To bring students healthy food at school, San Francisco Unified School District had already hired Revolution Foods, a caterer that serves some of the highest-nutrition meals in the nation. But when the lunch bell rang, 72 percent of those who could afford lunch weren’t showing up; students didn’t want to wait in the long lines or rush to finish, so they headed off-campus to eat.

Working alongside more than 1,300 students, parents, union leaders, nutrition staff, board commissioners, principals, teachers, and community groups, IDEO and SFUSD redesigned school lunch. Together, they developed recommendations for three age-appropriate dining experiences, from communal eating to student-designed spaces to new technology platforms, and worked to develop a robust business model.

In September 2013, the San Francisco Unified School Board expressed unanimous enthusiasm for IDEO’s work, clearing the path for this new vision of student-centered lunch to take root.

You can learn more about the cafeteria, and hear firsthand from the students, in this immersive, interactive story.

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Steelcase and IDEO have been collaborating for more than 25 years. The relationship has influenced furniture design across a range of environments, from work spaces to hospitals to schools, and has resulted in numerous design awards for iconic pieces like the Node Chair for classrooms and the innovative modern office chair Leap WorkLounge.

At the heart of the relationship lie trust and a spirit of collaboration, said IDEO founder David Kelley, allowing the space for innovation. “It has to be the collaboration between our inherent innovation capabilities and their extraordinary internal knowledge about the market and what they do best,” Kelley said. The way IDEO began working with Steelcase decades ago has influenced the way they continue to work today, involved in all areas of the business, from design and engineering to strategy and marketing.

The first collaboration in 1989 was for a new Steelcase division called Details, and featured desktop products to go along with its already successful line of office furniture. From the beginning, IDEO founder David Kelley and a group of designers were involved in helping Steelcase with decision-making on every level of the new division, from product strategy to hiring and everything in between. The particular blend of strategy, design, and engineering used to help Details become successful actually became the prototype project for the future IDEO, and is the blueprint for how IDEO works today.

What followed were a series of projects in which Steelcase and IDEO explored moving away from the traditional office cubicle toward furniture that was more architectural and open. More than 10 years ago, Steelcase noticed that the way people worked was changing from static work in offices to more fluid environments that were technology-enabled with laptops and mobile phones. This insight led to two collaborations, Room Wizard and media:scape, design efforts that captured this changing landscape by extending intelligent work to be supported by digital products, not just physical ones.

Jim Hackett, former CEO of Steelcase, said that an early brainstorming exercise in IDEO’s Palo Alto studio made him realize the power of a human-centered design approach. “They asked me to come to Palo Alto for a brainstorming exercise, so I went through the literal exercise that IDEO was having clients do at the time,” Hackett said. “As I was cutting foam core on the floor of one of the studios, I was thinking: I would never work the same way again after doing this. Not just designers should work like this, but anybody who is a knowledge worker should work like this.”

The collaboration’s many successes had a profound impact on Steelcase, and on Hackett personally: “I’m so humbled, I can’t even express it. I can’t tell you how many waves of joy come over me when I’m at IDEO. It’s just an extraordinary part of my life.”

Over the years, the two companies have been in nearly daily communication, a practice that has informed the work of both. While Hackett brought Steelcase’s perspective of corporate boardrooms and running a global company, Kelley and IDEO were working in the most innovative place in the world, saturated in design. Both companies agree that neither would be the same today without the experience gleaned from the other.

Some of the projects include:

RoomWizard
Aiming to connect the convenience of digital technology to physical spaces, the teams designed RoomWizard, a web-accessible touch-screen display that provides the real-time status of shared meeting rooms, simplifying the process of reserving and managing those spaces.

Leap WorkLounge and Ottoman
Building on their earlier work on the Leap Chair, the teams created a work chair with the comfort and style of a classic club chair, a luxury Leap Chair that takes work away from the desk.

i2i Chair
In researching the needs of a growing number of collaborative settings, Steelcase identified an opportunity to combine task and lounge seating. Named for the collaboration it enables, the i2i chair supports a variety of postures, including sideways, reclining, perching, and leaning. Winner of the Spark Gold Award, 2010, and the IDEA Silver Award, 2009.

