IDEO and Fotile have had a relationship since 2009, working together on projects including a unified design language for product offerings, retail environments, and IoT strategy. For the dishwasher, IDEO and the Fotile research team came together for design research, shadowing Chinese families in different cities as they prepared meals from start to finish. Together they discovered that unlike in Western cooking, where several kinds of cookware are used for different dishes, Chinese cooks tend to use the same cookware to prepare all of their dishes.

That meant that the cookware needed to be cleaned several times during a single meal preparation, rather than once at the end. In this context, the sink serves different purposes over the course of cooking—it’s a place to wash and store prepped ingredients, rinse the cookware, and deep clean the dishes used in food prep and during the meal.

Based on this insight, IDEO made a list of product design recommendations that became Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher—a counter-level, multi-purpose appliance that specifically suits Chinese cooking habits. IDEO’s design guidance gave Fotile the confidence it needed to launch its product into the market, and served as a blueprint for the future iteration of Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher.

On March 25, 2015, six months after the project ended, Fotile launched the world's first sink dishwasher designed for Chinese families. Eight months later, its market share exceeded 30 percent, setting off a wave of innovation in the Chinese dishwasher category.

In 2016, Fotile introduced a three-slot dishwasher with an added compartment for cleaning fruit and vegetables—a direct response to a research finding that Chinese families are concerned about food safety. When this new model hit the market, Fotile’s dishwasher market share jumped to 41.1%. In China, Fotile is now synonymous with “sink dishwasher,” and the company has a widespread reputation among consumers as a symbol of a safe and healthy Chinese family kitchen.

Since its founding in 1994, Fotile’s Chairman, Mao Zhongqun, has made it his goal to “do nothing but build a high-end Chinese family brand.”

30%

Fotile Sink Dishwasher’s share of the market in China, just eight months after launch

41%

Fotile’s dishwasher market share after it launched a three-slot version in 2016

#1 selling brand

in the mainstream price segment of the Chinese dishwasher market as of August 2023

BoAo Group’s idea to design a new baby car seat was fueled by a newly revised minor protection law, which made using child safety seats mandatory beginning June 1st, 2021. As ZUOWE and IDEO looked around China’s emerging car seat market, the team noticed a singular focus on safety and safety features across most international and domestic brands. There was a clear opportunity for a new product that could meaningfully differentiate itself by not only providing safety features but also meeting the needs of modern Chinese parents.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team needed to answer two questions: What matters to the new generation of parents in China? And how will their style and approach to parenting affect their expectations for baby car seats? Taking into account the potentially different consumer needs in different geographies, the IDEO team headed to Shanghai, a city with more than 25 million people, and the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 2 million. They conducted in-depth home visits to local families, visited many brick-and-mortar mom-and-baby shops, and interviewed people like specialized nurses, parenting experts, and child psychologists. 

Despite the differences between the two cities, IDEO discovered commonalities during consumer conversations. Young Chinese parents were experiencing a perceived identity gap. As individuals, they felt they had distinct personalities and a clear sense of self. They actively expressed themselves through their clothes and belongings. But when they became parents, this sense of self weakened or disappeared completely.  Their identities shifted to being someone’s mom or dad overnight. This new generation was eager to show their unique approach to parenthood as they used to express their sense of self. But many products were designed for children, with little regard for parents. 

This core finding helped set the direction for the new baby car seat design and brand Maple&Co. However, there were still two significant challenges to overcome. One, IDEO needed to design a product with stringent technical regulations and standards on a tight timeline—ZUOWE wanted to launch the new car seat at an important industry trade show within the year. And two, the team had to help the organization transform its thinking and ways of working to be more consumer-centric.

BoAo’s strength lies in its 20 years of experience developing and manufacturing car seats for major domestic and international automotive brands. This gave the company an edge in overcoming technical barriers and driving mass production. But its engineering and manufacturing mindset had become a barrier to transforming into a D2C brand. With such ingrained ways of working, pivoting to a more creative process can be hard. 

To address this hurdle, IDEO set up co-creation workshops, bringing together ZUOWE’s newly formed baby car seat team and manufacturing experts from their factories to discuss design direction and details early on. The benefits of the collaboration were clear: It was easy to share feedback in a timely manner and make product design decisions very quickly. When IDEO presented a design that emphasized natural textures during a workshop on brand positioning, a member from Bo Ao’s manufacturing team said, “This feels very different. This could become a major selling point,” and that they had “never seen” anything like it done by other baby car seat brands.

