The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Welcome to The Third Growth Option, where we're not just talking about growth—we're making it our mission.
At TGO, we understand that success isn't a fixed destination; it's an ongoing journey with twists, turns, and unexpected detours that take us to new places. Those moments are our Third Growth Options, where we throw away binary choices to create our own path.
Hosted by Benno Duenkelsbuehler, O.G #GrowthNerd, we're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside of business, one episode at a time. From humble beginnings to Fortune 500 companies, our stories are not just about business—it's about the relentless pursuit of greatness in every aspect of life.
With each episode, we don’t just want to share insights—we want to empower business owners across all frontiers to carve their own path to success, their way.
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The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Designing & Prototyping Growth Models, with Jonah Burlingame
Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ?
In this episode, I sit down with design strategist Jonah Burlingame to tackle the art (and challenges) of executing successful strategies in digital product development. Here are the key takeaways:
- Strategy Execution is Tough: With only 56% of corporate strategies being successfully implemented, Jonah shares actionable advice on overcoming common pitfalls that derail big ideas, using insights from his experience with Fortune 100 companies and research from Harvard Business Review.
- The 369 Approach: Developed with a multinational bank, this structured framework evaluates projects through three lenses—desirability, viability, and feasibility—ensuring alignment with user needs and market realities from start to finish.
- Blending Disciplines: Jonah explains how combining design thinking, lean innovation, and business strategy leads to user-centric products with a forward-looking edge.
- AI in Action: A case study featuring a fitness company shows the transformative power of AI chatbots and computer vision in creating engaging, tech-driven user experiences.
Whether you’re navigating strategy execution or exploring the future of AI in digital products, this conversation is packed with insights to help you drive innovation and deliver real impact.
Always growing.
Benno Duenkelsbuehler
CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN
Hey, welcome to the Third Growth Officer podcast, where we talk about all things growth, yes, even and especially those hard parts where you shed some skin and pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Hey, I'm Benno Dunkelspüler, growth sherpa and OG hashtag growth nerd. We're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside the business, one TGO episode at a time.
Speaker 2:All right, hi, I'm Jonah Burlingame. I'm a design strategist from San Francisco.
Speaker 1:I am so excited to have you on the Third Growth Option Podcast, john. You and I have gotten to know each other really over the summer in the last several months, introduced by. Who did introduce us? Was it Marvin Marvin?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe it was Marvin.
Speaker 1:I never know how to say his last name yeah, dejean I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe. I don't think we've ever gotten that far where I've had to pronounce his name.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's been on our podcast. So welcome to Third Growth Option Podcast. I am Benno, the host, and one of the ways that you actually introduced yourself to me a couple months ago, which I found really helpful to kind of you said, I went from being a designer who's pretty good at strategy work to being a strategist who happens to also do design work and happens to know about design. But you're really you are a strategist, I think first a designer, an entrepreneur, and then you're also an artist and a musician. So you know you're the coolest cat on the block because you've got pictures with guitars. So I I don't have pictures of myself with guitars, but uh, you, you have solved throughout your career and and and now doing it on your own. For how many years have you been doing it? Have you been doing more project than W2 work?
Speaker 2:Oh, since 2008,. I went out on my own. Okay, same as me.
Speaker 1:I started in 2009. You've been doing it for 16. I've been doing it for 15 years but you solve some really tricky product-slash-channel-slash-business-slash-design-slash-technology problems channel slash, business slash, design slash technology problems for fortune 100 companies and finance banks, technology companies, non-profits, so smaller organizations as well. Is that a pretty good introduction overview of? Am I missing? Is there something that I screwed up? And giving people a sense of who is Jonah?
