https://youtu.be/GJUnqQFsdks
Mike Wittenstein is the founder of StoryMiners, a consulting firm in Atlanta, Georgia. They help businesses translate strategies into customer experiences. Previously, Mike was a media personality and spokesperson for IBM. We discuss how StoryMiners utilizes design to create value for customers and the frameworks behind their processes.
---
Experience Design with Mike Wittenstein
Our guest is Mike Wittenstein, who is the founder and managing partner of Story Miners. Story Miners in Atlanta, Georgia, what a great place to be on January 5th. It turns strategies into stories and experiences to be implemented at the human level. So, Mike will tell us a little bit about that. Previously, he was with IBM. He was the media personality and spokesperson on IBM for two years, and he helped IBM design McDonald's digital drive-thru and Wingate's deskless check-in. And prior to that in the 90s, he was the co-founder and CEO of one of the first digital communication agencies in the world called Delia. He's also a global speaker, a coach and facilitator. So welcome Mike to the show.
Thank you for having me, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here and I can't wait to see what unfolds.
It's fun to have you on the show. Mike, let's start with kind of the regular question. How do you get here? Tell us a little bit how you become an entrepreneur and how did your journey take you on this long and winding road?
You know, I had to write some notes because I knew that question was coming. And here are some of the things I've done since I was like nine years old, because that's when I had my first sales experience. You know, I did babysitting, yards, restaurants, manual labor, office labor. I worked as a travel agent, a multilingual guide, a teacher, a cabinet maker. And then I got serious, a consultant, a little bit of work in real estate, more management consulting, the digital agency that you mentioned, e-visionary for IBM. And now I'm a strategist and a designer. That's a lot of steps, but that's where I am today.
Yeah, but the last 20 years, you were pretty much doing story miners, right?
Yes, story miners is almost 20 years old. That's right. And IBM was a few years and the digital agency, was about eight years before that. So, you know, a respectable professional career.
I'm glad I'm where I am. Job jumping and job hopping all the time.
No, not at all. Not at all. That's a sport for the young.
That's right. Okay. So it's interesting because you started out as an entrepreneur, you did this digital agency, and then you went into IBM, which is like a big corporate job. And I almost said career, but you only were there for two years, and then you left and became an entrepreneur again. So tell us what happened there.
Well, one thing happened. The dot com became the dot bust, and everyone was out on the street. So I would have stayed longer, but, you know, it wasn't in the cards.
Okay, fair enough. So what did you actually learn at IBM that you could put to use in your entrepreneurial?
What a great question. I learned so many things about working with people about how business is done, about how promises are made and kept how to organize big things how to move fast. But the two things that I learned from two amazing people I've used forever since professionally. The first one was from one of my mentors, Steve Heckel, who was the director of central planning at IBM until he quit because he said central planning no longer works.
Made a big statement back then to Lou Gerstner, I believe. He wrote a book called Adaptive Enterprise, which is the actual mechanics of how to make a business agile. Now, we all know how to make a software department agile. You run sprints, you have reports, you have burndown sheets, but you can actually make an entire company work like a software team. He wrote the book on it and it's influenced my life greatly ever since. Steve is still with us, but he's retired. I also met Lou Carbone, the founder of Experience Engineering.
He taught me about customer experience design. An old ad guy, he figured out that it's the experience that someone has that creates value for them and also begets the cycle of word of mouth marketing. So he taught me how to design experiences. Steve taught me how to design the backend and I put those together. And what we do for clients today is help them make adjustments to both the front and the back end at the same time, because most companies don't do that.
They have a founder or a department head who's all about engineering or all about soft side communications and marketing, and they push hard and they try to get the other part of the business to work with them, but it's kind of like, you know, it doesn't work. It's like our House of Representatives and our Senate. It's like not designed to work together. But if you introduce the idea of an agile business and you make your experiences focused on customers, then you can get both parts to work together and you can create huge changes very quickly. So I've used that magic to create about $2 billion for clients in the last 25 years.
So, experience design, can you explain it to me a little bit how that works? So how do you design these experiences and what is the process there?
Okay, what's your background Steve? Are you an engineer? Are you a business guy?
I'm an accountant actually.
An accountant, okay, now I know how to talk to you. And is your audience similarly minded? You know?
Hopefully not.
Okay, all right.
So yeah, so I'm an accountant, turned banker, turned investment banker, entrepreneur, business coach. So I always had a longer mind in the road.
You're used to looking at the numbers. I get it. You want to see how things work. Okay. Thanks for letting me know about that. So experience design is the art of creating interactions with your customers that create value for everyone. When you go to Six Flags, which is an amusement, a theme amusement park, you go there for the rides. When you're waiting in line, you're standing. Sometimes you're standing in the sun.
Sometimes you have a handrail to hold on to and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you walk by smelly garbage and sometimes you don't. That's been my personal experience. Great company, lots of parks. I'm not complaining about that. I'm just drawing a comparison. Go to Disney World and compare the waiting experience. When you're waiting to go on Space Mountain, one of the signature rides that Disney World in Orlando opened with in 1971, you get an air conditioning waiting area.
You get themed entertainment, stories, movies, interactive exhibits, a stainless steel handrail that's smooth to the touch. You get more music. You get to see what other people are doing on the ride. That stuff didn't happen by accident. It wasn't like one person in the architecture team said, let's just do the line like that. It was the result of all kinds of people coming from sales, marketing, story, design, theater, electronics, mechanical, figuring out the best way to create an amazing experience because that's what the client's coming for.
Customers want a really good experience. So if you design it for them around their tastes and desires, they'll feel like they got a better value and they'll start telling stories about it. So there is an art to serving coffee like Starbucks versus getting it out of the convenience store automatic dispenser. That stuff is done on purpose.
Utilizing the principles of experience design involves creating customer interactions that generate value for both parties, fostering word-of-mouth marketing and long-term loyalty.Share on X
That feels different. Definitely. So how important is design? an entrepreneur and he told me about three or four years ago that design is becoming the thing and it's kind of becomes the primary market for people to actually purchase stuff if it's fair design and they are predisposed to buying it even if they don't know what it is like an iPad. So how does that really work with the design and how do companies design stuff, having design first and foremost in their mind?
I don't think that design is manipulative in its purest form. It's not like advertising, which is designed to sway people's decisions. Design is first and foremost a problem-solving tool. One of the oldest forms of design is architecture. When people in Egypt or in Central America 10,000 years ago had to figure out what to do with their space and what that space would do for them, they found the highest and best use in architecture. That's one of the main themes.
Design is about making sure that everybody gets more of what they want. It's one of the few tools that we have that lets you optimize for everyone rather than someone. Let's compare design to the game of Monopoly. Have you ever played that? You know, the board game where you go around and pay rents and stuff. To win Monopoly, everybody else has to lose completely. The end state of the game is one person owns everything. It's interesting. That's the design of the game.
Better design, not that Monopoly is designed poorly, but good design would be what my daughter figured out when she was in fourth grade. We were playing a game and everybody had built hotels on all of their properties. There was nothing left on the board. So it was just a guessing game to find out who would run out of cash first based on the luck of their roll. My daughter said, Daddy, why don't we stop paying rent and just go visit each other? Different end state for the game.
Wouldn't it be nice to live in a great hotel and just enjoy that? So design is about figuring out what systems need, what businesses need, and what people need. It's about finding the logical, the profitable, the valuable, and the profoundly human balance that makes it all work. Design is used for complex things like cities, ecosystems, HVAC, defense missile systems. It can be used for ordering a cup of Starbucks.