Amia Chair
Steelcase and IDEO designed a task chair with modern ergonomic capabilities that accommodated a wide range of body types at a lower price point. Winner of the IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, 2009.

media:scape
Steelcase asked IDEO to help evaluate and design a “walk up and connect” experience that merged furniture and technology to help teams access and share information. Designed to look light, open, and inviting, media:scape used a pedestal table with cleverly embedded hardware and interactive technology to foster group work. Winner of the IDEA Bronze award for Office & Productivity, 2011.

Node Chair
IDEO collaborated with Steelcase to design a platform for improving the classroom experience. The final product, dubbed the Node chair, has received praise for promoting student collaboration, allowing educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses. Winner of five design awards.

Watch: A love letter to Node.

A great healthcare experience shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be available to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they need.

Planned Parenthood health centers have opened their doors to every woman and man for 100 years with this core conviction, offering services ranging from pap tests, cancer screenings, and breast exams to contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, counseling, and education.

As the healthcare landscape continues to shift, Planned Parenthood is evolving to lead the progress. For the past year, the organization worked side by side with IDEO to rethink and prototype a patient and employee experience that elevates individuals and their health and well-being.

Together, the teams designed a number of patient and employee interactions and corresponding prototypes that address different patient needs: education, personalization, connection, and support for any decision.

Concepts in Development

These concepts are being rolled out across health centers around the country:

Welcoming Waiting Areas
To help set the right tone for patients from the time they enter the door, the teams designed waiting rooms that offer different types of environments for different needs. The Hub is an area that transforms the passive waiting room experience to a greeting area that’s staffed by knowledgeable guides who help orient patients, and quiet nesting spaces for reflection and privacy. Patients can spend time with friends and family in a social, kid-friendly common area, and those who want to get involved to support Planned Parenthood’s mission can learn about health and advocacy information. This modular design toolkit can adapt to the individual buildings, budgets, and community needs of any existing Planned Parenthood health center.

Restorative Recovery Rooms
For women who are recovering from surgical procedures, small thoughtful details have a magnified positive impact. Redesigned recovery rooms have been separated into semi-private spaces, accommodating loved ones who want to join patients after a procedure. Soothing colors and soft, warm fabrics create a comforting environment, and service gestures including cards with words of support and encouragement from staff reinforce Planned Parenthood’s promise. A take-home kit provides clear information about what to expect during recovery and recommendations for follow-up care.

Unifying Employees
Because the heart of Planned Parenthood is its dedicated employees, we developed and launched an engagement and training program that provides staff with the tools and support they need to do their best work. In This Together, an employee engagement training, prepares staff to work with a vastly diverse community, reduce stigma around health choices, and empower patients to take control of their care. It’s based on a clearly defined set of workplace values and service standards, common goals that help employees across the global organization work together to provide top-notch experiences at every location.

Vision for the Future

These concepts are in varying stages of development, with plans to launch coming soon.

Patient-Physician Tool and Educational App
Visit Companion is a prototype for a suite of digital tools that help patients learn about their reproductive health choices and create personalized plans with their clinicians. While they wait, or anytime before a visit, patients can learn the answers to common questions related to their appointment and see side-by-side comparisons of their care options. The app uses familiar language and symbols to describe symptoms and side effects, and it provides a record of what was discussed during the visit as well as reminders for follow-up appointments.

Simplified Medical Forms
For the 2 million-plus patients who visit Planned Parenthood health centers, there’s an opportunity to make appointments more convenient and straightforward. Currently in prototyping stages, Friendly Forms is an easy-to-understand, interactive digital questionnaire written in simple, conversational language that was designed by replicating how Planned Parenthood clinicians speak to their patients. The forms adapt as patients answer questions, giving only the prompts that are relevant. Patients will be able to complete Friendly Forms any time before their appointment, so it’s easier to complete the forms accurately.