Speaker 2:No, that's accurate. That's accurate. The one thing I may clarify, because the challenge I often have when I get outside of my bubble in tech is that product to me and in my cohorts, is digital product right and not physical product? Is digital product right and not physical product? So that's the one thing I'd like to clarify for general audiences is that I'm really working at the intersection of the digital or logged-in experience or application. Anything complex like that is perhaps beyond a marketing website.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, no, that's an important distinction. Yep, yep, no, that's an important distinction. So let's think about you. Know how can we help the listener and the viewer here today understand this messy world, from concept ideation to talking about what is the future ideal state, to actually creating the future ideal state? Right, and you shared a document with me in which you talk about the main reasons why strategies fail. Talk about why strategies fail, because I think that's a really important fact in life, that there's more good.
Speaker 2:There's more ideas than well-executed ideas Agreed and you know to describe that. I think I'll go back a little bit to that you mentioned. You know, when we talked about being a designer who was strategic to being a strategist who can design. That was really one of the pivotal moments in my career where I was working on as a designer on increasingly more complex like platform design initiatives and so forth. Companies would pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time for my expertise to lead a design team to actually research and create things that the market wanted, and what would happen time and time again is that they would fail to get to market or, by the time they got to market, they were so deluded that they weren't really solving the customer's problems anymore, and I came a little bit disenchanted by that whole process and was wondering well, maybe that's the problem I need to solve is how do companies get big ideas to market without them being crushed under their own weight?
Speaker 1:And when you say diluted right, the idea gets diluted. At Pottery Barn we used to call that a horse. I'm sorry. A camel is a horse designed by a committee, right yeah. Right approval and committee approval and gets two humps and five legs and it becomes this unrecognizable thing that's no longer a horse.
Speaker 2:Is that what you?
Speaker 1:mean by delusion.
Speaker 2:It could be a bit of that. It just changes to where it's unrecognizable from the beginning. Or it could be that it just gets winnowed down to being something that enters the market that actually misses the mark entirely, because it was not what they intended. In fact, I've found that most companies' strategies seem to be on the mark. I mean, I rarely have an issue with the big overarching strategy. It's that execution part of it that I have found time and time again really being the key factor in the success of that strategy. And so you know the when I started to look at uh research done by, you know, harvard business review and the uh economic, uh uh intelligence unit and the PMI institution, um, they had done a lot of these types of studies about the execution of corporate strategies, and I think the best number I saw was that only about 56% of corporate strategies get executed properly.
Speaker 1:Right, that's the best number I saw that's a very benign, properly right. That's the best number I saw. That's a very benign, optimistic number, Right, I mean that's the best number.
Speaker 2:Some of them were like 10% and so forth, just depending on where you look. But that really was an eye-opening moment for me to say, yes, these studies actually are parallel to what I've witnessed in the work that I do and I said well, you know, that's the problem I can solve if I utilize a designer's approach to understand the audiences, because the audience is no longer just the end user of a particular digital product, it's all of the stakeholders, all the decision makers within an organization. So, to answer your first question here, which is what are those reasons why those fail? I really did a deep dive on that and came up with really just three things that are critical to effective strategy, and the one is that you have to be able to communicate those strategies effectively across the organization. Right, and typically there's just lack of communication within an organization like that.
Speaker 1:And that also means, if I can interrupt for a second on the communication piece. So one of the three reasons strategies fail to be executed is poor communication, and one thing that I find is that different departments and department heads and CEOs communicate differently. Right, there's left brain and right brain there is. You know, creative people tend to communicate more visually and you know, accountants tend to communicate in columns and rows, excel sheets. So everybody communicates differently.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And a strategy has to have buy-in across the organization, left brain and right brain doesn't it, it does, it does.