A year after working together, ZUOWE Technology launched Maple&Co and the new Maple baby car seat across its main e-commerce channels. Modern and minimalist in soft natural colors and wooden veneers, Maple appeals to the aesthetics of young parents in China. Despite a series of micro COVID outbreaks in China, within three months, Maple had already achieved better-than-predicted sales and received favorable comments about the look and quality of the car seat from parents. Fast forward two years, additional collaborations with IDEO have enabled the young startup to grow its child travel portfolio from a signature car seat into a more holistic offering that includes highly functional, fashionable, and adaptable car booster seats and strollers that thoughtfully address the needs of modern Chinese families across various life stages at home—and on the go.

China's minor protection law mandated the use of child safety seats beginning June 1, 2021.

‍

Despite incoming regulations fueling a surge in purchases, car seats on the market rightly prioritized safety but did not consider the emotional needs and lifestyle preferences of a new generation of Chinese parents.

1 year

after the project ended, a new, differentiated baby seat product and brand, Maple&Co, launched

Top 6

during the 2023 “Double 11” shopping festival, Maple&CO secured the 6th spot on Tmall's new brand pre-sale list

‍

“Over a year ago, I had to take my cat to the vet for an unexpected and expensive surgery,” says one Card Member. “To be honest, I still don’t know if I’ve paid the bill off.”

Many crave the flexibility to pay for large purchases over time, but also want to avoid the pitfalls of debt. Others rely on debit or cash for small items—no one wants to accumulate interest on a cup of coffee, lunch with a friend, or box of Kleenex—but then miss out on valuable rewards.

American Express worked with IDEO to help them attract new customers by understanding what financially stable young adults wanted in a credit card. The team began by interviewing more than 120 millennials to understand their payment behaviors around debit and credit, and how they think about borrowing and spending.

One person described the monthly panic of receiving his bill—described as “statement shock”—and his habit of making multiple payments before his billing cycle closed to ease this anxiety. Others were wary of credit because of a large veterinarian bill or financial mistakes made in their 20s, and relied on debit because it felt safer than accruing a balance to pay off. Overall, the team learned that many consumers experience anxiety about paying their bills. And while financial products that offer more flexibility and control have been needed for years, they are especially valuable in times of economic uncertainty like today.

Based on this research, IDEO prototyped, iterated, and refined two concepts, with frequent feedback from users and the client. Called Pay It Plan It, this feature offers financially responsible consumers more transparency, confidence, and control.

Pay It allows Card Members to quickly pay for small purchase amounts under $100 with a few taps in the American Express mobile app. When that purchase shows up on their account, they can choose “Pay It” and still earn rewards on the purchase. This ensures Card Members can take advantage of rewards while lowering their monthly bill by paying for smaller items throughout the month.

With Plan It, Card Members can split up larger purchases of $100 or more—like an emergency trip to the vet or a new sofa—into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. When the purchase appears in their account, they can select “Plan It,” and will be offered up to three monthly payment plans, ranging from three to 24 months. Each plan comes with a fixed monthly fee and no interest. Card Members know exactly how much they have to pay each month, so there are no surprises. And if they pay the purchase off early, they no longer have to pay any future plan fees.

The design of Pay It Plan It did not come without challenges: Bill pay is critical, complex, and highly regulated. Pay It Plan It required a significant internal financial and technical investment, which was achieved after IDEO shared many of the emotional, compelling stories from credit card users with leaders at American Express.

The team worked closely with the American Express regulatory and digital teams to ensure compliance and seamless integration into the mobile app and website’s user experiences and interfaces. To heighten the sense of competence, control, and transparency for users, the designers focused on small interactions like status animations, proactive suggestions, and straightforward language. These interactions help Card Members anticipate upcoming payments and clearly understand Pay It Plan It.

Plan It was designed with transparency, control, and accessibility in mind: The payment plan fee is displayed in dollars to give the customer certainty over their total costs.

Initially, the team set out to create a new credit card with the needs of young adults in mind. But IDEO and American Express realized that Pay It Plan It could be scaled across existing credit card products to ultimately benefit and attract more Card Members. Now, almost all U.S. American Express Consumer Card Members have access to Pay It Plan It through credit cards, co-branded cards, and the well-known Green, Gold, and Platinum Cards. Since launching in 2017, Card Members have created nearly 5 million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. Millennial and Generation Z Card Members have created approximately 44 percent of these Plans.

