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Season 2 Episode 22: From Ownership to Influence: Rethinking UX Leadership

From Ownership to Influence: Rethinking UX Leadership

In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino is joined by veteran UX strategist Paul Boag to explore what’s holding design organizations back—and how to fix it. With over 30 years of experience across sectors, Paul shares why small, underfunded UX teams must stop trying to “own” design and instead empower others through training, standards, and strategic leadership. From breaking down the four pillars of a strong UX practice to candid takes on titles, culture change, stakeholder influence, and democratizing design, this conversation is packed with perspective and practical advice.

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Key Takeaways

  • Design isn’t yours to own: UX teams need to stop trying to control everything and instead focus on enabling others across the organization to improve user experience.
  • Democratizing UX scales your impact: A Center of Excellence (CoE) model empowers non-designers to participate in UX while design leaders maintain standards and guidance.
  • Perfection is the enemy of progress: You can’t scale UX by insisting on pixel-perfect quality. Impact at scale comes from breadth, not control.
  • Influence comes from empathy: We do user research for customers, but not for stakeholders. Understand your colleagues like users to gain traction.
  • Start with working policies: You may not be able to enforce org-wide UX standards—but you can set boundaries for how you work effectively.
  • Design leaders must become culture hackers: Changing design maturity in an organization means shifting how teams think, work, and value UX over time.

Resources & Links

Chapters

  • 00:00 – Introductions and background
  • 05:45 – Designer Is the Problem Word
  • 08:36 – UX Teams Are Too Small to Own Everything
  • 10:58 – Democratizing UX at Oxford
  • 13:09 – Letting Go of Pixel Perfection
  • 17:02 – 4 Pillars of UX Leadership
  • 23:51 – From Working Policies to Org-wide Standards
  • 26:57 – Tailor UX Messaging to Stakeholders
  • 29:49 – Culture Hacking Through UX
  • 32:26 – Resources & Where to Find Paul

Tags

#UXLeadership, #UXDesign, #DemocratizingUX, #DesignOps, #CenterOfExcellence, #ProductDesign, #DesignCulture, #UXMaturity, #FuzzyMath, #UXPodcast, #DigitalProductDesign

Transcript

Mark Baldino (00:04.814)
Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also a co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer-grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I speak with Paul Bogue, who is an expert in design leadership and UX strategy. Paul has over 31 years of experience working with clients such as University of Oxford, UNICEF, and Puebla. He is an author of six books. A respected presenter, podcast host, does trainings. He's been doing the internet from the days we moved on from interactive CD-ROMs. And we've really kind of focused the conversation around some of the challenges that UX teams are currently facing, which is in a lot of cases small underfunded teams. Just, you know, why we even struggled with a call ourselves. We get pretty pointed at times in some areas that UX leaders are failing the moment and what they could do to better spread design.

And Paul explains in detail some of the pillars to a successful implementation of a UX organization, which is focused less on doing design. It's more democratizing design through setting up a center of excellence or COE. It's really a spirited conversation. And honestly, I think all of us have something to learn from Paul. So please enjoy the episode. Thank you for listening. And if you'd be so kind as to like or subscribe or share with your fellow designers.
Much appreciated.

Mark Baldino (00:01.794)
Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Boag (00:04.145)
Thank you very much for inviting me. It's really good to be on. I was very chuffed when I got your email through. Chuffed. That's a very, I've gone very British on you already haven't I? Sorry about that.

Mark Baldino (00:08.141)
That's it.

Mark Baldino (00:14.726)
So, do you want translate that? Maybe it sounds like you're super angry or...

Paul Boag (00:17.815)
Chuffed? No, chuffed is kind of pleased, surprised and pleased.

Mark Baldino (00:25.71)
Yeah, it's got a little, I was gonna say, Chet has a little bit of like, not sarcasm, but humor to it in terms of like, yeah, it you smile.

Paul Boag (00:31.123)
Everything, everything, everything we say has got a little bit of humor and sarcasm to it. So that's about right, yeah.

