A Digital Strategy Podcast

💡 Key Topics: "Responsible for the website, don't want to do content": how one IT admin ended up picking the platform, designing the blog out of the site, and leaving years of analytics unused The five-minute job that isn't: a headline change becomes a ticket, a queue, a scoping call, QA and a deployment. The bigger cost is everything that never gets published, like the campaign with no landing p...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ How normal this already is: 84% of people who build and run company websites use AI for it (Framer State of Sites, 1,900+ respondents, from a company that sells a website builder) ✦ The pressure behind it: 100% of marketing teams that can’t adopt AI fail to deliver projects on time or on budget (Webflow, 1,000 director-level leaders at 50+ person companies, from a company that als...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ The year-long ramp: when nobody has written down who the customer is, every new salesperson takes about a year to get up and running ✦ The persona access gap: only about half of people making content for sales teams say sales and marketing can get to the same buyer personas, and only 39% say sales uses the right content at the right time (Content Marketing Institute). That's marke...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ The doom-hype-doom cycle: a new model ships to influencers, they build something game-changing, then a week later someone says it'll end the world. Fear and exclusivity are the two oldest sales models, and exclusivity is really just fear of being left behind ✦ Why nobody shares the disease cure: Dario Amodei's essay says most major diseases could be cured in five to ten years, but...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ The twelve percent: Bain found only 12% of business transformations achieved what they set out to do, and the failure almost never traces back to the technology itself (Bain) ✦ The average user doesn't exist: why designing for a blended, middle-of-the-road user misses the real audience, and how splitting people into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups, internal staff included,...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ The iceberg problem: logo, fonts, and colors are the visible tip, while the real brand lives in the ~80% below the waterline (support replies, sales emails, checkout copy, policy pages) ✦ Why brands drift years before anyone notices: every channel gets written by a different person, in a different department, with no shared source ✦ 69% of B2B buyers reported inconsistencies betwe...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ The 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of your potential market isn't actively buying — Forrester says the exact split varies by category, but the shape holds up ✦ Why the "favorite vendor" is picked before you know they exist: 94% of B2B buyers rank preferred vendors before first contact, and that pick wins 77% of the time (6sense) ✦ Buyer enablement vs. "helping not selling":...

💡 Key Topics: Why "I built it with AI" is three different builds (pure generated code, CMS with an AI layer, headless + AI front end) with three different risk profiles Path one's trap: no content layer, so editing isn't editing anymore, it's regenerating the whole site from scratch The security roll of the dice: Veracode found roughly half of AI-generated code came back secure (55% one year, 56%...

💡 Key Topics: The zero-click economy: why roughly half the clicks vanish the moment an AI summary appears (Pew, 900-adult panel) AI Overviews now on ~48% of searches, up from ~31% a year ago (Bright Edge) Why B2B queries triggering an AI Overview jumped from 36% to 82%, and why retail is the mirror image Chegg suing Google, HubSpot down 27%, Business Insider's layoffs: companies naming the traffi...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ Why everything is a remix, and why that's freeing instead of depressing (shoutout Kirby Ferguson) ✦ Why AI trends generic: it remixes the average, so it hands you the average back ✦ John Snow's 1854 cholera map: how a doctor borrowed cartography to win an argument and accidentally invented data viz ✦ Harry Beck's London Underground map: how a laid-off engineer deleted the city and...

💡 Key Topics: ✦ Why "will AI replace designers" is the wrong question, and what it actually replaced ✦ The Figma stat that frames the whole debate: 78% say AI boosts efficiency, only 32% trust the output ✦ Why AI-generated design output is "average at best" and why the C-suite gives it a pass anyway ✦ How the old model worked (designers made the calls, tools just sped up execution) and what chang...

Before you even listen to this, scan your website here to know if you're accessible: https://www.designtennis.com/design-and-business-resources/website-accessibility-guide Most businesses think an accessibility lawsuit is something that happens to someone else. Then AI hands anyone with a browser the ability to file one. In this episode, Symon and Marcello unpack the sharp rise in ADA website laws...