The flexibility and control offered through Pay It Plan have earned American Express positive press, including a call-out in The New York Times for being among solutions that “make it easier for their customers to borrow money, and to manage their monthly cash flow.”

At first glance, design-led innovation may seem difficult to achieve in large, established organizations like American Express, operating in a highly regulated and deeply rational industry. But the IDEO and American Express team successfully found ways to introduce new behaviors like rapid prototyping, cross-discipline collaboration, and leading with emotional customer stories within the existing organizational culture and structure. American Express has since established a permanent Pay It Plan It team dedicated to evolving the feature. Made up of employees across departments, this points to a new and collaborative team structure for the company.

By seeking to understand the human behind the Card Member, American Express has transformed credit and financial services for the better, helping both to be defined by empathy, utility, and transparency.

For more than two centuries, The Times held a strong reputation as a storied British newspaper. Then came the digital deluge. Publication after publication began adopting a relentless online publishing schedule aimed at capturing eyeballs and subscribers, and guarding against waning advertising sales and print readership. But The Times and its sister publication The Sunday Times thought there might be a different way forward.

As Editor John Witherow explains, “the power of an edition” had long endured at The Times, but began to erode amid a round-the-clock breaking news cycle. Witherow didn’t want to do away with editions, but rather to update the model for the digital age. Times owner News UK approached IDEO in 2014 to explore exactly that: what the edition of the future might look like and how its design could drive revenue and subscribers.

IDEO’s research and design phase included interviews with readers, journalists, editors, and marketers at News UK. The team found that people’s reading modes vary—some reflecting new digital behaviors and others adhering more closely to paper-reading styles.

Readers, the team learned, chose The Times for its editorial opinion: a perspective that cuts through the overwhelming flood of information. They viewed the daily Times and weekend Sunday Times as one paper, despite the organizational distinction. And they were proud of their choice, valuing the papers’ consistency, trustworthiness, balance, and authoritativeness. Readers wanted these qualities distilled in a digital edition, whether on a smartphone, tablet, or on the web.

Those insights led to strategic recommendations spanning digital products, editorial, advertising integration, online membership offers, and social sharing. But the boldest among those was a publishing strategy that seemed to run counter to media trends: abandoning a real-time approach in favor of publishing separate digital editions.

The Times in March 2016 introduced an editions-based publishing schedule, with new editions available across all platforms four times each weekday: overnight, 9am, noon and 5pm; the weekend schedule shrank to three editions. A year in, they had broken that schedule fewer than a dozen times—making exceptions for major moments like the terror attack in central London and David Bowie’s death—but even in those cases, The Times refrained from incessant updates, instead resuming its regular pacing.

“The way we’re publishing now, taking our time over news...taking a more considered view of the world, it’s helped us offer something different from everything else,” digital news head Alan Hunter told Digiday in 2018. Readers demonstrated that this different approach was something they’d been wanting.

In the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales were up 200% as compared to the same period in 2015. At the end of June 2016, there were 413,600 subscribers to The Times and The Sunday Times, up 3.4% from a year prior. Of those, 182,500 were digital-only subscriptions—a 6% rise and a notable figure given how much online news can be obtained for free.

Through collaboration with IDEO, News UK's own digital teams capabilities grew, enabling them to implement and evolve their new digital strategy. The capabilities of the newsroom grew, too: “The decision to move to four editions a day has freed up tremendous resources to focus on big stories,” says Emma Tucker, Editor of The Sunday Times—the kind of stories that "supercharge engagement." The approach is working: By August 2019 digital subscriptions had increased 19% year-on-year to 300,000, showing the progress the legacy publisher has made in attracting readers to its online proposition. Total subscribers for the two titles' print and digital products now stand at 539,000, and their websites total five million registered users.

More than 230 years after its first edition was published, the new Times has established solid footing in the digital age and designed its own future—one based not on the habits of its competitors but on its legacy and the reading behaviors of its audience.

What they found through their conversations took them a bit by surprise. There was a deeper malaise afflicting everyone they spoke to—something under the surface, under the symptoms.

Loneliness.

Months into a pandemic, the isolation that’s always been below the surface is even more extreme. It was in this context that I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Murthy. We spoke about what leaders can do to facilitate connection, and why it is mission-critical for organizations to address loneliness and support relationship-building, even when we’re physically distant. Especially when we are physically distant.