Speaker 2:And understanding the various lenses of the decision makers, which leads to pillar number two and that alignment of stakeholders. You need multiple stakeholders to approve something that is large enough and maybe it's across budgets or requires resources across different functional units. You need that alignment. They need to be able to. Each functional unit needs to be able to see themselves contributing to that vision. And then you know, lastly, it's being able to translate the strategy itself into actionable steps. Right, how do you go from something that is somewhat abstract into something concrete and that is, um, there's, there's a kind of a hidden gap and you and I talked about this as a hidden gap in organizations between the instinct of strategic leadership and the business as usual teams internally that are saying great, give us requirements and we'll build it. And there's a gap there. You know, some people think it's just we'll take my idea and take it to market, but there are so many steps in between that a lot of organizations aren't, they're not set up to be able to fill that gap. Set up to be able to fill that gap. They can't interrogate the idea, the original concept, in a way that actually proves that there is an opportunity there or not, and just being able to take the time to actually consider those things, which I consider myself, I guess, a practical innovation consultant, if you will.
Speaker 2:I believe in the opportunities that emerging technologies often provide. Those are the disruptors of business and have been since the dawn of time. They're happening faster and faster with exponential impact. Now, right Organizations, as they're busy day-to-day in the business as usual, they oftentimes can't keep up with what those innovations really are or how other adjacent or comparative industries might be able to be applying some of those things. And that's where I can come in and provide a fresh perspective, understand what they're trying to achieve and look at it from three different lenses.
Speaker 2:When I'm looking at it from, you know, customer desirability, would a customer want something like this? What is the viability to the business? How does it ensure that the company makes money and can sustain whatever product they put into market? And then, from a feasibility, can you build it? Do you have the resources, does the technology exist, is it ready to be built? And what do you have internally? So, looking at those things, to be able to, in a very short time, be able to look at the concept and evaluate it from those three lenses and then decide whether there is an opportunity there or not and prioritize how you would get to market. Now the best part for me, the most rewarding part of this whole process, is when I have crafted a vision alongside the you know, the senior leadership and said you know, this is a prototype of the vision that you described.
Speaker 1:Now comes the prototype right.
Speaker 2:Right, I love this.
Speaker 1:This is like when you and I, the first several conversations you and I had in the summer, you kind of wowed me and bowled me over in the way you're describing prototyping, because I think you are using prototyping and in a way that really bridges the gap between where we are today and that ideal future state, in a way that, I'll say, just about anybody can understand it right, because you're taking that sort of theoretical, visionary here's a solution, future state and you're prototyping it like hey, this is what this is going to look like. We're building an app, we're building a website, we're having a multi-channel strategy that is, on the website, you're giving a taste of the user experience before it's built.
Speaker 2:Correct, identifying the key feature components that will help facilitate the conversation internally about the implications of that vision. And it's really, you know, a lot of leaders think here's my strategy and it becomes a PowerPoint deck with, at best, charts and graphs and bullet points, and then they hand it over and you know the rest of the team scratch their heads and trying to interpret that into requirements to build it. And I believe that there's a really critical step in there that if you create something tangible that becomes an illustration of that idea, then people start to have more meaningful conversations internally and then they start to align on what it's going to be and they can see themselves. As I mentioned earlier, each functional unit can see themselves contributing to that bigger vision. Whether it's the content team, whether it's engineering, you name it, they can see how they contribute to that.
Speaker 1:Part of the way you break down projects beginning, middle to end is what you call. I think you call it 369.
Speaker 2:Did.
Speaker 1:I say that right.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, 369 is an innovation.
Speaker 2:Talk about 369 is an innovation Go ahead. Yeah, it's a. It's an innovation approach that I helped to formalize with a long term client, a large multinational bank I had been working with. We wanted to make something that was repeatable and something that was short enough that it minimized the amount of internal investment on innovative exploration, right. And so the idea was that you would take essentially about three days to have a kickoff workshop and bring all of the necessary people together Yep workshop and bring all of the necessary people together and then you would you take about six weeks to come up with and look at it through those three lenses desirability, viability and feasibility. Right, can we? What are the key components? And we would test with customers whether they wanted these things.
