Designing Next: Achieving growth through transformation and innovation

April Dunford, product positioning leader and author of the book Obviously Awesome - How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy it, Love it, joins Designing Next to share her insights and methodology around product positioning. In this episode, April shares why traditional positioning statements are not useful, how she now approaches positioning with her five components of effective positioning, and how she has seen the COVID-19 pandemic affect how companies approach their positioning.

Tonya Browning, Vice President, Dell Digital Design at Dell Technologies, joins Designing Next to share her learnings and perspective from leading design at organizations large and small. Tonya covers a wide variety of subjects with Steve and Chad, including her three key waypoints around design leadership at large companies, why failing fast is so important in design and how to fail fast the right way, and her diverse sources of design inspiration - from Cyberpunk to palimpsests to Picasso.

Elena Zloteanu, International Design Thinking Program Manager at Hochland, joins Designing Next to share insights from Hochland’s journey of scaling design thinking across their organization. In this episode, Elena covers a number of topics with Steve and Chad, including how she learns from failures and how a past “successful failure” in design thinking helped lead her to where she is today, how she integrates Hochland’s mission to excite consumers about cheese into all of her design thinking challenges, and how she continued innovation and design thinking efforts through COVID - creating what she calls an innovation bubble.

Joe Smiley, Group Design Manager at Blizzard Entertainment, joins Designing Next to talk about a topic that Chad and Steve are passionate about - design thinking, and how it is utilized in business. In this episode, Joe speaks with Chad & Steve about how he has seen the role of the designer evolve in the last 20 years, what it means to be a design driven company, and the advice Joe would give leaders who want to integrate design further into their organization.

Danielle Cohn, Vice-President of Business Development and Startup Engagement at Comcast NBCUniversal, joins Designing Next to share her unique insights around innovation and the startup world. In this episode, Danielle speaks with Chad & Steve about why a large company like Comcast NBCUniversal has such a focus on startups, how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the environment for startups, and how Danielle’s personal experiences led her into the startup world herself and ignited a passion around care.

Paul Puopolo, Executive Vice-President of Innovation at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, joins Designing Next to share his experience and learnings from a career leading innovation across several large organizations. In this episode, Paul speaks with Chad & Steve about the commonalities he has seen in the successful innovation projects he has been a part of, advice he would give to those building a career in innovation, and his four P’s - the four key elements Paul believes are crucial to the success of any innovation initiative.

Jennifer Zamora, Senior Global Director Customer Experience & Employee Experience at Dow, joins Designing Next to talk about building a customer experience capability in a complex B2B environment. In this episode, she speaks with Chad & Steve about how customer-centricity moved from being an abstract concept to a key strategic initiative at Dow, why humility is so important when you are listening to your customers and how Dow developed a metrics framework around CX that all levels of the organization could buy into.

Jody Allison, Vice President, Transformation at Algonquin Power & Utilities, joins Designing Next to talk about driving transformation in the utilities and renewable industry. In this episode, she speaks with Chad & Steve about her journey from accounting and risk management to leading transformation at a large utilities organization, what transformation looks like in the utilities industry and how it compares to other industries, and how Jody and the team at Algonquin have successfully continued their transformation efforts even as the COVID-19 pandemic changed so many aspects of their business.

Alan Moore, author, designer, and innovator, joins Designing Next to talk about helping businesses discover their own unique beauty. Alan’s new book is called Do Build: How to Make and Lead a Business the World Needs and in this episode, he speaks with Chad & Steve about what led him to his mission of creating beautiful businesses, why he believes we need to shift from what he calls an extractive economy to a regenerative economy, and he shares the questions he believes leaders must ask themselves if they want to create beautiful businesses.

Torben Nielsen, CEO of ZOOM+Care, joins Designing Next to talk about innovation and driving growth. In this episode, Torben speaks with Chad & Steve about how working for Lego taught him to observe and listen to the needs of his audience, the steps Torben took to turnaround ZOOM+Care and how it doubled in size in less than two years, and he shares advice he would give to leaders who are on a journey to create transformative and differentiating experiences.