Cruce Saunders
Welcome back to Towards a Smarter World, this is your host, Cruce Saunders. And today I'm joined by Doug Powell. He's an award winning designer and design leader with more than 30 years working with enterprise design teams. In the past decade, Doug has served as Vice president of Design at IBM and the Expedia Group. He's a sought after guest lecturer and has been president of the AIGA, the largest and most established design organization in the world. It's a privilege to speak with Doug today on Towards a Smarter World. Welcome, Doug.
Doug Powell
Hey, Cruce. Great to be here. Thank you.
Cruce Saunders
Thanks for speaking with us about content design and how all of these things work within a larger enterprise. Especially as that enterprise is working to create coherence across different groups, ways of working together with design, with content, with systems of creative production that all end up producing something that our customers, the end customers, can find useful and motivating and ultimately drive business value for them and for the enterprise. You've been building these kinds of systems for years, and I wonder if we could just start with your perspective as an enterprise executive that's been working to unify teams that coordinate the people that share design process, systems and approaches. What is your big picture
view on the role of a unified design system and unified design services function? And why is that important?
Doug Powell
Well, I mean, there's two aspects of it. There is the design practice and call it program within an enterprise. So that is the designers themselves. These are the formally trained practicing designers who are doing the design stuff in an enterprise. And then there's the broader sort of application of call it what you will, design thinking, human centered design, collaborative design, co-creation. That is taking the kind of the secret sauce of those designers and infusing the rest of the organization with that way of working. And really, even though there are aspects of quote unquote design to that secret sauce, it's really about exactly what you were just saying. It's really about getting those cross-functional teams across the enterprise working better with each other. And there's a variety of ways that that happens. A lot of it is behavioral. A lot of it is, as we said a moment ago, a lot of it is about the language that we're using. A lot of it is certain activities and artifacts that are generated and co created by these cross-functional teams. Ultimately, you put it in the air quotes of design or design thinking, but it's really just about getting these teams to work better together and etcetera.
There's lots of ways that we do that.
Cruce Saunders
What is the role of a services organization between the poles of call it governance and call it orchestration and call it shared services? I don't know that that's one single continuum, but there's sort of a function of needing to do things in a consistent way that sometimes organizations call governance or a need to reduce regulatory risk or whatever it is. There's a process of centralization and then there's this process of sort of empowering the decentralized function. Could you reflect a little bit on that continuum and where you've kind of found the sweet spots are.
Doug Powell
I mean, there are all sorts of aspects of the call it change management, of taking an enterprise through this process. Yes, governance is part of it. I mean, for instance, at IBM, big, huge organization, huge enterprise, very complex. And part of what we were doing there was scaling a design thinking practice across across the company. We ended up training over half the company, a couple of hundred thousand people, in sort of the basics of design thinking. And important to that, to your point about governance, was placing some sort of certification infrastructure around the change management. That was important because it allowed us to know who the people are that have been trained in this practice. At what level of sort of depth of practice, depth of understanding have they been trained? Most of those 200,000 plus people who were trained, who are trained at a very lightweight way, a couple of hours of online video training. But that was important stuff that they picked up in those 2 hours. So that was important for us to know, okay, where are these people? What teams are properly sort of have the proper balance, the ideal balance of these skills practices by way of certification, what teams don't?
And then as we go to those executives who are leading those parts of the organization, we can say to them, all right, you're in good shape, you've got the right balance here. We can very clearly lay that out to them. You've got the right people in the right teams, knowing the right stuff about this way of working. Executive B over here. Hey, you've got some gaps and here are the teams where you're falling behind. And these are the consequences to that. We know that these teams are now moving in a less agile way. They're not focusing on the user, the customer, in the way that we need them to. And that is a risk to the success of the business. So we can get into a really compelling conversation with that leader. Based on the data that we have around how we've structured the program.
Cruce Saunders
To what extent do you believe the organization you're creating should exert authoritative function versus facilitative function or otherwise?
Doug Powell
Right? Yeah, authoritative is always going to have maybe some short term wins, but some long term challenges. So we always would try. And this was the case in my time at IBM, is the case in my time at Expedia, where I had a very similar mission. The top down kind of thou shalt adopt this new way of working. It's going to have its limitations. Our approach was always around active learning and getting people to have an experience with the practice and the methodology. And as soon as they do, boy, they get it. The light bulbs go on. They're like, oh, I see how this works now, and I see how this can help my team work better. That was always a more successful way of promoting the practice and promoting adoption.