Speaker 2:That's the desirability part. And we would look at doing business analysis. You know what is the market sizing, you know what are the real opportunities there. And then the feasibility was the engineering what internal capabilities do we have? What would we need? And then coming up with essentially a pitch deck at the end of that six weeks that you would put in front of the senior leadership and say that idea that you had at the beginning, we took a multidiscipline team, we only took six weeks and we came together and we said here's the real opportunity and here's what that cost is going to be to do a nine month pilot Right. So three days for a workshop, six weeks to really investigate that opportunity and define it and then figure out what is the cost for a nine-month pilot use, something you could build within nine months and get to market right.
Speaker 1:So it really brings it together yeah, and so within the six weeks, uh, uh is where you're doing the, the documents, where you document the strategy and the road mapping, or is? That correct in nine months, it's within no, no, that's all road mapping and then nine months is essentially getting it ready for execution, for launch date well, so it was.
Speaker 2:It's really a target um sizing of what could the engineering and design team do in nine months to get something to market right. So looking at an MVP, that would fit within a nine-month effort.
Speaker 1:Minimal viable product Correct.
Speaker 2:I read Eric's briefs too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and that's actually a great reminder. You talk about sort of also three different lenses, sort of a three-in-one approach of design thinking, lean innovation and business strategy. Right, talk a little bit about I think everybody understands what a business strategy is, right, the business case that you know, are we going to make money at it? But let's talk about the first to design thinking and lean innovation. I think the way I think about design thinking and, by the way, whenever I ask a designer what is design thinking, they're like I thought that was just called thinking, which is very true. But the way I think about design thinking is future thinking instead of historical analysis. Business strategy relies heavily on historical analysis right.
Speaker 1:What is the market today? What is our P&L, sales and metrics and revenue and profit metrics say, whereas design thinking really goes. Future thinking asks the customer, asks what the needs are and the wants are. Is that, am I on the right track? Or how do you think about design thinking? Are you ready to learn how to evaluate like a Sherpa so you can build new revenues like a Sherpa? Introducing our growth evaluation workshops, where you will learn about growth evaluation concepts and methodologies, problem definition, growth killers, opportunity scoping and goal setting, case studies and group discussions, apply learnings cross-functionally and get a certificate while you're at it, for you, for your company, for your growth growth evaluation workshops.
Speaker 2:Design thinking. There are probably a couple key components in that definition and, you know, depending on who you ask, you're going to get different. You know different methodologies, if you will, in design thinking, but it really is a collaborative approach. Meaning, bring in as many ideas as you can and really look at it from different perspectives is key. You know it's something that's Divergence Divergence exactly. Perspectives is key. You know it's something that's uh, it diverges.
Speaker 2:Exactly like create a bunch of ideas with a bunch of um, you know different perspectives and then converge, right, make some decisions on what that can look like, right, and you might do that a couple different times, which means it can be an iterative approach.
Speaker 2:Right, put some big ideas out there, learn from those, try some other things until you generally get to a decision, a decision point of whether something's interesting. The other is that it's user centered, right. So you're really looking at it from the customer's perspective first, and that's that's a large part of what I bring to the table as a strategist is looking at this as what do customers want, what are their um, what's the context by which they might use this and what are the real features that are game changers for them? Right, but then being able to marry that back with business strategy and saying, yeah, but here's what the business needs in order to, uh, not only survive but thrive with this right. And how do you create that synergy between the two of them? You talk a little bit with design, thinking about being future, forward and there certainly are a lot of methodologies that are specific to that and really looking to creating a vision and then somewhat backcasting it to today to say, if that vision was true, what would we need to do today to get to?
Speaker 2:that point Exactly, reverse engineer Exactly. And then there's also systems thinking too, which to me, it's all just in my head and how I operate, but really looking at systems, whether it's ecosystems, right Of how your platform is going to or a new platform would operate within the world, knowing that there may be integrations with other things or people are going to use it in context of something else, partnerships, you know actual technical diagrams where you can see data from this system can integrate with this one, like ERP systems and accounting systems, as an example.
