Culture Change—My Journey
Summary
Julie recounts her experience evolving the design culture at Citrix from a largely unknown, small team to an integral part of the company's customer experience and innovation processes. Starting in 2010, she navigated a distributed enterprise environment with limited design awareness. Collaborating with leaders like Catherine Tudor, Julie expanded design thinking beyond products into business functions such as HR, legal, and marketing. She describes bold visibility strategies like customer conference booths and creative pop-up design studios to build internal empathy and engagement. By partnering with cross-functional teams, including facilities and HR, her team introduced interactive, human-centered activities that influenced real projects like cafe remodels and onboarding programs. Julie emphasizes integrating quantitative metrics such as Net Promoter Score and time saved through improved compliance training led by Peter Conner to tangibly show design impact. She reflects on blending design thinking’s front-end creativity with Lean Startup’s hypothesis-driven iterations, stressing shared goals and language with engineering and product management. Her lessons stress making a splash to get noticed, educating broadly, embracing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and embracing risk and trust in the design process.
Key Insights
-
•
Design was initially invisible at Citrix, with many employees unaware a design team even existed.
-
•
Participating in Stanford’s d.school inspired expanding design thinking beyond products into business areas like HR, legal, and marketing.
-
•
Creating a design booth at a major customer conference helped build internal and external awareness and empathy for customers.
-
•
Design thinking workshops and pop-up studios made design approachable and embedded it into the company culture.
-
•
Partnering with non-design teams like facilities and HR enabled human-centered design solutions for physical spaces and onboarding.
-
•
Redesigning compliance training with lawyer Peter Conner saved nearly 10,000 work hours annually, quantifying design’s business value.
-
•
Integrating Lean Startup methods complemented design thinking by enabling measurable testing and iteration post-ideation.
-
•
Net Promoter Score (NPS) became a key metric to demonstrate improvements in user satisfaction and loyalty.
-
•
Having engineering, product management, and design share unified goals fostered collaboration and collective accountability.
-
•
Trusting the fuzzy front-end of the design process is essential, even when outcomes are uncertain or workshops fail.
Notable Quotes
"When I first got to Citrix, people didn’t even know we had a design team."
"At Stanford’s d.school, we got the religion: design thinking could be bigger than just about products."
"Our customer conference booth was strategically located by the men’s room to catch traffic from hardcore enterprise IT folks."
"We reached about half of Citrix’s 10,000 employees worldwide through workshops and education."
"We created a pop-up design studio in the cafe to trade coffee and cupcakes for employee input."
"Peter Conner, our lawyer, redesigned compliance training so people took fewer courses but more relevant ones."
"We calculated nearly 10,000 hours saved in one year from redesigning compliance training, equating to three million dollars in opportunity cost."
"Design thinking works great in the front end when you don’t know what you want to do; Lean Startup helps when you have a direction."
"Net Promoter Score is just one question, but it’s a powerful way to measure loyalty and customer experience."
"We aligned engineering, product management, and design with the exact same goals so no one could succeed while another failed."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Setting up a repository as a team of one or two is actually the prime time to establish processes like that."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"We have a role to play in democratizing the future and amplifying more visions of what that future can hold."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"Hackathons are a fun activity to spend some creative time together and then go back to making the stuff that we normally make."
Jeff GothelfInnovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation
May 14, 2015
"Accessibility ownership should never fall on just one person but be understood and shared across entire product teams."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"Design ops folks meet the habit of catering so much to everybody’s increasingly trivial whims that it takes us away from the real meaty ops work."
Tess DixonC'mon Get Happy
September 29, 2021
"We ran ambient workshops so folks could contribute on their own time and remove the friction of synchronous meetings."
Liam ThurstonWhy Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It
June 10, 2022
"People care about titles way too much. I had a guy whose business card said star-bellied sneak—love that."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"At DTA, distributed teams and lack of local diversity meant everyone was out in the field a lot to get diverse input."
Leisa ReicheltOpening Keynote: Operating in Context
November 7, 2018
"UX research is a team sport and our research process is cross-functional and non-negotiable."
Rachael Greene Alison DavisBuilding a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
October 2, 2025