Cruce Saunders
When you form a services group, what are some of the key success factors on making a group actually perform a value added function that is perceived as value added by the organization?
Doug Powell
Well, You do not want to call attention to yourselves as an internal, centralized services organization. There's a dilemma there. Like, you've got a big mission, presumably you've got an enterprise wide mission, you're trying to make big change in a complex company and you've got a really lean team. How do you do that? How do you achieve scale? And one of the things that we found, one of the big insights in our journey at IBM was that we needed to find those we called the magic people out in the business. Those people who had a kind of almost a religious experience with the practice that we were advocating. And we were training them in this design thinking approach and they were like, oh my God, this is all I want to do. I just want to be doing design thinking. I'm all in. And what we realized was we had in those magic people the ticket to scale, right?
If we could identify them, if we could activate them, if we could connect them to each other, if we could give them a little bit of extra resources, a little bit of extra training and the permission to go out and be our agents across the Enterprise, then we could exponentially increase the impact that we were having as a small centralized team. And that was over the, over the course of that journey and getting to 200,000 activated design thinkers across the company, that was an important moment of adding a zero to the number of people that we were able to touch, literally exponentially increasing our impact.
Cruce Saunders
That's interesting because you also talked about certification. So there's essentially a certification process and then deputizing evangelist to carry the pattern. Not just the pattern, but the passion for the pattern. And it sounds to me like there's a difference there.
Doug Powell
Yeah, a difference. But in the certification sort of tiers, that highest level of mastery of the practice was essentially built on these magic people. It wasn't that we ended up calling them coaches, design thinking coaches, but the persona was originally based on these folks who were just like touched by design thinking.
Cruce Saunders
Interesting. So there's an efficiency that enables a scale of a change management methodology through sort of leveraging the budgets of others by instead of having all of those agents be on your payroll, they're on the payroll of the rest of the organization.
Doug Powell
Right. So that reveals another important conversation that's needed to the Upline management of these magic people, these evangelists. Hey, you've got a very important person in your organization who's doing some important work for this bigger mission. You need to account for them. You need to allow them. And not only allow them, but this needs to be part of their role. They need to be accountable for it, their performance review and accountability and so on. They need to be incentivized to play this role. So that was a deeper conversation that ended up happening with their upline executives.
Cruce Saunders
Oh gosh, beautiful.
Doug Powell
Incentives, if you're talking about the deeper sort of mechanics of change management, that magic person, they're going to feel awesome about doing design thinking for about, I don't know, two or three weeks unless they're incentivized to do that in a more sustainable way.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. So there's an implied C level mandate that is at some level needed because the Upline executives will not sponsor the time. I'm not going to give 20% of my people's time to this thing. Okay, can you tell us a little bit about how the sponsorship dynamics work and what level of seniority is needed to be involved and how that relationship works with you as the leader of that crop functional group?
Doug Powell
Well, I'll return to the IBM experience. And this was a program that was launched in late 2012. I joined the company in 2013 just as we were forming the original kind of nucleus of a leadership team there. This was a user experience design program that we were building. It was kind of a new idea for IBM at that time. They had, I don't know, 100 or so UX designers scattered around the company, kind of loosely connected to each other, not really practicing any common way of doing design, not really no workspaces that were really appropriate for them to, to do their, to do their work. And, you know, the company was, was about to fall way behind in what was about to become a pretty forceful user experience movement across all kinds of enterprises. And to her credit, the CEO at the time, Jenny Rametti, who was just in, I think she took that role in 2011, so she was probably in her first year, year and a half in that role. She recognized this condition and she was the absolute epitome of what you're describing. That CEO who saw the need, who had the influence and had the authority to really make a bold move.
And she made a significant investment in this program. She also gave us air cover in the first few years of building the program because we needed to get to scale, to have any sort of impact in that size of a company. There were 400,000 people in that company when we launched the program. So we needed to get to a significant scale before we could have any sort of impact that could be measured. And Jenny understood that too. She understood that we were going to need some time to ramp up. And you look around the corporate environment these days and that doesn't exist very commonly anymore. So she was really visionary in that sense. And without her clear and vocal advocacy for that program, and without her ear cover in those early years, we could never have built that program to the level that we did. Ultimately, we added 3000 practicing designers across the company. We added over 30 executive design leaders to the company. We built 50 design studios custom built for design workspaces around the world. And we rolled out this practice of design thinking to the entire company.