Holistic Women’s Health Care
Women who rely on Planned Parenthood for their sexual and reproductive healthcare can benefit from having trusted clinicians guide their care throughout their lifetime. Through the Well Woman Plus program, Planned Parenthood will connect women to trusted providers for care beyond physical exams and birth control consultation. Clinicians will use interactive digital and physical tools to map out lifelong health care milestones and help patients think proactively about their future, from family planning to preventive screenings.

To learn more, go to PlannedParenthoodExperience.org.

Find out more about Planned Parenthood's approach to creativity in this Q&A with executive vice president and chief brand officer Dawn Laguens.

La Victoria Lab (LVL) is a group of designers, anthropologists, architects, and entrepreneurs working on improving the lives of the Peruvian middle class. Founded in 2014, LVL is the Innovation Lab of Intercorp, an economic group of 35 companies spanning banks, malls, cinemas, schools, health care clinics, and more. Intercorp was founded by Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, one of Peru’s most successful entrepreneurs, employs more than 90,000 people, and accounts for almost 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Peru is one of South America’s fastest growing economies, with a healthy 6 percent year-on-year growth from 2007 to 2017, on average. That rising economic tide, along with government policy, has created extraordinary social mobility: Between 2005 and 2017, the share of poverty fell from 55% to 22%, of a population of 32 million.

Know The Customer

As Peruvians’ lives have improved, the new middle class's needs and aspirations have changed: They’re entrepreneurial, expect great services, and want the best for their children. That challenge and opportunity led Rodríguez-Pastor to enlist IDEO to bring our empathic approach to the construction of Innova Schools, a new school system, and to redesign Interbank's customer experience"

Success in these two projects bred ambition. Intercorp, Rodríguez-Pastor realized, needed to build two capabilities: a deep, bedrock understanding of the new middle class, and an innovation capability with which his companies could create new products, services, and experiences. “I want a little IDEO,” Rodriguez-Pastor said, and the germ of LVL took root.

A Lab Takes Shape

In early 2014, as contractors broke ground on the Lab, its founders set about hiring an eclectic team from across the globe and undertook their first project: to deeply understand the needs, desires, hopes, and dreams of the emerging middle class.

Three months of ethnographic research was followed by three months of bringing their insights to life. LVL’s team surrounded themselves with mementos of people’s lives: toys, products, ads, as well as video interviews with families, to help Intercorp’s executives literally step into the lives of their prospective customers.

Solutions and Skills

Powered by those insights, La Victoria Lab has brought human-centered problem-solving to a variety of Intercorp’s companies, including new retail ventures, and improving the cinema-going and banking experience.

In 2015, the Lab began scaling its efforts to build innovation capabilities across all of the portfolio companies by using IDEO’s innovation readiness assessment, Creative Difference. Each company received a report of their strengths and improvement areas, and as a result, LVL facilitated workshops and community groups focused on building essential capabilities.

"Creative Difference is the first tool that has allowed my team and the organization to have a precise picture of where we are in the spectrum of doing truly innovative work. Now, we can identify our strengths and areas of improvement, we can develop work plans and actions based on data, and can start to really dig deep into innovation,” says Aurelia Alvarado, Director of Innovation, Innova Schools.

La Victoria Lab’s experiments are catalyzed by Intercorp’s scale, reach, and national ambition. Innova Schools, for example, is now Peru’s biggest private school network (read more about Innova here). And Interbank’s new retail experience rolled out to more than 180 branches nationally.

As LVL matures, its focus is changing, says Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer, Intercorp. “There's a transition taking place at La Victoria Lab, from a studio undertaking typical design projects, to a platform for impact-led journeys that start at pipeline discovery, defining key performance indicators, all the way to implementation and stewardship."

Just as important as the projects it delivers is the wider intent of LVL. The aim is for IDEO’s role within La Victoria Lab to wane, as Intercorp’s waxes, and the company’s internal Innovation capability and culture strengthen. LVL’s ventures range from mindset-changing initiatives, such as curating Peru's largest innovation festival, to deeply transformative endeavors targeted at reinventing the core value propositions of Intercorp's insurance, drugstores, and medical services. It envisions massive cross-organizational transformation.