Mark Baldino (00:35.479)
You

Mark Baldino (00:40.172)
right on. Well, appreciate your time today. Excited for our conversation. Maybe, know, as sort of as the tradition, if you can give folks a little bit about your background and kind of career trajectory to where you are.

Paul Boag (00:59.467)
Yeah, so I mean, I've worked in the industry about 30 years. So a good old length of time. I started before the web was a thing, working on multimedia CD-ROMs back in the day with IBM. then because I was the...

intern basically back in those days when this thing called the web came along, which was really boring. It was like gray background, no image tag, you know, terrible stuff. Of course, they gave it to the intern to do. And so that's how I got into the web. I did coding and design. My training was in design. But obviously, to begin with, you did everything yourself. And then over the years, I specialized in

UI design. I worked for a dot com startup for three years and that was an absolute roller coaster of an experience. Then from there, set up an agency where we moved progressively into UX. And then eventually, I stepped back from the day to day running of the agency, the agency still going.

And I now am a UX and design leadership consultant, basically. So when I say UX, I mean, in the broadest definition of it, not in the kind of UI UX interchangeable design thing, but you know, looking at the end to end experience.

Mark Baldino (02:37.9)
Okay, that was gonna ask you to define. So more end to end user customer journey and all the touch points, not just the very, not as narrow, but not just like that interaction.

Paul Boag (02:43.883)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (02:48.447)
Yeah, I mean, take when I talk about UX, I'm talking about it in terms of Donald Norman's original definition of it, which is that there's a lot more to the experience than the product. So, you know, at the moment, we're seeing a lot of UI designers who had branded themselves as UX designers now branding themselves as product designers.

And actually I feel like that's probably a good thing. Everybody's going, UX is dead. But I think a lot of people that were saying they were UXers weren't really in the kind of true sense of the word. And I think that's because we undervalued UI designers. We treat it, know, treat it, just, they're just coloring it in. When of course UI designers is a whole specialism in its own right. So.

you know, it's good to see that kind of realignment that's going on at the moment. But I don't think it means UX is dead. I just think it's returning to what it really was, which is looking at the experience holistically and in its entirety and everything from, you know, mean, Don Norman was at Apple at the time. So, you know, it's everything as we know from Apple, from the unboxing experience through to your customer support and everything else, you know.

Mark Baldino (04:16.174)
Right? Now we, so I started Fuzzy Math in 2009. And at the time, my titles had almost been exclusively Information Architect, even until like 2006, 2007. And we had this debate as to whether we should call ourselves a UX agency because the term was pretty, you know, was nascent and not everybody knew what it meant. And I had come up from my first job in 2000 was

Paul Boag (04:27.486)
Alright

Mark Baldino (04:45.716)
as an information architect, we had like a product planning group and we talked about product design a lot. And I always felt like product design kind of incorporate, what it helped me do is differentiate that I don't work on marketing sites or maybe heavy content sites. I can work in that environment. There's definitely UX work to be done. But like I design interactive experiences and product felt a little bit more comfortable. But of course we went with UX and then kind of rode that wave.

Paul Boag (05:00.374)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (05:14.69)
And it's only now that I feel like we, as you said, we talk more about being product design. I think as consultants, the consultants consultancy world and agency world maybe still uses UX, but if you're in house, you're definitely a product design. I feel like the role is now product design. And it's just, it's an interesting shift. There's always carving out of titles and what's my title and what does it mean and playing around with words and you know,

Paul Boag (05:29.621)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (05:43.8)
Trying to carve out our spaces, what I'm trying to say.

Paul Boag (05:45.505)
See, what I find really interesting about this subject is that everybody's focusing on the first part of the job title, UI designer, UX designer, product designer. I think a lot of our problems, if we have problems, which I think we do as an industry, come from the second part, from the designer part of that. Because I think no matter how hard we try,

I think designer is always seen as a colorer in a, you know, someone that colors in or certainly someone who is tactical, implementing wireframes, implementing, you know, interfaces, that kind of thing. And that's why I call myself a user user experience strategist, right?

because I actually think there's a lot of baggage, there shouldn't be, but there is a lot of baggage that goes with that term designer. So yeah, that's why I've kind of shifted away. don't think it's, you know, for me, for me, it works like this, right? The UI designer is interested in the interface. The product designer is interested in the product.

