Aligning Your Customer, Business, and Design Outcomes
Design strategy aligns design decisions with business goals, user needs, and technological possibilities. It ensures that product design doesn't just solve problems but deeply engages with users, while also driving organizational success. This approach allows us to innovate and create lasting impact, bringing together teams and ideas in a way that amplifies value and fosters collaboration across disciplines.
Experience Architecture
Creating an experience architecture requires the input from software architects, customers, and product leaders, and a great deal of buy-in from senior leadership. Your experience architecture drives product cohesion but also backlog priority, showing where components of the architecture work together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Long-Term Product Vision
Crafting your long term vision provides a lens to discuss and debate where you are going, how teams can contribute, and to better understand the most impactful customer value. Your long-term vision provides mechanism to forecast where you want to be from a portfolio standpoint, and to backcast waypoints to get there year over year.
MEASURING SUCCESS
Everything is an experiment. Everything is a prototype. I work your product management and engineering teams to establish key metrics and proactively harness capabilities to measure their impact on the customer adoption and delight.
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION
I build alignment across your cross-disciplinary product development stakeholders: design, product management, engineering, research, customer success, and sales. This alignment ensures design is integrated into every aspect of product development, and reduces friction in the development process.
USER-CENTERED FOCUS
Focusing on your user's problem space, and falling in love with the problem, not the solution, creates depth in understanding and provides confidence in decisions. This, in turn, reduces risks in execution by staying out of the trap of an identify, justify, execute process. Building what customers value first, and the least difficult to build is a critical factor in growth and differentiation.
HOLISTIC PRODUCT VIEW
I look at your entire user journey and how different touchpoints (digital and/or physical) connect within a larger product or service ecosystem. And how different capabilities may be combined in new ways to foster different outcomes. The whole can be greater than sum of the parts without duplicating investment.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS AND MARKET RESEARCH
I identify how your organizations core competencies align with market and customer needs, and map relative maturity against competitive capability. This provides a rational framework to evaluate the competitive landscape across capabilities, business models, and more.
BUSINESS ALIGNMENT
I amplify the value of design by ensuring that design decisions are aligned with your business goals, from market positioning to revenue targets and brand perception. I work closely with your leadership, marketing teams, product managers, and engineers to seamlessly integrate design into your broader business strategy, driving both short-term wins and long-term strategy and growth.
Testimonials
"Eric is a designer's designer and a leader through and through. In my time working with Eric at Autodesk, I was always amazed at how much A) he got done; and B) time he devoted to really listening and working directly with customers. Eric always brings a fresh perspective and the customer voice to the table. He is a great manager to the people he leads and always pushes for excellence. Most of all, Eric is a terrific communicator and teammate who always works to build something better than what's been built before - whether that's process, product, or relationships."
Justin Lokitz
Author, Professor & Chair of the MBA in Design Strategy Program
"I have worked very closely with Eric on several large-scale projects. His wisdom, objectivity and dedication make him one of the best designers I've ever worked with. His generosity, patience and dedication make him the best leader I've ever had. His guidance and enthusiasm inspire excellence in those around him. Within his teams, he nourishes a sense of experimentation and earnest communication."
Ben Kerslake
Creative Director
"Eric is an extraordinary Design Leader and Manager, that encourages business strategy, design excellence, learning culture, and human-centered design, as well as reusable and scalable processes."
Renato Ferro
Design Director
"Eric is an exceptional design leader. He applies his vast experience, creativity, and passion for designing experiences that delight customers to transform businesses large and small. Eric has a thoughtful and collaborative leadership style which gives him a broad influence, helping teams and organizations embrace the change necessary to be truly customer-focused."
Amy Hedrick
VP, Product Design