Speaker 2:Good example, really good example PMI's Great example yeah, and then lean innovation.
Speaker 2:Lean innovation. Yes, lean innovation is really meant to be, like I said earlier, kind of practical right. You come up with an idea and you very quickly interrogate or explore that opportunity in a way that doesn't end up in endless cycles of thinking that go nowhere and you end up with a really pretty deck or even a pretty prototype. That is not. It's not based in any reality. I, the way that I like to work in a lean innovation way is exactly that three, six, nine, where we time box it and really minimize the investment to say, look, here's an idea, we're going to spend no more than this amount of time and resources on it. If there is an opportunity there, here's the cost, and we can decide to tranche the efforts and say, yes, we'll invest in that, nine months then, or not. Right, so just keeping it lean and practical and minimizing your investment on something, uh, over time, instead of just this endless R&D lab that you just keep writing checks to and it may or may not go anywhere.
Speaker 1:Perfecting, trying to get to a state of perfection that doesn't exist in the world. Talk a little, I don't know. You gave me, you shared with me a number of case studies which are, in fairness to you, easier to explain with a visual powerpoint deck. Right, you know, with the visuals, but are there? Is there maybe a favorite case study? And like your worst failure case study ever? Right, uh, because both are instructive. I'll let you choose if you want to talk about one or the other, or both, and in which order yeah, I'll give.
Speaker 2:I'll give one of my favorites. Uh was for it's for a fitness company. They make um actual equipment. Plus they also have have training videos and such and subscriptions that people can sign up for and work out at home. It's a very popular company that most have heard of or seen their equipment and they had originally wanted to think about how they could use a more intelligent AI chatbot within their experience to help. It's an app to look at live training videos as well as recorded training videos and really help increase the engagement with a lot of those. And they thought you know a chatbot is going to help people. How can we use, like the latest LL? Thought you know a chat bot is going to help people? How can we use, like the latest LLM? You know, like a chat GPT in a way that could work for them. And so they engaged me to say we need a new vision for what that could look like.
Speaker 1:LLM is that learned language model?
Speaker 2:Large language models yeah, Large language models.
Speaker 2:Chat GPT is obviously the most famous one, but, um, you know, they're prevalent now and uh, off the shelf. You can plug them into, uh, your, your systems and have it learned on, you know, individual data. Uh, so they brought me into craft a vision for what their next, uh, the future of that particular uh application would look like. And uh, so I looked across the landscape, I looked at competitors, I looked at adjacent experiences and discovered that, you know, ai is not limited to just these large language models, this chat GPT type thing that's obviously the most celebrated lately, but there has been a lot of improvement on things like computer vision, for example, and I actually found some instances where companies were utilizing their phone to point at the person working out and could actually be a coach and recognize their body, position, posture, count, repetitions, a lot of things. In fact. There's one that works for a basketball training app and you can put it on the side of the court next to your bottle of water, looking at the basketball hoop, and it will track the trajectory of you shooting and tell you and coach you what is working for you and what's not, and counting the number of baskets you're making as well. So very sophisticated stuff, right and very real, and so I took a couple different flavors of AI that are out there that plus personalization and prediction, plus the chat GPT-like interface and I brought it together in a way that turned that app into a virtual coach.
Speaker 2:And when I defined the feature set as a hypothesis, I tested it with customers that were currently utilizing the current version of the app and discovered that there's a whole segment of people who really don't want to utilize this fitness equipment in public because they don't like to be coached or told that they're doing it wrong, right, right. So that's why they do it at home, right. But your form in utilizing this equipment is incredibly important. If your form isn't right, you're not getting the benefits of the device itself, so it does require a bit of coaching. And so when I showed them this app and that you could have it look at you, and it's obviously computer-aided vision and not a real person people loved it. They said, oh, this would be great, I'd be completely fine learning new workout techniques and new exercises with this coaching.
