Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
Gold
Thursday, June 9, 2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Share the love for this talk
Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
Speakers: Maria Giudice
Link:

Summary

In this talk, Mike, the VP of Experience Design at Autodesk, shares his approach to leading change within a 33-year-old global software company. Emphasizing that change is a team sport, he highlights how Autodesk’s leadership supports this transformation. Mike explains how he treated joining Autodesk as a design problem, spending extensive time listening across the company, from interns to the CEO, to understand the challenges. He outlines four key pillars of his strategy: building community by democratizing design through programs like Luma; focusing on customers by amplifying research and direct customer engagement; connecting experiences by unifying Autodesk’s disparate products through a consistent visual language and targeted Tiger teams; and elevating quality by shifting the mindset from MVP to Minimal Lovable Product. Mike illustrates how silos within the organization hinder progress and how his federated design model fosters collaboration among 320 designers worldwide. A highlight includes hosting an internal experience design conference and running a global visual design hackathon to crowdsource ideas. The talk closes with optimism about the progress made and the ongoing journey to deliver delightful, well-crafted products.

Key Insights

  • Change must be embraced at the leadership level and cannot be driven by individuals alone.

  • Design should be seen as a verb and a collective effort; everyone in the company can and should be a designer.

  • Democratizing design tools and methods, like the Luma training program, enables non-designers to participate effectively in the design process.

  • Organizational silos are major obstacles to effective design and product cohesion, requiring intentional connective initiatives.

  • A federated model for design leadership balances autonomy of distributed teams with needed cross-company collaboration.

  • Focusing on customers means banning the word 'user' to humanize and connect people to real customer stories and needs.

  • Bringing customers into the product development process through co-creation accelerates meaningful innovation.

  • Creating a unified visual design language across 130+ products acquired over decades addresses consistency and brand identity challenges.

  • Tiger teams targeting ‘signature product moments’ are an effective way to break down complex cross-product problems.

  • Replacing the concept of MVP with Minimal Lovable Product encourages shipping products with quality and emotional connection, not just minimal features.

Notable Quotes

"I treat everything in life as if it’s a design problem."

"Change really cannot be done by any individual person. Change is a team sport."

"Design is not a noun. Design is an active verb."

"Everyone is a designer."

"The word user kills your ability to put faces around our customers."

"We have to go from shipping a minimal viable product to creating a minimal lovable experience."

"Organizational silos are killers."

"The only way you’re going to go from good to great is through well-crafted experiences."

"You have to ask yourself, are you ready for the messiness, the hard choices, and the chaos that come with change?"

"We created Tiger teams that work like cancer cell hunters, targeting isolated problems and then dissolving after their work is done."

Fatimah Richmond
The Future of ReOps as a Strategic Function: A Roadmap for Getting There
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Lija Hogan
Practical Principles of Inclusive Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Sean McKay
Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Laura Gatewood
Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Mark Templeton
Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Reginé Gilbert
Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Karen Pascoe
Developing Experience Teams and Talent in the Enterprise
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Jane Reid
Self-care in User Research
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Aurobinda Pradhan
Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building the Rosenbot
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Nova Wehman-Brown
We've Never Done This Before
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Jules Monza
Use These Words and Count These Things
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Corey Nelson
Layoffs
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Carol Scott
Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Billy Carlson
Tips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold

More Videos

Etienne Fang

"Sharing is actually the end—it’s basically the last step that means you’ve completed your study or analysis."

Etienne Fang

Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform

December 16, 2019

Victor M. Gonzalez

"The question for hiring managers is how to move from expecting people to be UX researchers to inviting them to become UX researchers."

Victor M. Gonzalez

Practicing Learners and Learning Practitioners

March 10, 2021

Roberta Dombrowski

"Storytelling isn’t just for qualitative research; it’s also powerful for framing quantitative data to drive decisions."

Roberta Dombrowski Sam Duong Woloszynski

Making Research a Team Sport

March 11, 2022

Daniel J. Rosenberg

"About 200,000 digital health products exist, but only 1% of 1% have FDA clearance for accuracy."

Daniel J. Rosenberg

Digital Medicine Design

September 26, 2019

Jaime Creixems

"Leave some space for creativity in your design system so designers can innovate without breaking consistency."

Jaime Creixems

Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System

June 7, 2023

Tricia Wang

"AI is super polarizing — on one end, it’s discovering millions of new materials, on the other, it’s corrupting children’s experiences."

Tricia Wang

From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research

March 25, 2024

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

"Knowing your value as a person means not giving everything to situations that don't give back."

Shahrzad Samadzadeh

What Is My Value? Two Takes and Some Mistakes

January 8, 2024

Jorge Arango

"Co-creation brings other stakeholders into the design process, not just for requirements but to actually do the design work."

Jorge Arango

Design as an Antidote to VUCA

May 9, 2019

Louis Rosenfeld

"Imagine a world where research bots at IBM talk to the Rosen bot to give you better guidance on interpreting research."

Louis Rosenfeld

The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld

June 5, 2024