I'm sharing some excerpts from our conversation here. I hope they inspire you and prompt useful explorations into the health of your communities.

Three types of loneliness

The feeling of being isolated from each other, Dr. Murthy discovered, is at the root of so many of our deepest ailments. He reminds us that we are social creatures, and that community heals us. Especially in these divided times, the way to a more happy and healthy society is both obvious and profound: human connection.

Connection in the workplace

Our professional lives—the experience of working and the quality of what we do—is heavily influenced by what’s going on in their rest of our lives. Yet there’s a hesitance to be vulnerable, share challenges, and ask for help. As a result, colleagues sometimes miss opportunities to help one another. It’s a loss, because through helping each other, we deepen our bonds. Empowering employees to help each other can be one of the most powerful ways for organizations to strengthen their teams.

The potential for something better

While our present moment lays bare how technology can isolate us and ideologies can divide us, it also shows us that new ways are possible now and in the future. My conversation with Dr. Murthy explored the role design can play in creating human-centered systems that make us all feel more connected—from the scale of individuals and teams, all the way up to systems, institutions and governments. We all have the power to design conditions that prevent loneliness, cultivate community, and foster good health.

The strain on our systems caused by COVID-19 reveals an opportunity to take new approaches to our work and our infrastructure— from how the government sets policies to how businesses empower employees. In rebuilding the world post-pandemic, we need to keep in mind the tangible benefits that human connection can support: mental health, physical wellbeing, academic and professional success. We can design policy to optimize human connection, ensuring our government recognizes these principles when thinking about housing, public health, or education, for instance. The question for leaders is, what changes are required to create connection and maintain cohesion, even as our structures and processes shift? The opportunity for leaders now is not to go back to how things were, but to imagine something better…and make a new “normal” built upon what supports us as, as Dr. Murthy points out, social creatures who need care and connection.

Original photograph by Meredith Nierman

There’s a story in Dr. Vivek Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, about the tour he made across America in 2015, while he was U.S. Surgeon General. One of my colleagues at IDEO, Ann Kim, served as his Chief Design Officer and joined Dr. Murthy’s team as they set out to learn about the health crises gripping the nation—opioid addiction, chronic disease, violence—from the people who were suffering the most.

As pixels become a hidden quality, what would it be like to expose and celebrate this tiny landscape? Maybe it’s some sort of nostalgia for the pixel, but I thought it would be fun to prototype a game where part of the gameplay is uncovering this “hidden world” of pixels inside these new displays—and so the world’s smallest pixel art game was born.

Looking through the loupe

To start the project, I needed to see these tiny pixels up close. I bought a cheap jeweler’s loupe—basically a magnifying glass—and pressed it up against an iPad. Things looked promising with a 10x loupe. The level of magnification allows you to see the individual pixels, but still see a decent amount of the play area around the character. However, if your eye is pressed against the eyepiece of the loupe, it would make touch controls a challenge because you can’t see anything but the small area in the magnifying glass. To work with this constraint, I wondered if I could make the loupe itself the controller for the game.

The way iPads and most tablets sense touch is using a “capacitive touchscreen.” This type of display creates a grid of areas that hold electrical charge. When a fingertip touches the screen, the charge at and around the point of contact decreases, communicating where the finger is to the tablet. Electrically conductive gloves and styluses are able to work on these screens because they allow the properties of your finger to extend through the conductive material. So using the same idea as a conductive stylus, I put some aluminum tape on the loupe to transmit the capacitance from your fingers to the display. This allowed a player to move the loupe around the screen, and through doing so, interact with the game.

Exploring a tiny world

Next, I needed to develop the game. I borrowed from some of the classic role-playing-game tropes from games I played as a kid, building out a landscape that included many different climates—a desert, a lake, a forest, a deep forest, an ice tundra, and more. I created a tiny character that the player guided around the landscape by moving the loupe.

The idea is that the whole game is played on a single static overworld screen that never moves—you can explore an entire tiny world without ever moving more than a few inches. There are even a couple of fun ways the character interacts with the environment. For example, the player can force the character to fall into the lake, where he splashes around and quickly jumps out. I also created a hidden cave that shows how a game might work with inside and outside spaces that can be explored.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the way the experiment turned out. There’s something about looking through the magnifying glass and into this new world that brings back some of the awe and wonder that came with exploring new worlds on my Nintendo when I was growing up—it just goes to show that screen technology doesn’t need to be pixel perfect to transport us.

