Summary
In this talk, the speaker from IBM shares insights on cultivating a lasting design culture within a massive organization of 380,000 employees. Referencing collaborators like Phil, Doug, Charlie, and Susan, the talk stresses that culture is behavior over time, shaped by values, rituals, heroes, symbols, and practices. IBM’s design program grew rapidly, hiring over 750 designers through a rigorous process involving portfolio reviews, phone screens, and intensive in-person interviews led by a team including the speaker. New hires undergo a three-month onboarding to learn IBM design thinking and develop collaboration skills. IBM created flexible, people-centric studio spaces in Austin and elsewhere to promote productive teamwork beyond typical silos. The core IBM design practice revolves around IBM design thinking, emphasizing user outcomes, multidisciplinary teams, and a continuous loop of observe, reflect, and make. Influenced by conversations with David Kelley and Tim Brown, IBM adapted design thinking for scale, introducing tools like Hills, Playbacks, and Sponsor Users to maintain alignment and accessibility. The IBM design language balances unity and creative freedom across thousands of products, supported by embedded accessibility and bespoke design guides. The upcoming IBM design research initiative encourages all employees to participate in research roles. Above all, the speaker cautions that design efforts must drive real outcomes benefiting users. Throughout, the team embraces iterative learning and course-correcting as the design culture evolves.
Key Insights
-
•
Culture is defined as behavior over time, shaped by how people choose to behave and incentivize behavior.
-
•
IBM’s design hiring process is extremely selective, choosing less than 1% of applicants through multi-stage reviews.
-
•
A three-month onboarding program is essential to help new hires integrate and embrace IBM design thinking.
-
•
Design studios at IBM are built to be highly flexible, with furniture on wheels enabling constant reconfiguration.
-
•
IBM design thinking centers around user outcomes, multidisciplinary teams, and a continuous loop of observe, reflect, and make.
-
•
The Hills framework sets clear, outcome-focused goals to align teams and avoid internal conflict.
-
•
Playbacks provide a safe space for critique where hierarchy is set aside to focus on doing right by users.
-
•
Sponsor Users programs connect design teams directly to real clients for co-design and feedback.
-
•
The IBM design language promotes system unity but allows teams creative freedom, fostering cohesive yet diverse products.
-
•
Design research roles invite everyone in the organization to participate, expanding beyond traditional lab-bound models.
Notable Quotes
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast, but culture isn’t something you can just buy or transplant."
"Behavior over time is your culture; it’s how you choose to behave and incentivize others to behave."
"We review over 10,000 candidates and select less than 1% for hiring into the IBM design program."
"If you just throw new hires into cubeville, most of them would probably quit."
"We call everybody a designer on purpose to encourage branching out across disciplines."
"The studio is designed for whole teams to work together, not just the design team alone."
"Design thinking at IBM is not just for designers; it’s how we want all 380,000 people to think about problems."
"Playbacks are safe spaces where an intern can challenge a senior VP without hierarchy getting in the way."
"The IBM design language is about system unity instead of uniformity, so designers aren’t cookie cutters."
"None of this matters without outcomes; we design to make people’s days better, not just to design."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"You get a lot of different research outputs in a matter of minutes from your scope input."
Joerg Beringer Thomas GeisScaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
June 10, 2025
"I think of a journey map as a suggestion, not a rule, and I might take parts of it to fit the context and people."
Nidhi Singh Rathore Amber DavisEmbracing participation to unlock deeper truths in commercial research
March 12, 2025
"Having the qualitative and quantitative data together lets us tell a comprehensive story to stakeholders."
Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian FranklinIntegrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
December 16, 2022
"Quantities can be measured, but qualities need to be mapped — that shift feels core to the designer's role."
Jamie Beck Alexander Nina Gregg Shawn Petersen Bill DeRoucheyHow can you find your role in climate?
January 17, 2024
"UX research is a journey, not just a switch you flick on; many challenges you face have been experienced by others in the community."
Caroline VizeThe State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
March 9, 2022
"If you said are you creative, I’m gonna say hell yeah."
Dr. Karl JeffriesThe Science of Creativity for DesignOps
January 8, 2024
"A user-centered measurement should not be one dimensional because people are complex."
Alberto FerreiraMaking it Count: Developing a custom digital metric framework that works
October 15, 2021
"There’s never been a better time for designers to get their hands on tools that seemed far away before."
Shipra Kayan Robert Kortenoeven Eileen TangEmerging principles for using AI in Design: What the product design team at Miro has learned from deeply integrating AI in their workflow
June 11, 2025
"Benchmarking has nearly doubled in two years, showing growing maturity in UX measurement across industries."
Dana Bishop2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
March 11, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
Why is human oversight critical in integrating AI-generated content within design and development workflows?
How can design ops build onboarding processes that reduce new hire confusion and fragmentation?
What are the challenges of handoffs in multi-team design and development workflows that AI addresses?