The Experience Edge

A Salesforce design leader hasn't opened Figma in months. Her team builds first and researches after — and she says that's the right bet. Shir leads the Sales Planning design organisation within Salesforce's Sales Cloud, where her team no longer designs in Figma — they prototype and ship directly through AI coding tools instead. She and Jochem dig into what's actually shifting as d...

Most CX teams report satisfaction scores. If yours disappeared on Monday, whose week would actually break? That answer decides whether it survives AI. Rania Brand ran global CX and service design at Kimberly-Clark, where customer experience sits inside the operating model rather than beside it. In this conversation she argues that AI changes almost nothing about the CX equation — it only raises th...

Speed without craft creates undifferentiated products. The real cost of AI acceleration in financial services is the slow erosion of what makes experiences worth building. Julia Challicom leads Customer Strategy and Design for financial services at Deloitte Digital UK, helping tier-one banks and insurers transform the way customer insight shapes business decisions. In this conversation, she and Jo...

Every CX leader can point to their data. Almost none can trace how it actually becomes a business decision. Jochem van der Veer breaks down the four-stage customer experience data lifecycle — signals, context, intelligence, and impact — that determines whether experience data ever turns into a measurable business outcome. He unpacks why behavioral data (clickstream, session recordings, product tel...

Service design promised to connect the dots. So why are service designers inside the same company still not talking to each other? Khayyam "Kai" Lasi is Journey Management Program Lead at Autodesk, where he's spent years scaling journey management from a lone title on an org chart to a company-wide operating system. In this conversation, he and Jochem get into why service design silo...

Half of CX teams are still just running surveys. The other half stopped reporting and started operating. Bill Staikos spent two decades in customer experience leadership at companies like American Express, BNY Mellon, and JPMorgan, and now writes the newsletter AI Not KPI. In this conversation, he explains why CX is splitting into a "bottom 50%" still stuck in survey-and-dashboard mode a...

Your AI agents aren't failing because the models are bad. They're failing because your data was built for humans, not machines.  Jochem has spent years working on the structural problem underneath failing enterprise AI initiatives. In this episode, he breaks down why CX AI pilots stall after six to eight weeks, what an experience ontology actually is and how it differs from a taxonomy or t...

Your teams are drowning in customer data but can't act on it. Here's a 5-level framework that makes the customer journey your operating system. IN THIS EPISODE Why another dashboard won't fix your customer data problem How to connect what customers say with what they actually do Why the customer journey — not your org chart — should organize your data How a "meaning layer" cr...

Your CX pitch lands with practitioners but dies with CEOs. Here's the messaging framework that fixes it.  IN THIS EPISODE Why CX leaders keep pitching the wrong message to the wrong room — and how to diagnose it How to talk to a CEO or COO about customer experience without mentioning customer experience What product leaders actually need to hear before they'll prioritise CX on the roadmap...

Is empathy a staffing choice or a design decision? We often assume that emotionally charged moments demand a human touch. This episode challenges that instinct. In a world where AI is always available, always calm, and increasingly capable, the real question isn’t human versus machine - it’s whether we’ve misunderstood what empathy actually requires in the first place. In this video: Why empathy i...

Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber, former competitors turned co-founders of the Institute for Journey Management, join Jochem van der Veer to unpack how enterprise CX is evolving in the age of AI. Drawing on decades of experience across Kitewheel and Thunderhead, they explore how journey orchestration is being reshaped by generative AI and organizational transformation. At the center is a key tension:...

Over the past decade, many companies pursued omnichannel by adding touchpoints rather than designing continuity. The result is fragmented data, repeated customer effort, and teams optimizing for channels instead of journeys. In this environment, AI becomes a high-speed engine running on incomplete context. The real shift isn’t about better models, but about building shared, journey-level context —...

Katie Duncan, former CX leader at Warner Bros. Discovery, joins The Experience Edge to unpack what it actually takes to operationalize customer experience inside complex, high-growth media organizations. Drawing from scaling CX across major streaming launches, she brings a grounded view on turning strategy into execution. The conversation centers on the gap between customer-centric ambition and op...

