Thomas Otto – Strategic Design and Design Leadership

Design as a Cross-Collaboration Engine

extraz — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 09:20:25 +0000

Design as a
Cross-Collaboration Engine

Working across, instead of within

Cross-functional collaboration is nothing new. But expectations are rising, and so are the challenges. More complexity, more stakeholders, more friction. That’s not a bug. That’s the system.

Design has always touched multiple teams. But to really move things forward, it needs to do more than just connect. It needs to facilitate.

When collaboration starts to hurt

The idea of collaboration is usually not the problem. The execution is. Meetings that drain time instead of creating clarity. Handovers that break momentum. Parallel efforts that misalign.

As General Stanley McChrystal reflects in Team of Teams, »Information has to flow faster than hierarchy.« Since traditional top-down structures slow down the very collaboration they ask for. Designers see the cracks of this often first, because we live in the in‑between.

»The time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more in the past two decades, yet the returns on that collaboration often diminish as coordination overload sets in.«

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele & Adam Grant, Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review, 2016)

In between means in between functions, between priorities, and between the visible and the invisible. We hand work to engineering and discuss strategy with product. We listen to users, asking questions about the business with product and revenue, supporting the holistic storyline of the company, but also listening to the quiet signals in our teams.

Because of that, we often notice where things don’t connect when the process promises flow, but friction builds. We feel the delay before anyone names it. We see the conversation that should happen but doesn’t. And sometimes, our sketches or prototypes capture that tension before words do and release it in a long-needed discussion.

And yes, sometimes collaboration feels like a kind of tax. A coordination tax. And yet, none of us can deliver alone anymore. Not at the pace we’re expected to.

Where design comes in

Designers already hold key skills: visualizing ambiguity, framing questions, and holding space for other perspectives. That’s not decoration; that’s organizational glue.

But to use these skills, we need to shift our mindset. From contributor to facilitator. From designing the thing to designing the room where the thing is shaped. And culture matters. Jon Gordon reminds us in The Power of a Positive Team: »Positive teams don’t happen by accident. They are built with shared vision and trust.«

Facilitation is not just more tools or holding workshops. Designers work hard on empathy toward users, but we often overlook the need to practice empathy toward our peers in product, engineering, or even legal. Real influence starts when we understand their constraints and priorities as well as we understand our users.

»Cross-functional collaboration is a discipline. Breaking down silos is as much about using specific practices and internalizing principles as it is about changing structure.«

Alison Randel, A Practical Guide to Cross Functional Work (Medium, 2017)

This is where empathy opens the door, but it doesn’t walk the room for us. Influence grows only when we pair that understanding with deliberate practice: shared rituals, clear framing, and moments that turn alignment into action. That’s when design moves beyond delivery, builds the trust that makes collaboration real, and becomes the quiet catalyst for vision, even in organizations where structure and culture rarely meet.

It’s a structural issue

Cross-collaboration sounds like a cultural challenge. But it’s also structural. Most companies are optimized for function, not flow. Boundaries are baked in, in roles, tools, and incentives. Designers can’t change that alone. But we can make the cracks visible. And when we do, we don’t just make better products. We make better decisions.

What that looks like in practice

Designers who co-create with legal, not just ask for sign-off
Working sessions that replace status meetings
Design artifacts that invite feedback, not just approvals
Rituals that connect strategy and execution, weekly

These are small signals that collaboration is starting to flow. Moments where design helps teams move together, not just hand work over the wall.

It’s not about being the smartest in the room. It’s about building the room in a way that others want to step into.

The tension between ego and impact

Designers often join conversations with a spark:

»I have great ideas for the product.«
»I want to build something I can be proud of.«
»I want to create a cool brand.«

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the creative instinct. But in cross‑collaboration, personal ambition meets organizational reality. The room you build is not your stage. It’s a place where ideas mix, shift, and often belong to everyone before they become real.

Influence comes less from insisting on my idea and more from creating the conditions where the right idea can surface and actually take root in the system around it. That’s what design brings to cross‑collaboration: The ability to shape a context where people contribute, connect, and move forward together, even when the system around them makes it hard.