Cruce Saunders
Impressive scale and numbers. That is a really massive amount of human mobilization, especially when we're talking about people from all walks of life. Because at that point you're dealing with not one set of political pressures, but many in many places. And you're asking for time, energy, effort, and in some cases budget from many places, it sounds like. So it's coalition building, which is kind of rare. To be able to do that effectively and to have that air cover is also rare. We've seen to really make the patterns shared in a way that their peers can work with. And so they kind of get lost. Do you have any advice for leaders who are interested in creating cross-functional organizations, but they need to ladder up to get that C level or even just more senior support?
Doug Powell
Well, there was one thing that I would say. I don't think we knew that we were this smart at the time. But in retrospect, as we reflect on those early years of building that program at IBM, one of the things that we did that was super smart was we started small. The temptation, when you're in a big, complex organization and we were in the biggest and most complex would be we need to do this big, we need to come out of the gates at scale. And we resisted that temptation. And we actually started with seven projects in 2013 that were very highly they were hand picked, they were highly curated. We had a high level of trust with the stakeholders of those projects. We didn't have a deep or broad network in that company, but we knew some people and we knew some people who were early believers in what we were trying to do. And we went to them and we said, hey, can we work together? And we rallied. Like I said, seven projects. You would think, well, company the size of IBM, you must have been doing 1000 projects. And we didn't.
We did those first seven projects in the first six months, and not all of them were a success, but four, maybe five of them were pretty solidly, impressive projects. And we used those successes to tell the story as demonstration cases for the power of what we were and the value of what we were trying to do company wide. And we went around and we told anyone who would listen about those four or five projects. And pretty soon the line started to grow for, hey, I want to get my work, my line of business, my department, I want to get us in on this design thing that you all are doing, this human centered design thing. This sounds great, I love the stories. And it went pretty quickly from a stick to a carrot, I guess, is how you would say it. And there was some wisdom, again, I don't think we knew it fully at the time how much wisdom there was, but there was some wisdom in resisting the temptation to go big too early and to keep it really tight and to keep it really concise and manageable.
Cruce Saunders
And what was that pitch like? What was the short
version of the pitch into the business that they were latching onto?
Doug Powell
It was that approaching this work. This was early 2013, so think about what was in the air then. This was five, six years after the launch of iPhone, which was still very front of mind. Not that it's not front of mind now, but that is a case study for the power of a human centered approach. A user centered approach to driving business value was still very front of mind. So, I mean, essentially the elevator pitch was, hey, we want to bring an Apple way of working to the enterprise of IBM. We want to bring a human centered focus to your business, which primarily was a business to business environment, making digital products and apps for the B2B enterprise environment. Really dense stuff, really technical stuff. But our pitch was, hey, an awesome user experience is going to, is going to transform your product and it's going to transform your business, and we can help you get there because we've got designers, we've got talent, we've got a way of working, we've got a practice. And if you partner with us on this project, we're going to do something awesome together.
Cruce Saunders
What I like about it is it's not, hey, we've got a new way to do design necessarily as much as, hey, we want to build this new human centered approach, and therefore our design methodology will help facilitate that. But there's sort of a business outcome, I think, in content. We end up basically trying to sell the organization on understanding the value of content, but I think we're losing out on the bigger picture of what the content facilitates. Right. So I'm hearing the message is more about this next generation of customer experience that was represented by the shift towards mobility and highly simplified consumer interfaces that Apple represented.
Doug Powell
Absolutely. And this was, again, to talk about that time frame. We were right. I think in 2015, there was a demographic tipping point where millennial generation became the dominant generation, demographic generation in the workforce. So we were a couple of years away, and we knew we obviously could see that coming. And that became another compelling aspect of that conversation. Like, hey, you may think that the customer that you should be caring about is some 50 year old white guy working on a server farm in whatever, Utah, but that's actually not the case. Just the reality is you've got a very diverse, very young customer base and user base that is emerging that has grown. Other digital natives, they've grown up with this technology. They have zero tolerance for a crappy user experience, whether it's in the apps that they use for their personal life or their work life. There's no line between the two anymore. And that became a pretty compelling conversation to engage those business leaders who were then like, oh, man, you're right. I got to update my files here. I got to update my thinking about this, because you're onto something. There was a really fascinating sort of thread to these conversations as we got business leaders sort of engaged in what we were trying to do.