The UX designer is interested in the experience. And it's as simple as that. It's not actually that complicated, but a lot of, you know, we're changing our job titles all the time, primarily in a search for respect. And I think the limitations of respect in many ways comes from the word designer. But, you know, I don't know, it's a difficult one.

Mark Baldino (07:33.219)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (07:35.895)
There's a part of me wants to fight for that term and what that term should really mean, but you know.

Mark Baldino (07:40.482)
Yeah, I feel that. Well, and I also don't want to lose it in certain respects. Hey, I just literally half an hour ago, I had a conversation with a client of mine of what is strategy? What does strategy mean? What does it mean within the organization? So you all of a sudden start, I start calling my team UX strategists. Then they're sort of like, well, what is the output at the end of the day? And the tactical output of design, I don't want people to run away from because I think it's a powerful tool in the arsenal to be able to.

Paul Boag (07:46.604)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (07:59.831)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (08:08.92)
take somebody's words or someone's strategy, whether it's themselves doing that and moving forward and actually building something tangible out of it, even if it's just a wire frame, right? The idea, the difference of describing a house versus doing a mock-up of it or a sketch or a blueprint, people see that they can put themselves in that space. They can see how they're going to live in that space and the same thing happens. Nothing is more visceral than showing a picture to a client and getting that response.

Paul Boag (08:36.177)
And I agree with that, but in the same breath, I don't think producing those design assets, if we want to call them that, is necessarily the exclusive responsibility or right of a designer to do. So I'll tell you what I've been struggling with a lot is that

I go into organizations and almost without exception, the UX function within those organizations, whether you call it designer, strategist, whatever you want to call it, but that UX function is massively under-resourced. And the same is true for product designers as well.

And, you know, but especially UX because UX is so incredibly broad. You're looking at everything from marketing material to the site performance to the packaging of the product. You know, it is such a big brief. And so, you know, ideally in an agency world, you might have one designer for every two developers.

very rarely will find that in-house. Those kinds of ratios are very, very unusual. And so you've got these teams of designers or teams of UX people massively under-resourced and stretched way too thin. So increasingly, the way that I'm solving that problem within organizations, and I'm in the process of, well, I'm a couple of years into doing this now with

University of Oxford is, okay, we need to let go of that being the only people that produce these design assets, wireframes, mockups, interfaces, etc. And instead effectively become a center of excellence that teaches and empowers people across the organization to start improving the user experience because there's just not enough of us to do it.

Paul Boag (10:58.293)
And so they are the ones out there doing testing. They are the people doing user research. They're the people doing design, really. But what we do as a centralized team is ensure the standards, teach people how to do it well, offer consultative strategy services, put in place good tools to empower other people. So it's about really...

the democratization of strategy, or sorry, the democratization of UX more than it is about the implementation.

Mark Baldino (11:31.47)
Just, all right.

Yeah. No, I like that. was going to ask you if you use the term democratization of it. And I feel like the tools have come around to this way of being. So we worked with GE Healthcare's Center of Excellence in probably 2010, 2011 they were standing this up and they had a very, very early design system. But the tools kind of weren't there. And now we have a language.

I think we're better about describing the standards and governance of those. And we have tools that support it. And AI is sort of changing that as well in terms of where I think that'll be in two or three years. I say this probably every podcast episode. If you want to move pixels in three years, your job's going to be pretty tough. Just moving pixels from scratch is going to kind of go away. But we've already seen designers embrace design systems, which give them a...

Paul Boag (12:15.52)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (12:34.604)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (12:34.794)
startup and so I do kind of feel like the tools and the processes have come along that we can you can more easily scale a coe or maybe not scale scale ux across a coe yeah yeah how do you keep the quality level up right like if i talk to somebody who spent their entire career whether that's two years or 20 doing let's say ui design pure ui design like pixel perfect a high level of quality

Paul Boag (12:44.619)
Yeah, the democratisation of UX, yeah.

