Makoto Kern is the UX Product Strategy Design Leader at IIIMPACT, Inc.. Rising to prominence in the 2000s, he built a reputation for transforming complex enterprise software into high-adoption products, guiding clients through more than 22 years of digital transformation initiatives across energy, cybersecurity, healthcare, fintech, and logistics. He became known for driving 450% year-over-year revenue growth at IIIMPACT while helping Fortune 500 and high-growth B2B SaaS teams achieve up to 85% user adoption versus a 34% industry average, and for preventing $2.3 million in wasted spend through strategic planning workshops. Previously, as a senior UX consultant at FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, he led mobile and responsive web experience design for one of the largest U.S. car rental companies, a major Broadway e-commerce platform, and a top payroll provider, contributing to multi-million-dollar online revenue channels between 2011 and 2020. He became known for building cross-platform loyalty workflows across iOS, Android, and responsive web, and for introducing UX strategy practices that informed product decisions through analytics and usability testing. His career highlights include senior UX roles at Walgreens and Humana, where he shaped e-commerce, mobile, and responsive experiences for millions of consumers between 2011 and 2014. At Walgreens, he helped optimize cross-channel journeys across Walgreens.com and affiliated sites, supporting year-over-year gains in online conversion for properties spanning pharmacy, beauty, and vision. At Humana, he led UX for member-facing mobile apps and loyalty programs, collaborating with innovation teams to move concepts from brainstorming to tested prototypes in an agile environment. As host and executive producer of the Make an IIIMPACT Podcast, he translates two decades of product and UX leadership into weekly conversations for CTOs and product executives, growing the show to more than 80,000 subscribers and generating over 35,000 views on individual episodes in 2024. He also writes about his journey from robotics and fuzzy controllers to software leadership in essays like his Medium piece “From Broken Glasses to Building Better Software,” extending his influence beyond client work into broader product and design circles. Listen on Apple Podcasts↗ and Spotify↗ What happens when companies pause everything for eight months to integrate AI and discover nobody uses it. “The moat is the user experience,” Makoto says. “The easier you make that, the better. No one cares if you’re using Claude or ChatGPT.” We’re about twenty minutes in, and I’ve been waiting for someone to say this out loud. Everyone’s talking about AI strategy, AI integration, AI roadmaps. Makoto’s been consulting for twenty years, and he keeps coming back to the same point: nobody cares about the backend. They care if it solves their problem. Makoto Kern started as an electrical engineer in Chicago, building software for manufacturing environments. His job was to automate systems, make them faster, more efficient. But he kept noticing something. The software was built by engineers for engineers—and the people on the factory floor weren’t engineers. They had to use it anyway. “It kind of naturally led to UX,” he tells me. He started building websites on the side during the .com boom, taking sales calls over lunch at his full-time job, finding work on Craigslist. Eventually he quit and started IIIMPACT. That was twenty years ago. I ask him what’s been consistent across those two decades. What survives the hype cycles? “You still see the same problems no matter what the technology is,” he says. “You have to be hyper-focused on knowing that you’re solving someone’s problems.” The pattern is always the same. During the .com boom, companies added “.com” to their name and watched valuations spike. With crypto, the pattern repeated. Now with AI, he’s watching it again—companies pausing critical feature development to “just integrate AI,” only to discover nobody uses it. Then he tells me about a case study that stuck with me for days. One of his clients decided to pause all product development for eight months to integrate an AI chat feature. Microsoft was pushing Copilot. Salesforce was pushing Copilot. Everyone wanted one. So they built one. “Eight months later it’s integrated,” Makoto says. “We take a look at Pendo. We see a prompt, maybe two prompts during training. Nothing else after that.” I wait for him to continue. “So nobody’s using this. And this is exactly why you test.” The features users had been asking for? On the back burner for eight months. The competitors who kept building those features? Now ahead. Eight months of “innovation” became eight months of falling behind. “It’s another Clippy right now,” he says, and something in his voice suggests he’s said this before. “People are falling off after using it once or twice. They’re like, I don’t need to use this. I’m gonna go back to what I’m familiar with.” I bring up the instinct to chase technology—how hard it is to tell a board you’re focused on fundamentals when they’re asking about AI strategy. Makoto has a metaphor for this. “It’s like telling a kid it’s cold outside, wear a jacket. They don’t wanna wear the jacket.” He pauses. “Then they get sick.” He says when his team goes into consulting gigs, a lot of these companies are the kid who doesn’t want to wear the jacket. You tell them what’s good process, what’s good strategy. But they’re going to do it their way. “So we go in there. Of course, I bring the jacket. I tell ‘em to put it on after they’re cold.” There’s something resigned in how he says after. “Have you heard of the Peter Principle?” he asks. I shake my head. “You’re promoted to the point of incompetence.” He lets it sit. “You get somebody who’s a great developer and they’re promoted to manager, but they can’t manage people. So they stop there.” He’s seen product people say we don’t need to change anything, it’s working as it is. No innovation. Just following what competitors do because it’s the safe play. “If the salespeople heard about this, they’d be like, are you crazy?” The conversation turns to vibe coding—all those people on Twitter claiming software is cooked because they built something in five minutes. I tell him I’ve been using Claude Code, and it’s incredible for setup, for gluing repositories together. But when things break, I don’t understand what I’m reading. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s UX.” Performance is UX. Security is UX. If your dev team creates tech debt and every button takes five seconds to load, that’s not a backend problem. That’s the experience. And with everyone vibe-coding everything, he says, you’re going to see privacy issues, security flaws. His cybersecurity clients are ready. “They’re licking their lips.” I ask him what he does when the AI hype gets overwhelming—all the noise about automation, about making a hundred thousand dollars a week. “I just took a step back,” he says. “This is the bubble that people are going after. Don’t pay attention to that. Just stick with the fundamentals.” He tells me about his own experience with AI. He uses it for crunching data sets, for research, for brainstorming. But he sees the hallucinations. He questions the outputs. “Don’t use it as the end-all, be-all.” Near the end, I ask what hasn’t been said. “If you want to innovate, you can’t be scared about utilizing the right resources in the right way,” he says. “Because now if you don’t, it’s going to be detrimental to your company.” He pauses. “Don’t rely so much on technology. Always fall back on the right processes. If your product interfaces with users—like most of them do—be super hyper-focused on the user experience. Even if you have board members pushing your CEOs and your leaders into a certain direction, you have to get them to understand: are you solving a user’s pain point or not?” If you’re not, he says, then who knows what you’re building toward. I’ve been thinking about this conversation since we hung up. The technology changes, but the failure mode doesn’t. .com boom. Crypto. Now AI. Same mistakes, faster. The companies that survive these cycles aren’t the ones chasing features. They’re the ones who remember what the moat actually is. It’s not the AI. It’s how easy you make it for humans to accomplish what they came to do. The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe
