How I Think Differently
Beyond Products to Systems
Most customer experience problems aren't product problems—they're coordination problems. When customers avoid calling your organization "at all costs," when they create complex workarounds to manage your email streams, when they can't achieve business outcomes despite using your product successfully, that's systems experience failure.
Traditional approaches focus on: Making individual products or processes better I focus on: How experiences emerge from interconnected systems and where they break down
From Mobile Pioneer to Enterprise Systems Thinker
My principle "Mobilize, Don't Miniaturize" from the early mobile era wasn't just about screen sizes—it was about designing for ecosystem participants, technical constraints, and multi-stakeholder coordination. That systems thinking approach now applies to enterprise customer experience challenges.
The evolution: From designing mobile experiences that worked across carriers, manufacturers, and users to designing enterprise experiences that work across departments, processes, and stakeholder ecosystems.
What I've Learned in 20+ Years
The Real Problems Are Invisible to Individual Teams
At Sprint: Learned that platform strategy requires coordination across technical constraints, business models, and user needs—not just better interfaces
At Dell: Discovered that "customer satisfaction" scores don't predict satisfaction—they predict survey response bias, timing, and organizational relationships
Across industries: Found that the most expensive customer problems are coordination failures that no single team can see or solve alone
Why Organizations Get Stuck
Teams optimize for their own metrics while customer outcomes depend on cross-team coordination Data exists to solve problems but it's scattered across systems and never aggregated for decision-making Executives know something is wrong but lack language to describe systems experience problems Process improvements help internal efficiency but increase customer coordination overhead
My Approach: Make the Invisible Visible
Diagnostic Intelligence
I find the patterns that organizations can't see themselves. Like discovering that customers manage 3-8 separate email folders just to handle communications from one vendor, or that "quick resolution" metrics hide the fact that customer problems persist long after tickets are closed.
Systems Experience Design
I design coordination systems, not just interfaces. This means:
- Measurement systems that track customer outcome achievement, not just internal process efficiency
- AI use cases that actually address customer and employee challenges ... and get adopted
- Human-centered data science that recognizes the true meaning of your data
- Process architectures that align team incentives with customer success
Business Impact Focus
Every recommendation connects to business outcomes: cost reduction, revenue protection, risk mitigation. I quantify the ROI of coordination improvements because systems experience design is a business necessity, not an operational nice-to-have.
Who I Work Best With
Executives Managing Large Teams
My target clients typically manage 200-300 person organizations where coordination complexity creates customer experience problems. You already know something needs to change—you need methodology to change it systematically.
Organizations with Customer Success Teams
If you have a customer success function, you've already discovered that product alone doesn't deliver customer outcomes. I help you solve coordination problems systematically instead of throwing more people at every customer individually.
Companies Under Growth Pressure
Whether you're VC/PE-backed with aggressive targets or public company focused on retention metrics, I help you achieve customer outcome goals through better systems coordination rather than just hiring more customer-facing teams.
My Specialization
Industries with Complex Customer Journeys
- Manufacturing: ERP implementations, supply chain coordination, quality management systems
- Healthcare: Provider workflows, patient data integration, regulatory compliance coordination
- Financial Services: Transaction processing, regulatory reporting, multi-system customer experiences
- Technology: Platform strategies, customer data integration, multi-product portfolio coordination
Organizational Situations
- Post-acquisition integration when customer experience spans multiple legacy systems
- Scaling challenges when informal coordination no longer works at size
- Customer retention problems where satisfaction scores look good but renewals are declining
- Cross-team project failures where technology works but customer coordination doesn't
What Makes This Different
I'm Not Fixing Your Teams—I'm Designing Your Coordination
Your teams are probably excellent at what they do. The problem is that customer outcomes require coordination across excellent teams with misaligned metrics and workflows.
I Find Money You're Already Spending Inefficiently
Like the $5M annual cost buried in company assumptions coded into the database, or the customer success team overhead that could be reduced through better cross-team coordination design.
I Speak Executive and Technical
I translate between technical architecture decisions and customer experience impact, between operational efficiency and customer outcome achievement, between individual team performance and systems-level business results.
The Systems Experience Advantage
For your customers: They achieve outcomes with less coordination overhead and vendor dependency For your teams: They scale impact without proportional headcount increases For your business: You create competitive advantage through superior cross-system customer experience delivery
The reality: Organizations are becoming more complex, not simpler. Customer expectations are increasing. Regulatory requirements are multiplying. The companies that thrive will be those that can deliver coherent experiences across complex systems.
The opportunity: Most organizations are still trying to solve systems problems with interface solutions. The competitive advantage belongs to those who master systems experience design first.
Ready to Explore What's Possible?
I work with executives who suspect their customer experience challenges require more than better interfaces or additional headcount. If you're ready to understand how your organizational systems create customer experiences—and where they break down—let's start a conversation.
"The question isn't whether you need systems thinking in your customer experience. The question is whether you'll develop it before your competitors do."