Mark Baldino (13:03.488)
How do you keep that level of quality up for people that aren't technically trained in it?

Paul Boag (13:09.173)
Yeah, and this is the most common question. And I think the answer is one that a lot of UX designers or designers will really struggle with, which is you don't, right? You're never going to ensure the same quality as a professional UI designer. If you could just teach, I don't know, my wife how to do my job.

with a bit of training and a bit of, you know, the right tools and stuff, then really that'd be quite demoralizing, it? You know, they're never gonna be as good as you are. But the trade-off is although the quality will drop in any one individual interaction, the breadth of work being done will increase. So in other words, instead of...

you working on 10 % of the experience, okay, and doing that to 80 % of quality, because, you know, nobody's perfect, right? Let's be generous. Let's say we get it 90 % quality, right? By democratizing it, that quality might drop to 50%, but you're now affecting 100 % of the experience across the entire organization. And more than that,

you're affecting elements of the experience that you as a designer have never traditionally got to touch. Things like the call center that takes customer queries. mean, take for example, my EarPods, these ones that I'm wearing right now, arrived today from Apple, okay? Because my previous pair broke, okay? And that entire experience

has been so carefully crafted by Apple and I know, know, Apple are in my bad books at the moment over, know, liquid design or whatever bullshit they're coming up with, but set that aside, you know.

Mark Baldino (15:19.15)
That's it. We could come back in for another episode and talk about liquid design.

Paul Boag (15:22.247)
Yeah, there's a you could do a whole episode just on that. But their experience of that was was absolutely superb. That support experience and it involved multiple teams across the organization. There was no user interface in that entire experience. Right. I guess you could say the chat app where I talked to support was a user experience. But beyond that, it was the box that arrived with a nice label. They even give you a bit of sticky

take to seal the return box and, you know, and everything is so beautifully crafted as an experience. Those kinds of things we can now impact as user experience professionals if we just let go of the user interface and our desire to hold on and control every aspect of that experience, you know? So you don't maintain the quality, but you improve the overall experience.

Mark Baldino (16:17.646)
Yeah, I like that, and I think you're right that designers who see their value in pixel precision and in that like maybe feeling like they can't... everything has to be perfect. I don't know if it's always perfection, but really, really perfect. That they're... to ask them to step outside and think about that larger, more holistic impact that they can have by democratizing design.

If everyone worries about quality, and that's kind of the first question, what's the flip side of that? You're setting these up and you're implementing, what are people's blind spots? What aren't they thinking about that end up being like stumbling blocks towards implementation of a COE?

Paul Boag (17:02.359)
I mean, there's quite a lot. mean, I see that a UX design role really is fourfold. There are four pillars of work that we should be doing. And none of those are interface, right? Well, one could be argued to be, but we'll come to that in a One is we should be offering services to other parts of the organization, and those should be strategy services.

So initial project assessments, for example, will, if somebody's proposing creating a new product or adding new features, what's the chances of user adoption? What's the chances that the experience will be good? That kind of assessment work. We can, as part of our consultancy work, we can do coaching. We can help with strategies, you know, consultative services, basically. The second area that we should be looking at

is providing people with training. So equipping them, how to do a five second test, how to do facilitated usability testing, know, that kind of thing. The third area is resources. This is where things like your design system comes in, right? That enables people to quickly create interfaces. This is where you, you know, you've got an app.

that people can use if they want to do five second tests or first click tests. Here's your app, go and do some card sorting with this app. Here's the guide to do it, know, that kind of thing. And then finally, the final area is the standard operating procedures, policies, those kinds of things. And I would say if we are weakest in that area, we're terrible, okay? If you think about any other department in your organization,

Let's take for example, HR, okay? If I decide to bring a chainsaw into work and wave it around as certain high profile people have been known to do with the American government relatively recently, you know, that's a health and safety risk, okay? But I can't just turn around and say, well, that's HR's problem. I have a responsibility, okay?

