Summary
Julie recounts her path from working with Don Norman on early online education to leading design efforts at Xerox and Adobe before joining Citrix. At Citrix, she began when the design team was small and little recognized, with a dispersed workforce and disconnected understanding of design’s value, as Catherine described from leadership’s viewpoint. Julie’s team made a splash by boldly establishing a visible presence at key customer events, engaging both employees and customers through interactive booths and persona refinement. She expanded design thinking beyond product to business design, partnering with departments like HR, legal, and facilities. Julie highlights inventive initiatives like pop-up design studios and food-themed workshops to embed design culture. Crucially, she emphasizes quantifying design’s business impact by collaborating with finance to demonstrate time and cost savings, notably with a redesigned compliance training led by Peter Conner. Julie explains the complementary roles of design thinking in the fuzzy front end and Lean Startup in testing hypotheses and iterating products. She stresses the importance of shared goals and language among design, engineering, and product teams, trusting the design process despite uncertainty, and being open to experimentation, learning, and failure. Julies' stories underscore how cultural and organizational change in enterprise settings requires persistence, creativity, and measurement to embed customer-focused innovation deeply.
Key Insights
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Design teams often start invisible within large enterprises and must create bold, visible initiatives to build recognition.
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Design thinking can be expanded beyond product design to business processes and cross-functional teams.
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Engaging customers directly at events with interactive activities builds empathy and clarifies user needs.
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Pop-up design studios and experiential workshops foster informal learning and cultural adoption of design.
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Quantifying design outcomes using metrics and financial impact helps gain organizational buy-in.
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Combining design thinking (for ideation) and Lean Startup (for validation and iteration) bridges innovation stages.
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Shared goals and common language across design, product, and engineering teams align efforts and success criteria.
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Even small cultural interventions in teams and regions contribute to overall design adoption in a large company.
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Measuring net promoter score (NPS) and support call volume can demonstrate improvements from design changes.
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Trusting the uncertain front end of design process is critical despite discomfort and potential failures.
Notable Quotes
"I didn’t even know we had a design team."
"Design thinking could be bigger than just about products; we could really use this in many ways."
"Why don’t we also have a booth at the conference this year?"
"Most people thought compliance training came from HR but it really came from legal, and everyone hated it."
"We saved the company almost 10,000 hours and three million dollars over four years by redesigning compliance training."
"Design thinking is great for the fuzzy front end; Lean startup is great once you know what you want to do."
"Having engineering, product, and design share the exact same goals was key to success."
"Design should put tech support out of business by having great products where people never have to call."
"A shared language helps us communicate—whether we call it design thinking or design practice."
"You have to trust the process even when the fuzzy front end is scary and you don’t know where it’ll take you."
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