Why we need to get better at this

Because execution without alignment is expensive. Because miscommunication isn’t always a people problem, it’s typically a framing problem. Because the more distributed our work gets, the more we need moments that bring it together.

»Cross functional teams fail not because they lack talent, but because coordination becomes the work«

Shamresh Khan, When Cross Functional Teams Still Need Too Much (LinkedIn, 2023)

Cross‑collaboration doesn’t just happen. It’s a discipline, a mix of structure, practice, and reflection with the right conditions. It’s not just about putting people from different functions in the same room; it’s about creating the space where they can actually move together. And moving together means balancing speed and quality.

Speed because organizations demand visible progress. If nothing seems to move, energy and trust fade.
Quality because moving almost without connection only creates local wins and systemic friction.

Design helps teams hold that tension. By making progress visible without skipping synthesis. Creating moments where teams pause, connect the dots, and see if the work is still pointing in the right direction. From my experience and what the research shows, there need to be a few things in place, so this can happen:

A visible, shared mission
Everyone has to see the same “why.” Without a common purpose, collaboration turns into polite parallel work. Design can make that purpose tangible, through framing, visuals, and stories that connect the work to its impact.
Clear roles and ownership
People need to know not only what they are contributing, but also how decisions will be made. When responsibility is fuzzy, collaboration slows down or turns into endless consensus‑seeking. Designers can help by mapping roles, decisions, and flows, making invisible dependencies visible.
Moments to pause and learn together
Teams that never step back keep repeating the same friction. Reflection is what turns activity into progress. Design can create those moments. With a retro, a synthesis wall, a sketch session — to surface misalignment and see the bigger picture before moving on.
A space that invites contribution, not just presence
Cross‑functional work collapses when people show up but don’t engage. Designers can shape the room — literally and metaphorically — so that ideas feel safe to surface, mix, and evolve.

When these conditions exist, collaboration stops feeling like a tax and starts creating movement. Design can play its quiet influence here: not by owning the work, but by shaping how we get there, together.

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Design influence doesn’t just happen. It emerges.

extraz — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 04:48:10 +0000

Design influence doesn’t just happen. It emerges.

Reflections from the intersections of design on structure, strategy, and culture

When design as a function starts to evolve in a company, it either comes embedded from the beginning or enters later as a fresh perspective for change. In both cases, it doesn’t just influence output. It alters the way people collaborate, how decisions are made, and how business goals are approached. So what are the levels where design has this kind of impact? In the following, I explore different types of effects design and experience work can have from strategy to systems and from shaping conversations to enabling direction. Reflecting on my own experience, media that I consumed and people I spoke to.

Influence asymmetry: When execution isn’t enough

Design maturity and influence don’t automatically grow together. Execution can show value, but rarely reshapes the system that defines it. That’s the asymmetry: we expect execution to open doors to strategy, but without structural openness, the path ends where it began.

Some organizations recognize design as a lever early on, often because it was embedded from the start. In others, influence grows slowly, through trust and context. But it requires more than good work. It requires access. Most companies are not designed to be learning systems. They reward execution, not reflection. They fund certainty, not synthesis. And so, design is asked to act but not to ask. To deliver, but not to define.

»In most organizations, execution is rewarded over reflection. As one study notes, “companies tend to favour action rather than reflection.” That creates a system optimized for certainty—metrics, delivery, speed—not for hypothesis, synthesis, or iterative understanding. In those environments design is asked to deliver, but rarely to reflect.«

Inkermann, M. Gürtler and A. Seegrün (Design 2020 conference)

Even when design has a seat early on, timing still matters. Influence needs momentum, and momentum depends on more than structure. It depends on how teams learn and lead together. Like Dennis Hambeukers outlines (using Peter Senge »Five Disciplines of of a Learning Organization« approach), and like I’ve experienced myself you can’t skip steps, and progress is not always linear. You can’t force timing. You can’t work against a system that isn’t open to change. So what does it take? A culture where maturity doesn’t mean hierarchy but capacity, like

Personal mastery—Do we keep growing, or just refining what we already know?
Mental models—Can we name what shapes our thinking? And are we open to changing it?
Shared vision—Do we align early or only when the pressure gets loud?
Team learning—Are we just executing next steps or learning how we work together?
Systems thinking—Do we see the pattern or just follow the process?