Paul Boag (19:25.567)
because they have set up standard operating procedures and policies that say you're not allowed to wave a chainsaw around at work. But we don't do that. We don't say, you know, I'm sorry, but you know, our policy is that every stakeholder has to do two hours of, spend two hours with users in the last six weeks if they want to be a stakeholder in the project.

by the way, that's a real policy for the government digital service here in the UK. So, you know, I would say we don't leverage all of the power that's available to us, you know, so that's another area. So those four pillars, you know, I would say the heart of it.

Mark Baldino (20:06.06)
Interesting.

Mark Baldino (20:09.804)
Yeah, no, I like that. Thank you for breaking that down. think. Do you know, I'll ask you, do you think that there is a issue with how much influence UX uses the broad term has is that like and that we feel and that's reality. So my initial response is we're going to create. A rule here which says that key stakeholders need to be involved at this level.

with users to understand what they're going through, to empathize with them, to help build digital products and services that meet their needs. Like that all sounds well and good. It's nice to say we're going to democratize things until it becomes somebody else's job. Like what's that positioning battle? What's the influence matrix like in organizations? You're talking about, you know, large organizations. So like what's the reality there?

Paul Boag (21:03.081)
I think the biggest problem is that people try and ask for too much too quickly. so, you know, what, what typically happens is that, you know, the UX team basically go to senior management and they have a good winch. Nobody's listening to us, you know, we don't have enough resources. we don't have a seat at the table and you just sound like a petulant child. and so it's hardly surprising that

management pushback. Okay. And so you often see a scenario where you get caught in this catch 22 that you can't demonstrate the value of UX because you're not set up to succeed. But on the other hand, you can't succeed because you don't have the value in the kind of profile to be able to do it and etc.

So the answer is you have to start small. It has to be initially about doing what you can within the constraints and constantly pushing the edge of that. So let's go back to policies and procedures. It will be very hard for most people at the moment to turn around in their organization and say, I'm sorry, head of marketing, right? Who is three levels senior than you? That, you know, you can't be a stakeholder in this project because

you haven't spent two hours with users in the last six weeks, right? You would get fired. But what you can do is you can start with working what I call working policies. That's kind of an organization policy. That's something that's got to be agreed from an organization level. You're not going to get there overnight. But you can start with working policies and working policies are basically I

do I to do my job to do the job you have asked me to do, I need these certain things in place, right? So for example, the head of marketing can't say to you, I want you to design this website in Microsoft Paint, right? That would be unreasonable. So you can set certain policies about how you were. for me to actually to, you know, to produce this design for you.

Paul Boag (23:24.255)
I have to be able to validate it with end users. Otherwise, I cannot, you know, it's a waste of my time working on this project. Okay. So, so you can begin to introduce those, what I call working policies where, where, you know, you're simply defining how you operate. I need this information from you before I can do my job. I need to do these actions to do my job properly.

So that's where you start on that side of things.

Mark Baldino (23:51.778)
Right. And do you advocate for identifying the risks if that's not like, well, I can't do my job. Here's the risks of if we do it this way, like that sort of, or is that a little too...

Paul Boag (24:04.317)
Yeah, so that depends on the type of organization you work for. Right. So if you're working for a large, well established leader in the field, right. So, you you mentioned GE, I mentioned Oxford University, these are well established, big organizations. Absolutely talk about risk, right? Talk about risk, but go further than that. Talk about danger.

Mark Baldino (24:26.936)
Yep. Yep.

Paul Boag (24:33.877)
Right? If we don't do things properly, because that's what standard operating procedures and policies basically are about. They're risk management, risk mitigation tactics. Right? So what you do is you terrify people. You you say, you say, well, if we don't do this validation, you know, your ass is exposed to the world and this will come back to bite you. You could be open for accessibility, you know.

