175: CX Design for a Better Employee and Customer Experience with Justin Zalewski Navigating the Customer Experience

Justin Zalewski is the Director of Product Design and Strategy at Studio Science. He leads a team of talented product designers and works with clients to solve business problems through design. He and his team are experts in rapid prototyping and running experiments to more quickly learn from and deliver value to customers.
He has led projects with clients ranging from market-leading tech companies to Fortune 500 brands. Some of his clients include Angi, Genesys, Simon, Stack Overflow, and Cummins.
 
Questions
 
Now, could you share with us, in your own words, just a little bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today? So, customer and product design. Now, tell us a little bit about Studio Science. What is Studio Science and what does Studio Science do? So, maybe could you share with me one or two trends that you've seen in the customer experience space that you think is critical for a business to constantly be looking at to ensure that they are keeping current with the needs of their customer? Why do you think it's important for not only the customer experience, but the employee experience to ensure that your alignment in terms of needs is not just on the CX end but it's also on the EX end and what does that look like in terms of it being beneficial to both? Now, could you also share with us what is the one online resource, tool, website, or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business? Could you also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people. We do have a lot of persons that listen to this podcast, who are business owners, as well as managers and they believe that their companies have great products and services, but from time to time, they do lack constantly motivated human capital, so the people are not as motivated. If you're sitting across the table from one of those persons today, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give them to increase or improve their motivation and have a successful business? Could you also share with us Justin, our listeners would have tapped into this episode, they would like to connect with you. And so, they would like to know where can they find you online? So, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track or get you refocused if for any reason you got derailed.  
Highlights
 
Justin’s Journey
 
Justin shared that he started in the world of design and the way he started was a little more in the world of graphic design. And that led him into just kind of a natural curiosity into the more technical side of things. And so, he started to kind of branching out from just the visual design of things in visual communication into building things and figuring out how things work. So, getting into code, building websites, building apps. And that led him into product design.
 
So, figuring out what is the UX, the user experience of making sure that these kinds of things are intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, and really meeting customer needs. And that caused him to broaden his lens, especially the last 10 years and his time at Studio Science to broaden his lens, and especially adapt a service design mindset. So, looking across the whole customer journey from everything they're doing, with a digital product, outside of a digital product, their in-person interactions, the way that the organization delivers a service to a customer.
 
And one of the things that he’s been really passionate about lately and getting really excited about is how they use their design skill set and looking through the business world with that lens, to bring people together, bring siloed disparate departments together in pursuit of that common goal. Because really, ev