Without the combination of those capabilities, the conditions for strategic design don’t emerge. And without those conditions, even excellent work will remain tactical.

That’s the asymmetry: we expect good work to lead to influence, but influence requires a system that supports (iterative) learning. And if that system isn’t in place, design will always be valued for its execution and excluded from the decisions that shape it.

When doors open and design begins to multiply its effect

But what happens when the system opens up? Where does Design/Experience as Strategic Partner have an effect? Here are a few levels on where I experienced design can create an effect:

Strategic Lever

Design becomes a thinking partner, shaping not just what is built, but why. Design creates space to reflect, ask better questions, and connect ideas to direction. It doesn’t own the strategy but helps surface and shape it early, before execution begins.

For example, design can help leadership teams reframe quarterly goals by mapping them against actual user needs, not just internal KPIs.

Cross-Collaboration

Design connects, across silos, roles, and mental models. By framing shared challenges visually and conceptually, design invites different perspectives into one conversation. It translates complexity into moments of alignment, often where language fails.

This might look like using a service blueprint to align product, engineering, and support teams around one customer journey instead of competing backlogs.

Framing & Problem Definition

Design creates the space where the right problem can appear. Design doesn’t start with answers. It begins with synthesis. By holding ambiguity, connecting inputs, and making tensions visible, it sharpens the focus — not just of what to solve, but how to approach it.

This often happens when a discovery process results not in a feature backlog, but in a redefined problem statement that resets the team’s direction.

Participation & Co-Creation

Design lowers the barrier to join — and raises the quality of what emerges. By working visually, iteratively, and openly, design invites others to shape. It distributes ownership, aligns teams earlier, and strengthens commitment to shared outcomes.

For instance, using sketches in early meetings allows engineers and stakeholders to build on ideas before anything is locked in or polished.

Ambidextrous Execution

Design bridges future exploration and present delivery. Design operates in the now and the next. It balances the need to ship with the ability to rethink. It delivers outcomes while questioning assumptions, operates on all levels.

For instance, while one part of the team delivers a first version to meet roadmap goals, design prototypes a longer-term flow to test assumptions and keep future options open.

What remains

So where does that leave us? Design doesn’t need more proof. It needs the right conditions. It grows by showing up in strategy conversations, in system shifts, and in everyday decisions that shape how people work. When the context allows for it, design moves across levels. Quietly. Consistently, it connects. It aligns. It creates meaning.

And maybe that’s the real maturity: not just knowing how to design well, but knowing where and when to act so that design makes others more capable too.

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Experience Leadership in the age of GenAI

extraz — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:28:54 +0000

Experience Leadership in the age of GenAI

Between hope, erosion, and a chance to reclaim influence

Generative AI is currently on the mission to change the way we work. Benefiting from the days of data, what we’ve built over the years: Our silos, our knowledge, our tools and reassembles them into something new. Something faster, more efficient, sometimes surprising. It cuts through the layers of our workflows and touches places we’ve long considered protected.

The loudest voices in this shift aren’t always our own. People talk about how everything will change. I’ve heard that before. But this time, it feels different. The speed. The confidence. The certainty. And maybe because it’s not coming from within design, but from the people who usually watch from the side. Or manage from above. It feels like grown-ups are entering our space. At least it feels like it.

That’s why I want to unpack what’s beneath the surface: the emotions, the predictions, the loss, and the return of influence. And how GenAI might not just change how we design, but why we’re needed in the first place. Think of this as a collection of my thoughts, shaped by what I’ve read, the people I spoke to, and my experience.

The opportunity: A return to strategy?

There was a time when design moved closer to the center. Service design had its moment. Design was discussed as a structure for complexity. To connect things. It gave us language to discuss systems, about how things connect, about how we might help teams understand complexity instead of just decorating its outcomes. We made the whole offering visible the way though it, and visualized them with our tools of prototyping. Creating artifacts to make discussions tangible and creating stories that try to catch the full pictures of organizations, their customers and its dialog for internal and external.