Cruce Saunders
Wow. It's inspiring because that's a missing piece for content leaders today, even though the epoch shifting realities are similarly dramatic. Right. ChatGPT and other generative AI approaches are just transforming the content landscape. And there's a shift in the way that channels are consuming content. So on the production and the consumption side, there's this massive dips, and content teams need to catch up. So it's really something we're interested in, in facilitating are these kind of cross-functional organizations, we call it
Content Services Organization that helps us facilitate new ways of dealing with content. But it always kind of comes into the same question of how to motivate it and how to explain the story. Part of that is the ROI numbers that are always being kind of asked for. I'm curious about, in addition to the soft factor market shifting kinds of messages, what are the hard numbers that were driving the investment function?
Doug Powell
Yeah. Over time? Well, again, I talked a moment ago about the air cover that Jenny Rametti, our CEO, was providing for us. That air cover didn't last for long. Right. The air cover was an important few years there, but then the air cover got thinner and thinner, and so we needed to start showing up with more quantifiable numbers. We were tracking several different metrics that were important. One was velocity. How fast could teams move and that was always a compelling one because there's not a business leader on the face of the planet who doesn't want their teams to move faster and deliver faster. So that was something we were tracking. And we found that the highest performing, if certain conditions were in place, if a cross-functional organization was properly staffed with design talent. So we were tracking the ratios of designers to other disciplines like engineers and product people. So if that staffing number was correct and then we had the right sort of basic training of what we in the IBM program we were calling Design Thinking or Enterprise Design Thinking, if we had the right sort of basic understanding of that practice.
And then we had the executive support from those business leaders. If we had those three things in place, then we could say pretty confidently, these teams are going to move faster. And we could measure that. I mean, you can measure that. That's a quantifiable thing if you're paying attention to it. So velocity became an important one. Risk mitigation or tracking how many times you have to go back and fix something because you got it wrong. We found that risk mitigation was another measurable thing that we could be tracking, but it was very favorable for the teams that were high performing design thinking teams. Why? Because they understood their customer and their user as people better than those teams who were not practicing design thinking. When you understand your customer as a human being, their behaviors, their pain points, their hopes, their fears, when you understand all of that about your customer, you are going to do a better job of hitting the bullseye for them, creating an experience and a product for them that solves their problem. And so we found that we could track, hey, we're not having to go back and fix this stuff as often as we used to.
Interesting sort of surprising factor that I wasn't expecting to be as prominent as it was, was employee engagement. We found that these teams that were practicing in a more human centered way were working cross functionally in a more human centered way, were that the employees, the individual team members were happier at work, they were more engaged, they enjoyed working that way. Kind of sounds like, I don't know, kind of obvious, but it's an important one. And companies are very concerned, as you know, about employee engagement and they want their workforce to be happy and motivated and healthy and inspired. And these teams were that, we were tracking that as well. So those are just a few aspects that were kind of impressive about the program as we built it and measured it.
Cruce Saunders
That's helpful. It's interesting. A lot of it is based on capabilities and not cost as much. There's a cost advantage to moving fast, but the emphasis is on speed, not on cost savings. Yeah.
Doug Powell
You could do the sort of analytical gymnastics to convert velocity into cost savings. Yes, but explicitly that was not the pitch. It was more about how the teams were working. And then any smart business leader is going to be able to kind of take that and say, okay, all right, x plus y equals z here. They'll do the algebra on it.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. Well, by getting people working better together and creating ways that known ways to accomplish user experience, design collaboration, it sounds like there's all these soft factor important outcomes that make everything better. Like people are happier and more engaged, they know what to do, more gets done and completed and less waste and rework and better business outcomes. So those are all things I think when you're in the orchestration business or you're in the facilitation business, it's all these gestalt effects that you're facilitating that sometimes are hard to hammer down, but they're enormous.
Doug Powell
Sure. Yeah.
Cruce Saunders
I'm curious the role of design system. I know that you were involved at IBM with a very famous design system program there that has become a model for really the whole design system industry.
Doug Powell
Right.
Cruce Saunders
Over years, this last decade has been increasing amounts of investment and careers focused around design systems. Could you speak just high level about the role of design systems in facilitating design outcomes?