Chart your own pixel territory

Want to try it for yourself? Here’s how to get your own version of this experiment up and running:

1. Build the loupe controller

Get a loupe, and some aluminum tape. I made two separate “T” shaped pieces of tape, and wrapped them around the edge of the bottom of the loupe. This metal transmits the capacitance of your body down to the edges of the loupe, simulating two-finger touch.

2. Load the game

There are two ways to do this. First, make sure you have Unity, then download the project from Github. You’ll also want to install the Unity Remote app on your tablet.

To quickly test the project, you can plug the tablet into a USB port on your computer and open the Unity Remote app on the tablet. In Unity on the computer go to Edit > Project Settings > Editor and select the tablet. Then press the play button at the top of the main Unity window and the game will appear on your device. This will let you try things out but it will be very slow to react and move the character because it’s running on the computer and sending each screen as an image over the USB connection. More detailed instructions can be found on the Github project page.

Alternatively, if you want to run the application natively on a device at a reasonable speed, you will need to follow the directions on building for mobile to set up your device with Unity.

Either way, once you’ve gotten the game up and running, you’ll have a good sense of the game mechanics and can go into the project to edit it to create your own tiny world—changing things like the landscape and character actions, creating new characters and interactive objects, and even extending it into an actual game. Happy exploring!

A quick shoutout to some of the great resources I used to create this demo:

• Tiled: A fantastic tool for creating tiled backgrounds for 2D games. This was extremely helpful for putting together the overworld.
• Tiled2Unity: This tool helps bring the tiled data into Unity seamlessly.
• opengameart.org: A great repository for free to use game art assets. My main tiles were modified from surt’s Blowhard Chronicles.
• rm2kdev’s 2D Unity RPG Development series: A super helpful video series on developing 2D games in Unity.

‍

When’s the last time you had to design for something as small as a pixel? In recent years, with the advance of retina displays on computers, tablets and phones, it’s easy to forget that pixels are still the building blocks for everything you see on the screen. (These new displays still use pixels; they’re just so small they can’t really be seen.) In the past, user interface designers had to build to pixel-perfect precision to avoid blurry aliasing effects and issues with displaying fonts on lower-resolution screens; today, this is all but a thing of the past.

Designers prototype everyday. It’s an essential part of the design and development process that involves translating early ideas into tangible prototypes that we can test in real life with real users. Prototyping is about being able to understand a challenge or an opportunity and find creative ways to move toward a solution, step by step. Essentially homing in on “building the right thing,” before “building that thing right.”

But the prototyping process doesn’t have to be limited to what you do for work. In fact, bringing this approach to your everyday life has the magical effect of turning common challenges into moments of playful exploration. It’s not necessarily about finding the ultimate answer, but enjoying the opportunity to experiment, improve, and learn along the way. You can prototype anything as long as you have the right mindset and get creative with your tools.

Here’s what it looked like when a sous-vide experiment took me down a prototyping rabbit hole (and how it could take you down one too).

Step 1: Get inspired

Inspiration can come from many places, like frustration with tools or objects that are not easy to use or the simple joy of creative exploration. For me, the latter happened when I stumbled across a recipe that used sous-vide, the technique of slowly heating meat or fish to its perfect core temperature so it doesn’t become dry or overcooked.

I thought it would be fun to try out for a dinner party, but didn't want to invest in a professional sous-vide machine. A typical moment where my prototyping obsession kicks in…

Step 2: Start out low-fidelity

An essential step while prototyping is identifying the simplest way to obtain the intended result—to achieve more with less. Isn’t the sous-vide technology just slowly heating up ingredients and stabilizing the temperature over a long period of time? That seemed pretty simple. So I gathered my materials: heat-proof bags, an electric thermostat, and of course, a couple of beautiful steaks.

I sealed the steaks in the heat-resistant bags, put them into a pot of water and used my oven to heat them up to 53°C/127 °F (the perfect core temperature for a medium rare steak). Unfortunately, the thermostat of a regular kitchen oven is relatively inaccurate, with the actual temperature being ±10°C/18°F compared to what it shows! That can make the difference between your meat being bloody as hell and completely overcooked.

That meant I had to place myself in front of my oven for over two hours, staring at the tiny LCD display of my electric thermostat and manually balancing the inaccuracy of the oven by turning the temperature up and down.