Later, the term »strategic design« entered the conversation. It served as an umbrella term to combine cross-functional work from us and others, which we borrowed and used methods before to create clarity. For a while, it felt as we design could become a translator of ambiguity. Instead of the producer of output.

But that moment passed quickly. The framing and the language were there. But the mandate was missing. We could talk the talk, but in many places, the decisions were already made elsewhere. The tables were full. Other roles had the mic.

It’s important to acknowledge that this played out differently depending on where you stood. On the agency side, in consultancies and innovation-driven environments, design often had more air. It could act visionary, push into new spaces, create frameworks to explore what was possible. But in product-driven organizations, especially in startups, design was more tied to making, to execution, to the next feature. The gap between ambition and reality stayed wide.

Some companies bridged that gap. Often thanks to design co-founders or leaders who intuitively understood the value of experience beyond aesthetics. In those cases, design had a seat at the table. It shaped direction. It informed decisions. But these cases were still the exception.

And then came the pandemic. The restructurings. The budget cuts. Many design leaders lost influence, some lost their teams. The progress we had made felt fragile. In difficult times, companies reverted to old patterns. Efficiency became the dominant narrative. A direct path from business to engineering seemed like enough.

Some of the patterns I kept seeing and feeling. Maybe the design community didn’t experience them as sharply because many of us still stay closer to the craft than other departments. But they shape our context too:

Leaders are pulled into the operational trenches
What used to be delegated is now expected to be owned. Leaders are no longer shielded from the day-to-day they’re deep in it. This shift demands increased personal agency, resilience, and sharper judgment.
Efficiency and innovation are converging under pressure
»Do more with less« is a structural expectation. Leaders are tasked with pushing transformation and AI adoption, all while running on tighter budgets and leaner teams.
Flattened structures and collapsing middle layers
Middle management is thinning out, pushing more direct responsibility onto senior leaders. Fewer buffers, more exposure. Decision-making and execution are increasingly fused.

These patterns describe a backdrop for us and also a chance. We won’t return to strategy by waiting to be invited back. The language is still around. The potential too. But the mandate isn’t, and strategy won’t come looking for design. We have to earn our seat again. And maybe GenAI gives us a way back in. Because now, delivery accelerates. Interfaces, copy, concepts all can be produced in minutes. But speed makes something else visible: the missing link between what gets produced, what makes sense, and what’s actually good. Fast output without synthesis creates noise. Slop. And that won’t help any company, not in the long run, not even short-term.

Holding the line on quality

There’s been a shift in how we talk about design leadership. Less about execution, more about judgment. About knowing what’s good, even when the thing wasn’t made by us. Taste has become shorthand for quality. But not the superficial kind. It’s about coherence, about balance, about timing. It’s about knowing when something fits and when it doesn’t. Even if it came from a prompt instead of a person.

In a GenAI-driven environment, this kind of judgment becomes more visible. Because the volume of output is no longer the bottleneck. But quality still is.

»So I think that’s like probably where it’s headed, where we’re gonna have more and more people that ultimately become the creative directors, the art directors, and they might have an idea and a vision. They may not have the classical art and al art and design training. So how can you train that on the fly or provide that right?«

Amy Lokey, Chief Experience Officer, ServiceNow (Finding Our Way Podcast)

So this can be one way into strategy is by holding the line. Not by doing more, but by helping others know when something is good. When it’s enough. When it’s not yet right. Not just visually, but in its intent. In its fit. In its ability to carry meaning.

The kind of quality that still needs conversation. That still needs perspective. That still needs care.

Creating orientation, before speed

Another way design becomes strategic again is not by speeding things up, but by helping teams find direction. That means slowing down early enough to ask better questions. To name the actual problem. To decide together what matters before jumping into execution.

This isn’t new work for us. We’ve always created space for synthesis—visually, conceptually, strategically. But that kind of work is becoming more essential and plays on another scale.

Help teams to:

ask the right questions
frame the real problems
align around direction before execution

GenAI frees up time in the process. But that time won’t stay open for long. If we don’t show up with intention, someone else will. And if we’re not involved in how direction is formed, we won’t be part of what gets built.