“Innovation,” said Rodríguez-Pastor, “is too important to be outsourced.”

Keep up to date with the latest projects from La Victoria Lab: lavictoria.pe

"For the latest developments on our work with Intercorp, head to "The Possibilities Business: An Oral History of Organization Transformation"

IDEO’s global client and partner network gives us a unique view into how organizations are responding to rapid change. Recently, we decided to ask our clients what problems are keeping them up at night, and what promising solutions keep them leading with optimism.

We reached out to 55 global business leaders spanning 25 cities and 18+ industries. What we heard is that while uncertainty isn’t new, there have never been so many compounding causes for concern. A decade ago, it was easy to see what triggered the recession. Now, volatility surrounds us—in politics, markets, regulations, the environment, and society at large.

Leaders cited increasingly complex consumer expectations and interactions. They pointed out tension between fueling growth and tightening belts, and pressure to sustain their core businesses while spinning up new growth horizons. And they noted growing difficulty attracting and retaining the right talent.

Leaders agree that growth is still the primary business objective, but increasingly understand that the methods and mindsets to achieve growth have changed. In particular, it’s becoming more important and impactful to consider people—customers, employees, shareholders, and stakeholders—when making business decisions. A human-centered approach to strategy and innovation makes it possible to turn obstacles into opportunities.

How do leaders become more human-centered? By looking both inward and outward to identify the needs and conditions that drive innovation. Inwardly, it’s about evolving leadership qualities to encompass a combination of creativity, strategy, technology, and soft skills. Outwardly, it means testing tangible solutions with customers to inform execution and scale.

These shifts can unlock trapped value, fuel growth, and build trust and loyalty.

Our research identified six key tensions leaders face now. While tension can create stress, it can also—when approached thoughtfully—enable sustained balance between opposing priorities. In our client network, we see numerous examples of inspirational leaders and organizations learning to strike that balance, and in turn finding a new way forward that leads to profitable business growth.

1. Improving efficiencies while exploring new growth opportunities

In 2014, The Times and The Sunday Times worked with IDEO to define and design a new digital publishing strategy. The decision to move to four editions a day—and stop competing with round-the-clock breaking news—freed up tremendous resources to focus on big stories, and balance efficiencies with growth. Since moving to online editions in 2016, subscriptions are up 15% (April 2018) in a market where most content is free.

2. Balancing the needs of shareholders and stakeholders

Intercorp is a Peruvian conglomerate whose strategy focuses on providing Peru’s growing middle class with high quality and accessible healthcare services, competitive education, and financial service offers. In 2010, IDEO started working with Intercorp to design and launch Innova, a low-cost, for-profit education model built on the needs of families and aiming to make Peru an education leader in Latin America. Innova has become a successful business that investors are confident to back and scale. Innova has opened 63 schools in Peru, which will serve 52,000 students by 2020. They also recently opened the first Innova school in Mexico, welcoming 1100 students, and plan to open three more schools in 2020.

3. Rethinking data collection to unlock actionable insight

Ascensia Diabetes Care, a global healthcare company, has been a leader in diabetes treatment for over 70 years. In 2017, Ascensia set its sights on moving the company beyond producing blood glucose metering devices, to become a comprehensive health support provider for people living with diabetes. IDEO’s team worked with Ascensia to leverage real-time data from people with diabetes to identify behavior patterns, then share that information on demand with certified diabetes educators (CDEs). The team used the insights from the data to prototype various ways of connecting those health educators to people with diabetes, ultimately enabling a different kind of patient-provider interaction through live remote support and a suite of digital tools.