Step 3: Analyze your results

The good news: the meal was perfect—the meat medium rare—and my friends were impressed. But sitting in front of my oven, watching a thermostat for multiple hours, was less than ideal. This was the perfect starting point for the next iteration—looking into ways to automate and refine the temperature stabilization and improve my personal user experience.

Step 4: Iterate on key features

That’s how I found myself on a Saturday afternoon hooking up a simple heating rod, my electronic thermostat, and a milk stirrer with an Arduino board.

I mounted my thermostat to the top of the pot and coded my Arduino board to activate the heating rod as long as the temperature of the water bath stayed below 53°C/127 °F. Triggering the milk stirrer every once in a while ensured that the temperature stayed consistent throughout the pot. My prototype ran this process every 10 seconds and freed me up to focus on other parts of the dinner preparation while delivering another round of perfectly cooked meat and fish.

Step 5: Repeat until satisfied—or pivot

Each iteration of a prototype will reveal more detailed feedback and help you get closer to an actual solution. That’s why prototyping is the best way to learn while moving forward, and to de-risk decisions on product innovation or bigger investments.

Using my sous-vide prototype several times helped me identify multiple opportunities to improve it, like how to make it as compact as possible for easy storage (a great design and prototyping task in itself!). But most importantly, by using the prototype, I realized that I missed the sensorial experience of cooking. Simply waiting for ingredients to reach their core temperature in the water bath felt like an artificial, chemical experiment and was not the rich sensory experience I was looking for when spending time in the kitchen on weekends.

So I decided to pivot. After not using the prototype for months, I disassembled it and freed up the components for my next prototyping rabbit hole. Even if the sous-vide prototype actually never made it into a final solution, it helped me better understand what I enjoy most about cooking, and taught me something that I’m sure will be applicable to a future experiment—because the prototyping obsessive’s job is never done. Now, on to the next project!

On a Saturday afternoon (pre-COVID), I found myself in my kitchen, hooking up an Arduino board to a heating rod with one hand, and handling an electronic thermometer and a milk-stirrer with the other. How did I end up here? A hunt for the perfectly-cooked steak—and a typical result of my obsession with prototyping.

For years, I’ve watched smart companies buy into big data. Yet despite huge investments, some of them fail to reap the rewards. A 2017 MIT study revealed that 63% of executives expected to see a large impact on their offerings from AI in the next few years. But of the 14% of executives who reported already seeing a large impact, most cited examples in automation, decision-making support, and operational diagnostics for internal capabilities. Those kinds of advances can contribute to higher profits and short-term differentiation, but operational efficiencies do not generally help organizations grow beyond their peers. They also aren’t the deciding factor that will carry you through a yo-yoing economy. So how, exactly, do successful organizations unlock sustained and differentiated value in an AI-enabled world, at a time when immediate change may seem necessary just to survive?

It starts with experimenting and iterating with data—in a responsible way— to find your organization’s unique value proposition. Intentional experimentation mitigates the risks of failure by ensuring that you learn which data skillsets are critical to your organization, while at the same time identifying product-market fit. It’s a process that can happen before, during, or after a broader digital transformation, and there are three different ways to approach these intentional experiments: scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, and purposeful venturing.

Scaling internal offers

In 2004, a web design company called 37signals needed a project management tool to keep all of its work streams on track. Initially, its solution—Basecamp—was meant to be a tool that would help the company be more efficient, and serve as a single source of truth for all its projects. But the more valuable it became internally, the more the company realized that it could be valuable externally. Eventually, Basecamp became 37signals’ core business; it adopted Basecamp as its name, and folded other offerings under the new brand.

Scaling internal offers is a smart way to create new revenue streams that can also help drive an organizational purpose. It’s a particularly good approach for companies that value creating internal capabilities and investing in their employees.

Another example comes from a liability insurance company that had recently gone through quarterly reviews. The company took a deep dive into large lawsuits, setting case direction and identifying where liability existed and standards had been breached. These observations were used to set financial reserves and, after months of manual curation, create risk-management training materials. While this company had already developed a technique for improving best practices, leveraging data to create a digital tool would give them an opportunity to scale up dramatically. The resulting in-house product allows the company’s claims and risk management representatives to rapidly identify new and emerging trends, as well as strategize case management on the portfolio level, saving thousands of human hours and much more in lawsuit expenses over the course of a year. With a bit more refinement, the firm could offer a version of its tool directly to policy owners, which could allow them to adopt best practices in real-time.