This isn’t about control or ownership. It’s about stepping into uncertainty and making it navigable. That’s not just a design opportunity. It’s one of the few real chances we have right now to enable, influence, and create impact by bringing experience back into the conversation as a business partner.

Both attempts need one thing. Not the mandate, but room and the culture for real cross-functional work. If you are in a place where silos, titles, and leadership of the division and demarcation is based. You have to elaborate if it’s worth your time, energy, and lifetime.

The risk: Designing in the dark

The more GenAI becomes part of our work, the less we often understand how results come to be. The tools produce things that look right, that feel complete, sometimes even convincing. But the process behind them stays hidden. There’s no clear path to follow. No trail to learn from. No reasoning to reflect on.

This breaks something fundamental in the way we work. Design has never been just about outputs. It has always lived and breathed in the in-between.

In the way, we arrive at something.
In the questions we ask. In the dots we connect.
In the reasoning that leads to clarity.

When that disappears, we lose more than process. We lose confidence. In the result. In the quality. In our ability to repeat what worked. We can barely grasp the why behind the output. How did we get here? Why does it make sense? We start reacting to what is generated instead of shaping the conditions in which it’s made.

And we lose something else, too. The ability to teach others what good looks like. If we don’t understand the steps, how can we help others get there? If we can’t see the thinking, how can we reflect or improve?

GenAI privieds us with faster and more output. But without transparency, they risk creating noise instead of meaning. Without transparency, there is no trust to build on. No foundation for true partnership.

When everything moves fast, it’s easy to follow whatever comes next. And for a while, even noise can feel like progress. Until it doesn’t. Until something feels off, but no one knows exactly where or why. And it will take a long time to recreate the path to understand this.

The loss: When experience is skipped

People build things without us. They move forward. They ship. They launch. Not always well. But well enough to get by. And the hard truth is, in many places, that’s enough.

The truth is, our absence rarely causes a crisis. Decisions still get made. Interfaces still get pushed. The roadmap moves on.

And when our work is no longer visible, it quickly becomes optional. When something looks smooth, people assume it was easy. And when it looks easy, they assume it’s not essential.

That’s where the erosion begins. Because our work was never just about the deliverables. It was about holding the threads together. About making sure the thing we’re building actually does do make sense for the business, for the people using it, for the teams involved. Without that, it’s not that things fall apart. They just drift. Direction gets fuzzy. Decisions become political. Quality becomes subjective. And experience becomes a checklist.

And still, people move on. Because they can. That’s the part that hurts, quietly. But just because something continues doesn’t mean it continues well. And just because it works doesn’t mean it works together.

The danger isn’t that we’re excluded. It’s that we’re not missed until the cost becomes visible. And by then, it’s already spread.

»Design leaders face a pivotal moment. As artificial intelligence reshapes creative processes, platforms evolve at unprecedented speed, and businesses seek more profound competitive advantages, the mandate for design leadership has fundamentally expanded. What was once about craft excellence and product impact now demands enterprise-wide transformation and strategic influence.«

Rachel Kobetz, Chief Design Officer, PayPal

The question: Where do we go from here?

Good question, right? I don’t have the answer. But I do have a perspective. And yes, my bias. I don’t think it’s about needing to be at the center (of everything). We work with others; we need others. Their input, their opposition, their experience.

But when no one holds the center, things start to slip. The work keeps going. But the friction builds up. The gaps grow. Quietly. Until no one can cross them anymore.

That’s where we come in. Not to dominate. But to hold the space where direction can emerge. Design isn’t about saving the day. It’s about how the day takes shape. How people come together. How priorities become visible. How momentum builds at the right moment.

If GenAI accelerates the visible, then our work is with the invisible. The timing. The framing. The synthesis. The quality. The clarity you can’t automate. But you can design for it. And maybe that’s not just where we come back in. Maybe that’s where we’ve always been needed.

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Designing the Invisible – How algorithms became our new material

extraz — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 14:54:22 +0000

Designing the Invisible - How algorithms became our new material

From data to algorithms

I used to believe that we design the relationship between machines and people. People do a and machines do b and the other way around. But during my work over the years for companies and my research for my study focusing on data, I realized that this binary thinking is coming to an end. That data lays a ground for something new, a new species and its behaviors. These are (less) bound to the shell they embody and will have way more factors for considerations.