Doug Powell
Absolutely. This is the Carbon design system at IBM which has been evolving over a number of years. It was originally the IBM design language, then it kind of in its first edition many years ago and then it kind of took on the Carbon brand and moniker and sort of identity. Interesting project. This is sort of the tactical way of getting those cross-functional teams to work in a more consistent way. This is giving them the components to actually do their work so that different teams are not inventing the login screen 63 different times for basically the same thing. We've got a standard approach for that and rather than having to reinvent it, the teams can pull it off the shelf and basically plug it into their flow. And it is also an open source project. So teams and individual developers and designers are not only drawing from Carbon but they're contributing to it. And that was an important idea around how Carbon was going to go out in the world. Now there's some obvious advantages to that. It becomes a very inclusive system that you have the opportunity to just accumulate just so much more componentry in doing it that way.
But the downside is you also have to manage it and you have to make sure that the quality levels of those uploaded components are meet the bar of the system. At any rate, Just really impressive cutting tens of thousands of developer hours over the course of a year of measuring it simply, by not having designers and developers having to redo common components. It's as simple as that. Now, Carbon also happens to be just a beautifully elegant system that's just rare in that way. Aesthetically. It's gorgeous, it's got beautiful interactions and it's a super impressive design system. But for the business, your average business leader at IBM, what they care about is efficiency, velocity, streamlining that delivery process so that their teams can move faster. And we were absolutely able to achieve that with Carbon and continue to at IBM. I'm no longer there. But that system, as you said, one of the top design systems in the industry.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. And it sounds like that by itself would pay for the entire underlying effort and then all of the value added advantages to the improving of the actual customer experience, which improves the business value overall at the level of shareholder value, even. For sure, it's really significant. I'm kind of amazed that more of these kinds of unification, rationalization, coordination, orchestration initiatives are not in place. And I think one of the reasons we've seen enterprises they're not is because of the tendency for line of businesses to really want to control their own worlds and kind of do things in their own way, have their own system, and not have any centralized enterprise level function kind of get in their way. And so we've seen centralization efforts become overly governance oriented and therefore become perceived as essentially the stopping block to velocity and efficiency and employee engagement, as opposed to the facilitator of those things. It's very easy to see those programs get put on the chopping block when they're culturally rejected like that.
Doug Powell
Yeah. And I'm kind of giving you the thumbnail
view of these programs, which there were absolutely bumps in the road along the way and there were certainly pockets of non believers out there and non adopters and resistance to everyone thinks what they're working on is unique. And when you're trying to roll out a design system or any sort of common way, common sort of programmatic, systematic way of working, everyone's going to say, well, you know what, I like it, but we've got something special here. I've got this really unique use case and I don't think it's going to work for that. So you got to have those conversations, you've got to engage with those folks and you've got to turn them from skeptics into believers, into advocates, into adopters. That's part of the job when you're running an internal center of excellence program.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. You used a word that is really striking me when referencing design systems as open source. And the concept of open source, I think has a lot of lessons for us in the content industry. It's a concept that means that there is many contributors against one common code base.
Cruce Saunders
And there's a lot of threads around all of those contributions, but ultimately there's sort of one shippable product. And so if that product. Is, for example, a
content model, or a set of shared terminology or a design set of components. There's multiple contributors into that environment and that all has to work in a way that everybody can submit their contribution, but it doesn't end up creating a log jam or break the enterprise as a whole. I know the data folks work with this as well. If you ship the wrong code into shared data repositories, you can break hundreds and hundreds of business critical systems. And so there's real stringent controls about what gets adopted enterprise wide for data handling. I'm curious about your reflections on the sort of right relationship between pitching and catching within these kind of environments.