In this Insights episode, Jochem van der Veer challenges the assumption that more data, dashboards, and AI naturally lead to better customer experience decisions. The real issue isn’t visibility - it’s the absence of shared context that gives data meaning. Most organizations aren’t lacking insights; they’re operating in different versions of reality. Teams interpret the same signals differently an...

Gene Hong, Design Leader at Target and founder of Aperture North, brings over 25 years of experience shaping how brands translate creativity into commercial success. Leading a $770M portfolio, Gene operates at the intersection of design, business strategy, and innovation, with a focus on creating culturally relevant, high-impact consumer experiences. In this conversation, Gene explores why the fut...

In this Insights episode, Jochem van der Veer challenges the common belief that improving customer experience requires more data, dashboards, and AI, revealing instead how a lack of shared context across teams leads to misaligned decisions. While organizations optimize performance using advanced analytics and AI-driven insights, they often operate on different versions of reality, creating fragmen...

Ashana Singhania, VP Product Management at Goldman Sachs and former product leader at American Express, operates at the intersection of product, trust, and regulation. Having led zero-to-one launches and large-scale platform consolidations across payments, lending, and digital banking, she brings a clear-eyed view of building customer experience inside highly regulated financial institutions. In t...

Anne-Kathrine Nissen is a seasoned user experience leader who has driven customer-centric digital transformation across global brands like Airbus and Electrolux, and today shapes omnichannel experience at H&M across 79 markets. In this episode, she joins TheyDo co-founder Jochem van der Veer to unpack what it really takes to run experience-led transformation at global scale, where hundreds of...

Adam Towne, Director of Product for Scaled Analytics and Funds at LSEG, began his career on an 11-hour help desk shift before moving into account management and ultimately product leadership. Now building analytics and API products for asset managers, banks, and hedge funds, he brings a rare perspective: customer support is not a cost center, it is a growth engine. In this conversation, Adam refra...

Steve Cleff, product design leader and founder of Prismatic Vision, has led product and design at Comcast, Barclays, and Siemens, helping global enterprises move beyond feature factories toward experience-led growth. In this episode, he shares how his background in UX, engineering, and fine arts shapes his belief that customer experience starts long before someone touches your product. In conversa...

What if 2026 isn’t the year of the agentic enterprise? Most predictions paint 2026 as the moment AI suddenly takes over customer experience end to end. Autonomous agents. Self-driving journeys. Overnight transformation.  In this Insights video, Jochem challenges that narrative - and argues the real shift is quieter, slower, and far more operational than the hype suggests. The risk for leaders isn’...

Why executives nod at journey management - and then do nothing Leaders rarely push back on customer centricity - it sounds sensible, even obvious - yet that agreement is often exactly where journey management quietly stalls. In this Insights video, Jochem reflects on why the issue isn’t resistance but misunderstanding: journey management is still framed as a belief or a set of maps, when in realit...

Suchi Parikh is a creative director and storyteller with a rare blend of design craft and business fluency. After a decade at Apple leading global sales content, she now serves as Director of Storytelling at PayPal, where she helps bring complex product innovation to life across agent commerce, Venmo, and global payments. Her work sits at the intersection of empathy, clarity, and persuasion - tran...

What if removing friction is ruining your customer experience? Everyone in CX wants to make things effortless. Fast. Smooth. Seamless. But in this Reflections episode, Jochem explores a provocative idea from his conversation with Sam Stern (Service Design Lead at LinkedIn): not all friction is bad - some friction creates memory, meaning, and better decisions. We unpack the difference between good...

Are journey maps just artifacts or operating systems in disguise? In this episode, Jochem reflects on his conversation with Dan Sullivan, Director of Journey Management at CHG Healthcare, to explore how journey management becomes true organizational design. Dan's team didn’t just improve customer journeys - they restructured how decisions get made across teams. From building a “Journey Atlas” as a...