4. Approaching talent acquisition as a strategic venture

In order to future-proof its business, Mitsui & Co., one of Japan’s largest investment and trading firms, believes that they need to build greater internal capabilities to start and launch new businesses of their own, instead of relying purely on their trading investments. To that end, they have partnered with IDEO to create Moon Creative Lab, an innovation hub aiming not only to launch new ventures but also to develop entrepreneurial talent and capabilities as a strategic asset for Mitsui’s future. IDEO is working with Mitsui to attract, hire, and onboard new talent with skills and backgrounds radically different from that of the parent organization.

5. Investing in culture to build purpose and values

Leaders at Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, Zalando, recognized that staying competitive would not just require new offers, but new ways of working internally. IDEO partnered with Zalando to rally teams around a renewed corporate purpose, to deliver a best-in-class fashion experience, generating a greater sense of engagement and pride in the company culture. Zalando has since become a European success story that has sustained a high level of growth. The number of active customers grew by more than 15% year over year as of August 2019.

6. Refocusing leadership from individual experts to collaborative teams

Ford has spent nearly 15 years steering its global enterprise toward design-led innovation. By integrating teams to include diverse expertise and setting up dedicated innovation labs, the company has reduced both time and money spent on new product development while becoming a leading player in future mobility solutions.

Outside of the corporate context, there is a need for learning and development programs that can teach these new leadership approaches. IDEO and Tsinghua University, an esteemed Chinese academic institution, have created a year-long program to guide and support executives who aspire to transform China’s economy. The goal is to cultivate a generation of collaborative, creative, and purpose-driven leaders, enabling the country’s transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China.”

Special thanks to a global team of IDEO collaborators including Charles Hayes (Shanghai), Michael Hendrix (Cambridge), and Madison Mount (San Francisco).

Illustration by Tynan Collins

With so many global challenges converging at once, businesses face unprecedented tension between present demands and future goals. Smart business leaders are formulating responses that will fortify their resilience and sustain growth. But many are also losing sleep over the monumental task of navigating through ambiguity in order to successfully adapt and thrive.

Inspired by the recent overhauls of government sites like gov.uk and boston.gov, Georgia tapped IDEO to explore how it could give more than 80 state agencies flexibility in the look and feel of their websites, while also preserving a uniform branding experience that residents could recognize and trust.

To get acquainted with the state, we took a road trip, wandering around the historic streets of Savannah, getting to know the resilient spirit of Macon, and soaking up the innovative energy of Atlanta. We learned a lot about what Georgians would like from their government, and took a strong look at how the look, feel, and content of a digital experience might impact delivery of services. But we also learned a lot about the difficulties of accessing—and providing—government services. Soon, we realized that this project could be more than just an identity exercise.

The state of Georgia’s population has grown 25 percent over the past decade while the size of its government has decreased by 25 percent. These diverging trends have put a strain on government staff, adding even more pressure to the promises of efficiency that come with civic tech. The transition to digital delivery is not easy, and governments around the world are working to define digital best practices. Because the work is still in progress, service delivery is a serious challenge. Our project wasn’t just about identity, but about how changes in CSS, information, and color schemes could fix the concerns residents had about trust and access to information and services.

During our journey through Georgia, residents told us they felt that government was removed from their lives, monolithic, opaque, and solemn. While it plays a necessary and—in some cases—critical role in their lives, their relationship to it was transactional. Armed with that feedback, our goal was to leverage Georgia.gov to make that relationship feel more collaborative from both a functional and emotional perspective. Thanks to conversations with many people from the great state of Georgia, we synthesized the shortcomings of government websites, explored the needs of the people, and came up with a list of three rules for anyone looking to create a better digital link between a government and its people.

1. Empower users to make an impact

When there are limits to what government can do, give constituents a clear role in how they can work with government to solve problems together. In our research, we chatted with civic technology expert Cliff Lampe, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information Studies. In one project, Professor Lampe and his students developed a technology that allowed residents to flag the presence of rats in their neighborhoods. Though the technology empowered residents to report health and safety issues, the staff in Ferndale, Michigan didn’t actually have the capacity to keep up with them. They started replying to requests for support with information about what residents could do to help mitigate the rat population, like getting rid of clutter in the backyard or keeping pet food inside. Instead of ignoring work it couldn’t get to, the government brought the people into a collaborative relationship, so that they could fight the rodent population together.