Piloting to stretch

A classic example of this approach comes from Netflix, which started offering streaming video services in 2007, alongside their penalty-free mail order DVD rentals. When the streaming service was born, it was a digital replica of the video store experience, browsing and selecting movies from a wall. But as Netflix accumulated ever more data about what people watched and their preferences, the streaming service became a data-driven way to personalize and recommend content, better fulfilling its purpose of “entertaining the world.” In fact, developing this data-driven capability in-house has given them sufficient insights into viewers’ preferences, which they are now using to create their own content, dramatically shifting the entire media landscape because of the data they own.

Piloting to stretch is a method of launching a new venture that brings in cash and stretches the organization to more intentionally fulfill its purpose. Often, that can require an entirely new business unit, with a new culture and team, so that it can grow without absorbing existing constraints. This approach is particularly appropriate for organizations that are seeking a new lever for growth, or are looking to disrupt their industry.

For Ascensia Diabetes Care, it was about recognizing a service gap for patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Most people, shortly after receiving their diagnosis, are scheduled for a brief consultation with a certified diabetes educator (CDE) who helps them learn the basics of managing the disease. But the short time a CDE spends with a client isn't nearly enough to establish new habits and enable sustained lifestyle changes. Ascensia saw an opportunity to create a new remote care service that would allow people with diabetes to interact with CDEs over a prolonged period of time through a telehealth platform, helping them better acclimate to their condition. To design the right program and path for each patient, Ascensia created data-driven tools that would help CDEs know how and when to interact with users. Initially, the company piloted the app with 60 people, and early results showed that users were willing to adopt and adhere to the program. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%.

Purposeful venturing

Google may have started as a search engine, but in 2015 Alphabet emerged as an umbrella organization that made space for Google to pursue other ventures, some that might seem far beyond the scope of the core business. Alphabet’s interests— everything from life science (Calico) to transportation (Waymo)—are all in service of doing the right thing, and separating Alphabet’s other ventures from Google kept them from getting mired in particulars of the Google organization. This nimbleness has allowed Alphabet to fulfill its broader purpose, even during the extreme uncertainty of a global pandemic; the company quickly launched one venture, Verily’s Project Baseline, to research COVID-19, while Google and Apple have partnered to develop an exposure notification system.

Purposeful venturing is a way for an organization to create new business lines that drive growth. These ventures operate independently, with their own teams and cultures, and may require dramatically different ways of working that would be distracting for the core business’ operations. It’s a good fit for companies that might have many different ways of achieving their purpose, or for firms that can create symbiotic effects with auxiliary offerings.

In practice, it can also look like this: A nimble venture firm called 1848 Ventures (a subsidiary of Westfield Insurance) recognized that staffing is one of the biggest uncertainties business owners grapple with. Over-staffing eats into their already razor-thin margins; under-staffing means long lines and lost revenue. By rooting their innovation efforts in their purpose—to help their customers mitigate risk and uncertainty—the firm saw an opportunity to create a service that would help small businesses better manage their expenses through a tool that combines large data sets and an intuitive interface to optimize operational decisions. This new product was piloted with restaurants to help them offset the thin margins they need to survive.

Regardless of whether you experiment by scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, or purposeful venturing, there are ample opportunities to simultaneously unlock product-market fit while getting a better grasp of the capabilities your organization needs to grow. Design offers a way to mitigate the risk of missing product-market fit and improve your odds of success in a way that dovetails with your existing capabilities and long-term vision. So after you pick your path, get out there and start prototyping early and often with data products, just like you would with anything else. It’s the best way to make sure that your data investment will push you past operational efficiencies, to sustained and real growth.

Illustrations by Nate Kitch

Over the past six months, the pandemic and the economic uncertainty it ushered in have sent companies in every industry flailing; to survive, many have leapt to major digital transformations. Scrambling CEOs have bought into the hype around data and AI that has been swirling for the last decade, all in hopes of making it to the other side. It’s a smart move. Even in a moment as stark as this one, with no sure path to a return to normalcy, data has the potential to ethically deliver unprecedented value to consumers, organizations, and shareholders. But just because the potential is there doesn’t mean the full value of these investments is being realized.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

‍

My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

‍

In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

‍

The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

‍

This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.