Great opportunity for any strategic design leaders looking to apply their expertise within an organization that still places value on practice rigor, end-to-end experience delivery, and design operations. I'm not too familiar with the current conditions for success in this role at Walmart, but the opportunity may speak to those who've felt their expertise minimized by the recent shift toward speed to delivery, especially in publicly traded SaaS companies.
As a service design professional, I'm intimately familiar with and arguably biased toward the value of holistic customer experience strategy and delivery. I think there's real human value in designing experiences end-to-end, front-to-back and across touchpoints, even if your main value proposition is transferred through a digital product (SaaS). That being said and, as Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett point out in Finding Our Way, many leaders and practitioners haven't been able to demonstrate enough value from these specialties to maintain their importance, especially amid economic volatility (i.e., the rising cost of money and companies' urgent need to drive revenue for survival). Now, I'd argue most of these craft specialists were never properly set up for success in the first place so it's a catch-22, but that's another whole conversation.
What I'm seeing from the inside is companies laying off researchers, downsizing service design, replacing leaders, and doubling down on interaction design and visual design because these are the hard skills that achieve speed to delivery. While this approach doesn't always result in great outcomes (ever experienced flying with little kids?!), some leaders believe that the upfront investment in thoughtful human experience delivery isn't the best business move right now. Instead, they prefer shipping features quickly and advancing AI. It's also unsurprising to see an increase in investment for design operations as a support function to maturing design delivery.
I'll wrap with a few possible takeaways for strategic designers in this landscape:
- If your skills are underutilized, think about how you can adapt and transfer them to related areas like design management or design operations.
- Look for organizations that still believe in the value of strategic design and join those teams. Advocate for and protect the conditions you need to succeed.
- Find organizations that have successfully supported strategic designers and see what roles they offer; some might be more about enabling others, while some are hands-on (player / player-coach).
- Reflect on your career and consider what steps you can take today to prioritize your needs and make a positive change. Don't get stuck in learned helplessness.
Any other hot takes? Good luck out there, folks! 💙
Exciting news! 🚀 We are thrilled to announce the addition of a new role to our team at Walmart International - Director, Innovation, Design Thinking, Design Ops, and Service Design.
As we continue to strengthen our Design Thinking practices and drive significant impact, the time has come to establish a dedicated practice that can support both UX-specific efforts and our overarching business strategy. In a world increasingly shaped by "common platforms," we see a tremendous opportunity to accelerate our business. The key challenge now is how to best prepare our markets to leverage these platforms effectively from day one, and Service Design holds the solution for us.
Join us in this pivotal role and become a catalyst for innovation and acceleration at Walmart International! 🌟
Apply now: [Link to the job posting](https://lnkd.in/gpmekUFx)
Leadership: Product Data Strategy, Big Data Engineering& Analytics, AI / ML, Deep Learning, NLP, GenAI, LLM, Data Science, Architecture, Platform Engineering, Product Development, DevOps.GPT Ex-Founder
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