Mark Baldino (24:47.886)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (25:00.887)
be sued for accessibility, you could be doing this. Fear is a huge motivator in larger, well-established organizations. However, if you're dealing with a younger startup, someone that's hungry to gain kind of reputation in the sector, is trying to grow, know, trying to grab market share, that kind of stuff, it's all about the opportunity there, right? If we can validate this design, then we might be able, we could

you know, increased market share or stakeholder value, you know, or various, you know, kind of grabbing, growing those kinds of things, all opportunity focus. But the other thing as well is that we also need to tailor how we talk about UX and how we talk about these things for the audience that we're talking to. Because don't talk about the user experience. Nobody cares about the user experience, right? It, you know,

They care about, and actually even talking about, especially in large organizations, even talking about the benefit that UX is gonna provide to the business is gonna fall on deaf ears. What you need to be talking about is how the things you want to do, whether it be introducing a policy, doing some testing, whatever it is, how it helps the person that you're talking to.

So if I'm talking to the head of marketing, I will talk about how my work can help customer retention. Well, no, I probably wouldn't talk about customer retention. That's more of a sales team thing. With marketing, I'll talk about word of mouth recommendation, right? Organic growth, know, better reviews, those kinds of things that helps with customer acquisition, because that's what they care about. That's what their quarterly targets are about, right? With sales, I'll talk about customer retention.

Mark Baldino (26:29.709)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (26:54.508)
Yep. Yep.

Paul Boag (26:57.591)
customer lifetime value, those kinds of things, because that's what sells. If I'm talking to a finance director, I'm talking about efficiencies, risk management, reduced development costs, those kinds of things. So you really have to tailor your message. And sorry, I've gone off on one now. But one last thing to add on that, while I'm ranting about it, is the other thing is, we don't put legwork in, right? We spend.

Mark Baldino (27:16.814)
You're good.

Paul Boag (27:26.027)
We're user experience professionals. We are obsessed about understanding our users. We do user research, we do user testing, we do user interviews. We, you know, we create personas of them. Do we do any of that with our colleagues? Hell no, right? You know, we don't bother to understand them. We don't understand their pain points, their questions, their tasks, their, all of those things that we put so much effort into with our end users. We don't do it with our stakeholders. If we did that, then we can motivate them.

You know, so that's my attitude.

Mark Baldino (27:57.644)
No, you, I'm glad you got there. I led you to my favorite point, which is stakeholder empathy mapping and stakeholder kind of understanding. And it really turns us, I think in a positive way. I don't mean this negatively. Like you are a sales person at this point. Like you need to build trust with the people you work with. You need to understand them as human beings. You need to understand what motivates them. I learned in the sales course, you're kind of trying to create a hook, which is like what's an acute pain somebody is feeling.

Paul Boag (28:02.044)
Hahaha

Paul Boag (28:13.323)
Yeah!

Paul Boag (28:26.741)
Yeah?

Mark Baldino (28:26.828)
where are they actually feeling that? And what does it mean for them? So if it's somebody's sales, they have a quarterly presentation or marketing, they have a quarterly presentation with their boss or with the board, and they're gonna present a bunch of marketing numbers and they're gonna be up the night before trying to figure out why maybe they didn't meet those numbers. And if you could speak to somebody's, you know, their acute pain in the moment, you can advocate in a way that that isn't process, process, process, this has to be the way, it's really, I'm gonna help you achieve.

I can be here to accelerate and help achieve your goals, director of marketing or development leader, something like that. So I'm glad you got there because I do think that is a very underutilized soft skill that I think a lot of designers or even leads have because they kind of feel like, well, I've been hired to implement a process at this organization and this organization is putting up A, B and C roadblocks for me to do that when the truth is like,

It's kind of your job to go around those roadblocks and figure that out. And it means different things at different organizations. Maybe you step into a well-oiled machine. They've hired you to be the director of UX and everything's going to be smooth. often more times than not, they're hiring you because they think they need it and they don't actually know what they need and they don't know how to implement it in the organization. And your job isn't just to implement the process, it's to figure out how do we implement this correctly in this particular.