2. Leverage UI to let residents know that government is on their side

People on both sides of the conversation called interacting with the government “a necessary pain.” Government staff recognize that if you’re coming to a website to pay taxes, you’re probably not in the greatest mood. Residents often mentioned that the look and feel of the websites didn’t give them the sense that they were welcome to reach out and call agency staff for help.

Our testing of early prototypes revealed that shifts in language and color schemes could change how both government staff and residents felt about their experiences. When we changed the color scheme from a traditional red, white, and blue to more approachable and ownable peaches and greens, residents used words like “warm” and “welcoming” to describe the look and feel. Adding language that invites people to call if they needed help also lead to a much better reception.

One resident told us that these changes gave her the feeling that the government services actually wanted to help her, rather than giving a feeling of what in the past felt like reluctant support.

3. Give constituents insider knowledge

When we visited Atlanta, we spoke to Tara, a program manager at a nonprofit that connects low-income individuals to state financial and educational resources. As an intermediary, Tara knows that state workers are stretched thin, so she advises her clients to do what they can to help move the process along. To this end, she has developed a series of strategies that make the process a little bit easier for everyone involved. Tara, like other superuser intermediaries we spoke to, relies on these strategies to empower herself in her work, helping to move the process along more efficiently.

Sharing tips on how to best navigate the application process brings residents into a collaborative relationship with agency staff, helping them understand obstacles and needs. Some of the tips that Tara shares with her clients include scheduling periodic check-in times to get updates on applications, keeping a file on previous conversations, and having key information on hand before making a call. Following her example, we provided step-by-step application instructions as well as advice from agency staff. Articulating these strategies on the agency website allows constituents to have smoother and more efficient conversations with agency staff without doing a deep dive overhaul of the service model.

Supporting collaboration between government and constituents doesn’t have to mean an overhaul of services. You can make things better with seemingly surface-level changes, like changes to tone, color schemes, and the way information is shared. Though they may appear to be band-aid fixes compared to solving larger systemic challenges, they really can change the way people see and experience their relationship with the government.

Special thanks to the residents of Georgia who shared their experiences with us, and to the IDEO design team of Tom Kershaw, Lindsey Turner, and Emma Baker that shared in this journey. See the state of Georgia's new website at pilot.georgia.gov.

Illustrations by Matteo Berton

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There’s a reason government sites don’t have a reputation for great user experiences. They rarely have the budget or staffing even for digital updates, much less innovation. But the state of Georgia wanted to change that.

New York is a city that invites (or demands) personal reinvention and grit, a home where you choose your own adventure and meet your true self.

While everyone comes to New York for different reasons, chances are each person is drawn to the seemingly endless opportunities, rich culture, and potential for discovery. The city is a blank slate for bucket lists that keep on growing. But New York is also notoriously difficult for many to navigate and discover. In the midst of everything going on, it’s hard to stop and see the magic that brought us here in the first place.

In the true spirit of design provocation, a handful of us at IDEO New York asked ourselves: How might we help New Yorkers get lost in the city, and by doing so, allow them to discover something new and surprising along the way?

In between projects, we gave ourselves a job—design some speculative concepts to bring these two complex, potentially oppositional ideas to life.

Lost

The first design concept, Lost, explores how we can lose ourselves in the city by going off the grid. As we asked people how they disconnect in the Big Apple, we heard about different rituals to reclaim time and attention: from turning on Do Not Disturb mode to giving an iPhone to the local bodega for safekeeping.

Intrigued by the implications these tactics had on a person’s digital footprint, we took this idea even further. Instead of simply flipping a switch or hanging our phones off to a confidant at the corner store, we explored sealing off our entire digital footprint with a 3D-printed aluminum Faraday cage. By blocking all wireless emissions, a Faraday cage is one of the only surefire ways to ensure your phone is safe from transmittance.

