knew who was buttering my bread, who was building my designs, and wanted to have empathy and understanding of constraints. I had an engineering friend gave me this great quote of sometimes you got to make whiskey and sometimes you got to make gin, meaning there are things that you can get done very quickly that's the gin aspect and there are things that you need to stick into barrels for 10 to 12 years to then see that payoff down the road. And that's always sort of been the front of mind, because design can be made in incremental improvements or can be made in massive leaps and boundaries, and the good designer is able to anticipate both. What can they do in this sprint or what can they do in this quarter or this year? The tension will always exist.
Speaker 2:You mentioned IBM. Ge was another organization that slashed their design teams, grew it to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, and then took a very hard, pivot of which impacted many of the people in my network still to this day at IBM and then caused that sort of questioning you described of what just happened. Why that pivot? Do we not see the value in design anymore, or are we just offshoring and outsourcing and then getting rid of our domestic workforce?
Speaker 1:So that's my question. Having been not I'm not an engineer and I'm not a product manager I was always on the business development side or consulting side of our business and I saw time and time again we'd build great stuff. Nobody wanted to buy it. My theory was, because we didn't really listen to the user, we gave them a crappy user experience. Most of the time we'd build stuff they didn't need or the price points where they wouldn't buy it. So, certainly at IBM, I got years and years and years of examples of that, and so again, this is where I have this conundrum of where we're going with all of this.
Speaker 2:I read articles about startups that have the same thing. So, whether it be IBM with the quarter million employees or whether it be a startup with two employees, it's like are you sure you're doing the right? Is there a market fit here, or are you building it just because you want to see it built? You know the tinkerer by trade, and the joke is that the person that works on the car in their driveway is that once they finally, after years of making this classic automobile, once they finally get to drive it, it's time to sell it and then buy another fixer upper. Is that are we building just for the sake of seeing what's possible, or are we really making sure it's the right one that comes through good research?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that actually goes into my next question. So what guidance would you give enterprises or teams that want to integrate this approach to be more effective into their organization?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean seeing generative tools.
Speaker 2:Ai harkens back to digital transformation and I'm old enough that I remember that sense of disruption here on the Disruptor podcast that occurred around this notion of digital transformation.
Speaker 2:And now that word is cringe, as the youth say. You wouldn't find anybody using that term in a modern setting and not raise eyebrows of what era are you from? However, it still applies and it still should be echoed because we're seeing something similar and if you're in an enterprise, that means you've been around long enough and you're a successful company enough and mature enough to have seen the cause and effect of digital transformation to a workforce, to a training regimen, to a rethinking of how we do these things, as you mentioned, with the design team, to the headcount and the allocation around, who's being transformed and what's getting left behind. And so, as we look at these new tools, new generative tools, things are going to be transformed. My advice to you, enterprise companies, is what was the ethical, what was the efficient, what was the correct thing to do back then and where did it really fall apart? As we adopted the Microsoft Office suite 20 years ago with hopes of newfound efficiency and effectiveness, it gave us Clippy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that little paper clip at the bottom of the screen.
Speaker 2:It's Godfonder of prompt-based engineering. Right, clippy knew what we were doing and we just needed to tell it, like a gpt, that we were writing a letter, it would come a long way to say in the commercials.
Speaker 1:So how do you believe, or what you know, your more disruptive approach here? How does it benefit these guys that are trying to navigate today's challenges?
Speaker 2:how does ai how to have general tools benefit people who are trying to navigate challenges?
Speaker 2:It gives us every answer to any question we ever had.
Speaker 2:I think that's much like the Internet Back 20 years ago. But as we talked about pitfalls, I think that with more information, there is more noise. There is more noise, and that to be able to discern the difference between signal and noise is going to be somebody like yourself that has had enough experience to know that this is just noise and this is the signal, and you need to pay attention to how to trim that out and be able to guide yourself away from from stout. That's going to be a great benefit for those who have been in the industry and to have seen these mistakes being made. After wave and wave of technology has washed over our starboard bow, to be able to kind of guide that ship to the point where, yes, this is working for us and yes, this is improving efficiency, but no, we don't need this flock and it can only be used correctly in this context. So I think that that sort of weight of experience is going to be extremely helpful going forward agreed, I think this.
Speaker 1:You still need some level domain expertise, regardless of where you are, what you're doing, but there's a lot of opportunities to again do it differently, do things faster. Anyway, I want to wrap this up. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with our audience or your peers in the design community?
Speaker 2:You know this notion of disruption as somebody again you've come off of the enterprise world and into more non-traditional, maybe fragmented, leadership roles, that notion of when to disrupt as that come into these companies, of knowing that this is a workflow or a process that's outdated or needs to be disrupted or needs to be called into question, of what is that appropriate and what needs to be constrained. So what I've tried to do is measure disruption enough to show that you're really trying but not so much as for those of you who play Dungeons and Dragons to be chaotic, evil, where you're pulling things apart for the sake of doing so. And that's the balance that I'm trying to find is to be disruptive, but in a responsible manner, not so much as a question, more of a reflection.
Speaker 1:Well, cool, well, appreciate you and thank you for sharing all your insights, your experiences. How can people learn more about you, your services, what are your socials?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I've issued social media for mental health purposes, but you can still find me on LinkedIn and you can visit me at gageio. That's U-G-E and I'd love to hear from you. Please do reach out and let's make a connection.
Speaker 1:I'd highly recommend it. We'll for sure put both of those links into the show notes. Please don't forget to reach out to Nick, either on LinkedIn or through his website. Anyway, nick, I'll give you the last word before we wrap up the show.
Speaker 2:John, thanks for having me on Safe travels. Enjoy the rest of the summer. Let's connect again in the vault.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ditto, loved it. Loved talking about this topic. Thanks again. So I'm John Kuntz. Thanks for joining us on this edition of the Disruptor Podcast. Have a great day.