Paul Boag (29:49.163)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. And that brings me on to another area, the fifth area, which I kind of left out because it's quite a wooly one and sounds a bit kind of pretentious. And that is, I think a big part of a UX leads role or design leads role is culture hacking. Because most organizations are not, certainly if they're more traditional organizations,

are just not very user focused. They're not very design focused. They lack maturity in that area. So a big part of the work that you need to be doing is subtly changing the culture of the organization. And that's through, that's still through the other four pillars. It's through education, providing resources, you know, all of the rest of it. But there is this kind of underlying thing about

raising the profile of UX, becoming a marketer and a salesperson, as you said, for UX and the benefits of UX across the organization. And a lot of the work I do these days, or as part of the UX strategy and leadership stuff I'm doing, is teaching people how you can gently shift a culture within an organization. Now, you're not going to shift the whole of the culture in somewhere like GE, but you can shift

bits of it that begin to build a cumulative effect and start to, you know, get a ball rolling. But that's a that's a whole nother conversation.

Mark Baldino (31:22.434)
Well, and I think it's, I think I agree with you and starting with culture is always kind of a challenge, right? I think your initial pillars, as you said, they work together, right? Even the governance piece or the kind of what set up some rules kind of components, they're gonna rely on you doing some handholding, some education, some offering of services, strategic value, setting up these systems. Here's what design has to offer.

Paul Boag (31:30.262)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (31:49.902)
We're kind of, you know, we're a collaborative group here. We're willing to offer you our services. It kind of is easier to get into the, here's maybe what would be a best practice if we want stakeholders involved. Here's now subtle ways to change culture. I think if you're on a culture changing mission and that's your first priority, you're gonna run into, you're gonna run into a bunch of challenges, but.

Paul Boag (32:11.243)
Yeah, it's not the thing you can, yeah, you're right. It's, you know, it's, and it shouldn't be the focus either. I think it's a happy result when you get further down the line, will begin, you'll begin to see those things.

Mark Baldino (32:26.926)
Well, maybe this is a good way to transition into, you mentioned these are areas you're helping folks, you've been kind enough to talk about kind of a current project you have. I know you have a podcast, you have a blog, you do speaking engagements, training. Like, first of all, where can people find you? And what's a good client for you? If somebody's listening to this, they're a designer product leader, they're an executive, and they're like, I'm struggling with this problem. I need to reach out to Paul. Feel free to give your pitch.

Paul Boag (32:55.831)
Do you know what? I'm beyond giving pictures. People will find me if they want to find me. I tell you what, let me, instead of me pimping myself, let me give your audience something that might help them. So if they go to boagworld.com, B-O-A-G world.com forward slash subscribe, you can find a email course that

Mark Baldino (32:59.822)
You

Mark Baldino (33:06.744)
Hmm.

Paul Boag (33:25.655)
comes out every week that goes through UX strategy and leadership piece by piece, little bit by little bit, all the way through all of the subjects we've talked about and a lot more. Also, if you sign up for that, you get a copy of all of my books pretty much. But the one that you might be most interested in is called User Experience Revolution, which is about how to begin to shift the culture within your organization.

you know, and just check that out because I think that's people are are fed up with sales pitches, but some useful resources that always go down well. So there you go.

Mark Baldino (34:04.782)
100%. I think the proof is in the content you'll be providing. Generous to offer all of that and pretty amazing and I think it'll be great for the audience. So, Paul, I just want to say thanks for your time today, sharing your background and your stories. And I just want to say I appreciate your passion of areas that I think UX is kind of failing or people are skipping or aren't putting in, as you said, sort of the hard work and the legwork to get the job done right. So, I just appreciate your time and energy and effort today.

Paul Boag (34:17.633)
No problem.

Paul Boag (34:34.055)
No problem, thanks for the invite and hopefully, hopefully we've inspired people a little bit.

Mark Baldino (34:40.654)
I think so. I'm gonna take it as we have. All right, thank you very much for your time.

Paul Boag (34:43.403)
Yeah.

Paul Boag (34:47.319)
All right.
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