We added a touch of personalization to the design—the grids of the 3D printed file mirror the New York City map. By going off the grid before setting out to explore New York, you reclaim your anonymity, commit yourself to living in the moment, and immerse yourself in the serendipity of the city.

Found

You can find virtually any tidbit of information with a few taps: movie times, breaking news, the exact Pantone shade of a celebrity’s jacket. Our second design concept, Found, explores how we might reintroduce discovery and spontaneity into our daily lives.

As a nod to the legacy of open-world gaming maps, the app—affectionately named Streetheart—begins with the map of New York City shrouded in darkness. As the user moves, the app reveals the paths of the city that you explore, block by block, avenue by avenue.

By illustrating how much of New York City is (always) left to uncover, Streetheart encourages you to leave your comfort zone and embrace the curiosity and spontaneity that made the city magic in the first place. The percentage discovered feature reminds you of the scale of New York City and humbles even the most high-handed New Yorkers.

We pushed things a little further and coded a web prototype to test our concept out in the Big Apple. In just an hour and fifteen minutes, we discovered beautiful brownstones in Boerum Hill, a bustling downtown Brooklyn, an unusual park hidden near the Manhattan Bridge, and so much more. Yet a quick peek at the app revealed we only discovered 0.6225% of New York City.

In a city fueled by efficiency and hustle, we’re fascinated by choices that help us slow down, even if it means intentionally designing not for convenience, but inconvenience. We hope that Lost and Found allow you to lose yourself in New York City—and by doing so, rediscover the city and each other.

Taking the subway in the wrong direction for many stops; getting blindsided by the unimaginable smells emerging from the MTA; living among 8.6 million people but feeling completely anonymous, even isolated. These are some of the experiences IDEO’s New York community described when asked what living in the Big Apple is like.

Like a gawky teen who acts like a kid but resembles an adult, many Internet-born organizations find, a few years in, that their mode of operation no longer matches their growing size. The acceptable norms of a small startup—like decision-making around a shared kitchen table—actually prevent these companies from continuing to innovate once they’ve scaled. As a result, they begin to plateau and become susceptible to disruption and competition.

Often, companies in this teen stage seek guidance in areas they've neglected during their initial growth spurt. As one CEO recently shared, she needed help “jumping the S-curve.” The following three principles can enable digitally-native companies to keep thriving and achieve sustainability—in other words, help the skinny kid fill out and establish the traits needed to become a grown-up.

Rethink team structures and incentives

When startups consist of just a few people in a room, there’s no separation between disciplines: An engineer sits next to the head of sales, who sits across from a project manager and shares a file cabinet with a designer. But as the company scales, teams often become siloed into discrete functions. When disparate groups are responsible for specific parts of the customer experience, it becomes fragmented.

In a project IDEO led with an online retail startup that had fallen into this trap, we noticed that the front-end engineers and UX designers—who were responsible for the website search interface—rarely communicated with the back-end engineers and data analysts. Because of this, the front-end team designed user search experiences that weren’t even feasible from a back-end point of view. In addition to this being a massive waste of time and effort, it represented a misalignment between teams working at the same company, on the same product, and serving the same customer. If internal teams are disconnected, the customer experience will inevitably be disconnected as well.

For organizations struggling with this, there’s an opportunity to reorganize teams around moments along the customer journey (account creation, browse or search, checkout, and so on), rather than function. Eventually, that misaligned company created an interdisciplinary search team that included designers, data analysts, account managers, customer success associates, and others. This resulted in a more consistent and functional search experience for users, which in turn led to more people finding, and ultimately buying, products on their site.

The customer experience needs to guide not only team organization, but also incentives. In early start-ups, individuals and teams are rewarded for speed and execution: The quicker features are released, the better. But this mindset only reinforces the tendency for teams to evolve into myopic silos, unable to grasp the holistic experience beyond their discrete function.