Speaker 1:That's the embarrassment.
Speaker 2:Right. And then additionally found that the company has an incredible studio where they create programming. So any of the major sports soccer, baseball, football they have great programming and running tennis, and they will create, you know, video workouts that are specific to that particular type of activity, but they're never going to do things for, like, you know, club rugby, you know something like that because it's just not enough. It's too niche, right. But I found through my research that people were looking up on ChatGPT you know, put together a fitness regimen with this particular workout gear for club rugby and so they were going to chat GBT to get this information. I said, look to the company, you need to own this conversation because otherwise they're just going to point to YouTube videos of people who may or may not know what they're doing. And and right, so you need to own the conversation. And right, so you need to own the conversation. So how do they train their bot to be able to recognize what exercise program would be great for club rugby to avoid injury? And, you know, get better at whatever particular thing they want to do. And so that was a key moment for them to recognize that this is really the future of AI within that app.
Speaker 2:So when I took all of this, I kind of worked mostly on my own with that. I had a couple people internally that I was working with, but for the most part they said give us a vision. And here are the people you know. Here are your resources that know, have the expertise in-house and the knowledge you might need. Your resources that know, have the expertise in-house and the knowledge you might need. I came up with a quick prototype, tested it with their customers, came back, tweaked the prototype and then I presented it to the CTO and he sat back and he said I would be so very proud if our company could put this out. He said I love this. How do we make this happen? And that, to me, is one of the best moments you can have with a client is when they fall in love with the vision and they ask now, how do we do this? And then you sit in a room with all of the people with the different lenses and use. If they are in love with it and agreed on and aligned toward the vision, what are the implications of this vision to your business? And content will say well, we'll need new content. Blah, blah, blah. Engineering will say we need to open up APIs to get data. Da, da, da, da, da, and so on and so forth. Now everybody's contributing to that vision. How can we make this happen? Action ability, exactly Right. So now you're putting that strategic plan into action and they're writing the roadmap.
Speaker 2:At that point, right here is, here are the dependencies of the technology. When I've come in and I've come up with a good idea, people say, oh great, where does this fit into our overall workload? Last thing we need is something new. It's exciting, but we can't get this other stuff done. But one of the things that I do is I try to look at those other initiatives and align them toward the vision. Right, so now all of these separate, siloed initiatives are contributing to this and that is shown on the roadmap by saying there's this is why this particular feature is not going to happen, because until phase two, because you have another initiative that's actually going to contribute to that. So it is a dependency. Now their entire workload starts to make sense.
Speaker 1:Jonah, we're not going to have time to talk about your favorite failure. We'll do that on another podcast. Maybe we'll do another podcast talking about a bunch of different projects that both of us have done to either, you know, either create an idea or take an existing idea and sort of run it through its paces, to get to put meat around the bones, and then execute it and then have it become part of the real world, which is, I think, what gets both you and me up in the morning. Right, it's not just coming up with an idea, but making it to the execution stage. As Thomas Edison says, vision without execution is hallucination, and we're both into creating the vision and executing it. Hey, if folks wanted to reach out to you one-on-one, what's a good place to find you, jonah?
Speaker 2:You can certainly find me on LinkedIn. My website is mindarccom, that's M-I-N-D-A-R-Ccom. You can also reach me with my email address, which is Jonah at mind-arccom.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Now people know where to find you. They know where to find me. I want to do a project with you, Jonah.
Speaker 2:Same We've got it.
Speaker 1:This is great what you're doing. Thank you so much for sharing sort of you know, looking behind the curtain of how you put the secret sauce, or what is your secret sauce and how do you put it together. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, this has been a delight.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you for listening to this episode of TGO Podcast. You can find all episodes on our podcast page at wwwrealign4resultscom. You can find me, benno, host of TGO podcast, there as well. Just email Benno B-E-N-N-O at realign4resultscom. Let's keep growing, thank you.