Doug Powell
Well, it gets back to the original question about the importance of that centralized kind of program team that is managing in this case, the integrity of the design system, but also the design thinking practice, the studios network, the career framework, all of these different aspects of what a centralized program team might be doing. That's why you need that. Without it, it's kind of the Wild West, you know, you, you just really lose pretty quickly, lose the, lose the shape of the work and the consistency of the work across a complex organization. And it's not to fault anyone. It's just sort of human nature that different teams, given their own devices and given the lack of any sort of governance and infrastructure, they're going to do their own thing. They're going to do what makes sense for them to get to the finish line as quickly as they can. That's just how they're going to work. That hopefully small, lean, but empowered centralized program team is a vital, vital function.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, because it facilitates those nimble outcomes. I think that's a mindset shift for centralized organizations that have a governance mandate as well. There's a flip side to this where in some organizations, especially highly regulated industry service organizations, there's a governance and compliance and risk management
component. And so there's a need to kind of also take a different service orientation as well, not just a heavy handed, sort of centralized governance approach. Can you turn those governance functions into something that helps to facilitate business outcomes and still accomplishes the risk management objectives? It's really the human challenge. And you've done a great job of getting a lot of humans to work in an aligned way. Things you talked about earlier was finding these magic people that were essentially evangelists that you could bring on board to the methodology, who get certified, who really, really take to it and bring it into their works and become kind of agents of that larger that larger organizational function even though they're living and reporting inside of other teams. What kinds of skills or characteristics do you look for in those magic people and how do you find them?
Doug Powell
Well, they kind of found us. I mean, you know, again, the, the dilemma that my team had was to get ourselves from a scale of impact, from touching basically thousands of people across the company to tens of thousands of people across the company. We need to add a zero to our impact. And we had a very lean small team and we just simply could not do that ourselves. And so by finding these folks who whenever we did a workshop or training session they would come to us and say wow, that was so inspiring, I love this, I want to do more of this. How can I be a part of this? In most cases they would kind of come to us and raise their hand and say I'm in, let me know how I can help. And so then it became a matter of all right, how do we shape this role? How do we connect them to each other to form a community? How do we give them some additional resources, some additional training and then how do we give them the permission really to go out there and play this role in an intentional way.
And as we were talking that an important part of that then becomes incentivizing the activities of that role and making sure that it actually becomes a part of the accountability of the job that they have, not just the role that they're playing.
Cruce Saunders
One final kind of wrapping thought because I feel like there's a lot here we could keep going down with this huge topic. It's something that feels like the most important thing many organizations can tackle and yet it's one of those dynamics that gets lost inside of individual business
unit needs or large market trend that people are running after and actually getting things working well together. And people working well together in systemic level change is really something that serves the whole far more than is sometimes given credit. So I think it's a testament to the enterprise leaders that do sponsor these programs and those that do lead them for being really truly stewards of enterprise value in a very chaotic environment. What are some of the things that you're going to need to look out for and what words to the wise do you have for folks who are leading design and content teams in this decade ahead?
Doug Powell
Yeah, it's a good question. I think one thing that I'm becoming aware of and it's interesting because we were just talking about the value of design systems I also think that there's design systems and also sort of highly sort of operationalized ways for teams to work. There's also a risk there that when we over systematize that we lose the ability for true innovation. That we get really good at incremental improvement but we get really bad at big idea out of the box kind of game changing innovation and ideas finding their way into businesses. And the risk there is that we leave ourselves just wide open for disruption. And that's something that I think business that's sort of my caution, I guess, to businesses that are overly sort of focused on efficiencies and streamlining that, hey, there are also some real superpowers that can and should be a part of working in a human centered way that will allow you to change your business in major ways. And you've got to be open to that or else you run the risk of somebody else coming in and then having that big idea that changes the game for you and then you're chasing.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, stay ahead. Well, great. And is there any other words to the wise you have for folks really early in career getting into design in a world that's AI driven? Any thoughts about their evolving roles?
Doug Powell
I think AI careers and roles that include a specialization and a deep knowledge of AI and machine learning are going to be the hot roles of the hot jobs of the next decade. And so getting smart about that, just adding that to your toolkit, adding that to your set of offerings in your portfolio, even in incremental ways, is going to make you exponentially more marketable in the talent market. Just without question, that's going to be a big. I predict that any job in the next decade is going somebody hiring is going to be interested in what expertise you can bring in that area. And if your answer is, I don't know anything about it, then you're already putting yourself at the back of the line for that role. So get smart about it, build your story around it and make sure that it's part of what you can bring to a business.
Cruce Saunders
Really it creates for a lively environment, indeed one that needs human oriented design leadership to bring it together and to make the humans working with these machines work well together and work well with the customers that are also learning along with us. Thanks for your design leadership pioneering, really. I think you've created a legacy that's carrying forward in many, many ways in the industry and we've learned a lot from your expertise and insights today. Doug, thank you for sharing your time.
Doug Powell
Thanks so much, Cruce. It was a really enjoyable conversation. I appreciate the invitation.