When reorganizing their teams around the customer journey, that online retail startup established new incentives and shared success metrics that encouraged the newly-formed groups to work together and focus on the customer experience, rather than speed and quantity. The new interdisciplinary search team’s incentives were tied to a customers’ success in finding the item they were looking for on the website or app.

Dig deeper into data

Internet-born startups tend to have an abundance of engineers who are experts at collecting and leveraging data. They relentlessly A/B test the product and often immediately take action based on the results: If button A is generating more clicks than button B, it’s best to go with the former.

This is where teenage companies take a wrong turn. Engineering teams rely on their same tried-and-true data and analysis methods used when they were chasing the next round of funding. But now that the company has matured and needs to become profitable, it must change its habits to match this new stage of growth. Continuing to blindly A/B test without considering the implications leads to over-optimizing their current product features. This results in feature bloat and prevents innovation beyond a hallmark product or technology.

Instead of reinforcing old habits, it’s useful for startups to ask why something is occuring—why is this button outperforming the other? Many teams skip this question. As a comparison, during qualitative research, we ask target customers open-ended questions to learn why they think, feel, or behave in a certain way. For example, a shopper may share that they prefer organic produce. But learning why—perhaps due to climate concern or wanting the best for their kids—unlocks the potential to understand how an online grocery delivery startup could innovate.

Rather than merely pushing organic strawberries on the homepage or building an “organic” product filter, the company can use this valuable knowledge to grow beyond their primary offering. They can consider questions like: Do environmental activists or health-conscious parents represent new or existing customer segments? How might we meaningfully shift our product or create a new one to serve them? The key is to follow data collection and A/B testing with qualitative research aimed at understanding why. Engineers will need to push beyond their comfort zone to ask these questions. Companies may also consider bringing qualitative research specialists onto engineering teams to help build this capacity.

For Internet-born startups, data can’t be only an optimization tool. It’s also a catalyst for deeper qualitative understanding and continuous innovation.

Embrace a new mode of leadership

When founders are used to working alongside engineers and designers, they often hesitate or struggle to step into the level of leadership required to run a company with hundreds of employees. The skills that enable someone to build a company are not always the same as those required to lead a mature and rapidly growing organization.

During a meeting with a digitally-native healthcare startup, the founder asked for a pause so he could weigh in on new illustration icons. By this point, the company had 200 employees and the founder had hired over a dozen senior leaders with deep experience managing teams and scaling mid-sized startups. But because of this CEO’s tendency to do the work (which he embraced when the startup was 10 people) rather than delegate the work, he wasn’t empowering this new talent do their jobs. Letting go, trusting others, and delegating can be particularly difficult and humbling for founders of companies in this adolescent period. But it’s essential to make these shifts for the startup to flourish.

This same founder also shared that communicating the company’s vision and big decisions to employees felt like more of a challenge than it used to. When an organization can fit inside a conference room, leaders have a simpler time with this: Small startup teams are often made up of generalists with an “all hands on deck” mindset. But with hundreds of specialists on board, CEOs must translate their strategy to multiple teams with differing expertise.

Each quarter, the founder began holding meetings with each team in addition to town halls with the entire company. Rethinking one’s communication strategy at this adolescent stage can create more of an opportunity for understanding, connection, and inspiration. This transition also reflects a new level of maturity for a leader.

Digitally-native startups initially grow and succeed due to a certain set of conditions: They’re technologically innovative, data-driven, and have leaders who can inspire early hires and investors and build from the ground up. But when these startups scale, those core conditions no longer do the trick. Evolving from a rambunctious, scrappy teen to a promising adult requires a new willingness to centralize around the customer experience, think before acting, and reach a higher level of leadership.

Special thanks to Mike Stringer, Jill Levinsohn, and Deb de Vries for their contribution to this article.

Visuals by Kate Bingaman-Burt

Startups enjoy a reputation as the bright young things of the business world. They’re digitally fluent, small enough to be nimble, and new enough to be free of legacy baggage. Yet many successful startups face a rude awakening if they make it past infancy and scale to hundreds of employees. While success is exciting, puberty is awkward. These principles can help.

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.

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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.