It’s not about designing the communication between humans and machines.  It’s about shaping the behaviour of the algorithm and its dialogue with people.
And that’s where things get interesting and complex.

The new material has influence

Before the rise of human computer interaction, Traditional materials were about friction. Weight. Limits. They respond to pressure in a way you can learn to feel, and in their areas they still are. But algorithms don’t behave like that. They behave within systems. They are shaped by context, by (training) data, by the intentions and believe of people who created them, by the way people use them – and re-shaped by the consequences of their own predictions.

It’s a different kind of material. One that learns and co exists. One that feeds on the world and mirrors it back to us, sometimes distorted, biased, invisibly influential.

If you’re a designer, you’re not just deciding how it looks. You’re influencing what gets seen. By whom. When. And why.

Data is not neutral. It’s directional.

There’s a common misconception that »data speaks for itself.« But as I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way), data never comes without context. It reflects decisions about what to measure, what to leave out, and how to interpret meaning. The problem is: once something becomes a metric, it feels objective. Despite or focus on the data literacy on its audience.

Data, on the other hand, is not the truth; it’s just a trail. A trace of human behaviour, choices, conditions. And when we use data to train algorithms, we’re not just reflecting the world, we are mirroring a version of it.

Designing with data means navigating this uncertainty. Being aware of proxy signals, structural gaps, and the trade-offs we’re making every time we prioritize one outcome over another. Our responsibility is increasing rapidly, becoming more complex. This happens simultaneously with the parameters and dependencies of our material.

Trust can be influenced, but needs to be build.

Through my work, exchange with colleagues, and my study, I put forward the hypothesis that these systems are hyped by two forces: Mechanical trust (is it reliable?) and social trust (does it behave the way I expect?). Why both? Because these systems mirror their human creators while interacting with other humans – they are both product and participant.

That’s exactly what makes algorithms a design problem. Because the behaviour of a system depends not just on its internal logic, but on the situation users of the system are in, what they expect, and how outcomes and the process are communicated.

Trust isn’t a feature. It’s the result of expectations aligning with experience over time, in context. As designers, we can’t guarantee trust. But we can design for trustworthiness. That means shaping feedback loops, exposing the logic of the system, advocating for the intent not going overboard in the building process and building in mechanisms for correction.

In an age of data fatigue and rising expectations, trust isn’t soft – it’s strategic.

Why good systems make good business

Algorithmic design and its systems isn’t just about ethics, tech or aesthetics – it’s about business resilience and performance.

Poorly designed algorithms don’t just fail in the background; they also hurt reputations, break trust, and make regulators look more closely at the companies that use them. Design, when understood as the shaping of system behaviour, becomes a form of risk management. It allows teams to identify and mitigate unintended consequences before they become costly.

How can you measure it? With trust. Systems that are experienced as transparent and fair create stronger user relationships, reduce churn, and drive sustained engagement. In an age of data fatigue and rising expectations, trust isn’t soft. It’s strategic.

This only works if design moves beyond the interface. The logic, data flows, and adaptation mechanisms of algorithmic systems all encode behaviour. Embedding design here means shaping what the system does, not just how it looks.

So what does it mean to »design an algorithm«?

It means asking uncomfortable questions:

Who benefits when this prediction is right?
Who is excluded when this pattern holds?
What happens when the system is wrong, and who bears the cost?

That’s the core of algorithmic design: not decorating the output, but shaping the logic, the behavior, and the consequences.

It also means holding space for uncertainty. Because real-world situations are messy. People are messy. The perfect Double Diamond rarely plays out in real-world. And if our design frameworks can’t enable people to deal with that messiness, we risk making things look clean while staying fundamentally unbalanced.

A more human-centred future starts behind the interface

We often talk about human-centred design in terms of usability, flow, or accessibility. But taking it seriously means shifting the focus from screens to systems, from aesthetics to consequences.

Because algorithms aren’t just technical tools. They’re social actors. They govern access, visibility, trust. And if we treat them as design material, we cannot just make them more usable we can make them more balanced and the business in the long-run.

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