How do you find what people actually need?

I caught the mobile wave early, right when the iPhone came out. Brands were calling agencies asking for “a mobile strategy” before anyone, the brands included, could say what that meant. We didn’t know either. You found out by making things and watching what happened. Purina, Land Rover, Jaguar, Universal, Adidas, all on the early roster, all of us guessing together.

Most of that early work was mobile in service of something else. A campaign. A product that already existed. Then I built Petcentric for Purina, a kind of Yelp for pet owners, and halfway through I felt the brief change shape under me. This wasn’t an ad for a product. It was the product. After that, the work I wanted was building real products, not bolting mobile onto someone’s marketing plan.

A few years later I helped launch the US arm of PhoneValley, the mobile agency inside Publicis Groupe. I ran design as Creative Director and grew it from three people to more than thirty. Bank of America, GM, Purina again, Scion, Puma. Mobile Agency of the Year two years running, best revenue per head in the network. By every number that’s supposed to matter, it worked. Then the wave flattened. Everybody was on it now. Mobile wasn’t something to see coming, it was a department, and the work had become running the machine. More layers, more meetings about the meetings. I was good at that part. I just missed the water.

So when PhoneValley folded into Digitas, I left instead of climbing. I didn’t want a bigger machine. I wanted to be back out where the next wave was forming, where nobody had the answer yet.

That meant products, and products were a different animal. A good one doesn’t live on a screen. It lives across web, mobile, sometimes hardware, and you can’t design the part people tap without designing the whole system behind it. I learned that the way I learn everything, by doing it in a lot of different places. Livewire, a marketplace where you met a tax pro over video, bought by H&R Block in 2017. The real design problem wasn’t the app, it was the relationship between two people on a call. Audacy, a wireless lighting system for IDEAL Industries that ended up in Wrigley Field the year the Cubs won the Series. That one ran from a phone all the way out to a stadium full of fixtures and the crew installing them. (I’m not taking credit for the Series. I’m not not taking credit for it.) Namaste MD and CannMart, a Canadian medical cannabis company, where one product was the online clinic that got you a license from a real doctor and the other was the marketplace where you filled it. Two products to the company. One thing to the patient: getting your medicine. So I made them feel like one.

A tax marketplace. A stadium’s lights. A cannabis pharmacy. On the surface, nothing in common. But the more different the work got, the clearer the part underneath became. None of it was really about the screen. It was about the whole experience around it, the system a person moves through, most of it not digital at all. And all of it came down to the same question I’d been asking since 2007. What do the people using this actually need?

Somewhere in there I built the design practice inside Ballast Lane, back when they were about thirty people. They’re a design and development agency now, past 130 and on the Inc. 5000. Through it, we kept shipping. Reibus, a marketplace for the metals industry, designed to fit how steel has actually moved between mills and buyers for decades. Annise, a financial platform for family offices, one calm picture across many advisors, accounts, and asset classes. Sage, a wellness product built with an elite-athlete coach, shaped so a regular person on a regular week could actually follow it. Different industries, same question every time. Sometimes what a team needs isn’t another product from you, it’s the ability to make good ones without you. Sometimes they need both.

And now AI, which feels a lot like 2007 again. Nobody knows what these products should be yet. The brands don’t, the users don’t, half the people building them don’t. Which is exactly the part I like. We’ve spent three years on Petivity, built Aura, and made Coa and Hazelnut for ourselves, because the fastest way to understand a wave is to get on it, not watch it from the sand.

That’s the whole story, really. Three waves so far. Mobile, then the messier one of products and systems, now AI. Almost twenty years, more industries than I can fit in a sentence, and it came down to one skill instead of a hundred. Not how to design a litter box, or a lighting system, or a coach. How to read the water. How to spot a wave while it’s still forming, get to the right place, and ride it before it’s the obvious thing everyone’s already on. Too early and you’re treading water. Catch it right and there’s nothing better.

I built Dezign of Mine to keep doing that, without the parts that got in the way last time. No machine to run. No layers. No process for its own sake. Just a few people who are very good at looking, sitting close to the work. Ready to catch the next wave with you.