💡 Key Topics: What AODA actually covers on the web, and why it applies to all public websites and content if you have 50+ employees in Ontario WCAG 2.0 Level AA as the current legal floor, and why 2.1 and 2.2 matter even if the law hasn't caught up The compliance report trap: how self-reporting non-compliance gets you audited within weeks How compliance officers really operate, and why they rewar...

💡 Key Topics: What Config is really like in person, and why Toronto has no local equivalent (RGD, Tech Week, Web Summit gaps) AI fatigue at the conference, and audiences literally clapping when a talk wasn't about AI Why Figma let agents take a backseat in the keynote, unlike last year's AI-heavy product slate John on the new production and motion features, and where designers will push them Anna...

💡 Key Topics: Figma's July IPO and the pivot to positioning itself as an AI company, right down to the software description The claim that ~80% of Config talks are now AI, and whether that's a good or exhausting thing What going public adds to the program: a new investor and analyst session Why 3Blue1Brown, a math channel, is speaking at a design conference Last year's product slate (Figma Make,...

💡 Key Topics: Why Italy was primed for this: arriving late to the Industrial Revolution and deciding to win on design instead Camillo's 1908 factory and the "Olivetti style" that predated Apple's design manifesto by 40 years Adriano embedding painters, architects, and writers as full-time co-builders, with design reporting to the top Ivrea as the original Google campus: housing, clinics, librarie...

In this episode: Clarity beats cleverness: define the goal and the KPI before the design Structure is the real UX: information architecture as the invisible foundation Speed is a design decision: real speed, perceived speed, and the three-second rule Building for the person who knows nothing about you, starting with ICP work Why AI-generated copy keeps missing the mark Every page needs one job, in...

The worst design system project is one that starts too early. Wrong timing, wrong scope, wrong people and it dies in a folder somewhere, untouched. In this episode, Symon and Marcello break down the three signals that tell you you're actually ready for a design system, the two signs you're definitely not, and how to scope a version one that people will actually use. They also cover the build or bu...

💡 Key Topics: Why most agencies get stuck and can't scale past the founder How pricing affects client lifetime, team stability, and the work itself The story behind going from $2,500/month to $45,000/month and back down Why revenue is a vanity metric and what to measure instead Employee churn as the red flag most clients ignore What niching down actually looks like in practice Why mutual respect...

Key Topics: • The Lego analogy: the simplest way to explain a design system to anyone • What's actually inside a design system: foundations, components, patterns, and documentation • How designers, developers, and product managers use a design system day to day • Why a brand guide and a design system are not the same thing • Design system governance: who owns what, and what happens without it • Op...

Key Topics: Why AI is accelerating brand chaos at the mid-market level The difference between a brand guide and a design system What design debt looks like, and why you don't feel it until it breaks Single source of truth: why every team having its own components is killing your brand Why speed without systems is just expensive chaos Chapters: 0:16 — Why design systems are blowing up right now 1:1...

What we cover in this episode: 🔹 [0:00] — The verdict: What actually happened in the Meta/YouTube lawsuit 🔹 [2:16] — Kaye's story and why starting social media at age 6 matters 🔹 [3:55] — Internal Meta documents: "If we want to win big with teens, we must bring in tweens" 🔹 [7:50] — Section 230: The 30-year legal shield that finally cracked 🔹 [9:06] — Engineering addiction through design — an...

In this episode: • How design evolved from a contained discipline in 2006 to absorbing everything by 2020 • Why low-code, no-code, the gig economy, and nearshoring created a race to the bottom on execution • The three disciplines of market leaders — and which one actually resists commoditization • How network effects are reshaping agencies, product teams, and businesses • Why focus is the only rea...

  Key  topics Definition of technical debt in web development How small decisions compound over time Real-world examples of web debt Strategies for auditing and addressing web debt   Chapters 00:00 Technical Debt in Web Development 00:19 Understanding Incremental Web Debt 03:19 The Impact of Technical Debt 08:21 Real-World Examples of Technical Debt 14:49 Addressing Technical Debt 17:42 Final Thou...

Notes Why does a website project that everyone agrees is needed keep dying in the finance meeting? Usually it's not the budget — it's the pitch. Symon and Marcello break down how to reframe a web investment as a business initiative, not a creative one, and walk through exactly how to build a case that finance can actually approve. Topics covered: current cost audit (hosting, content ops, lost lead...