From Chief “Executive” to Chief “Experience” Officer.
Recently, I changed one word in my title. I am still the CEO of J5 Design, but the E no longer stands for Executive. It stands for Experience. On paper, it is a small edit. In practice, it is my answer to a question I have been asking since the day I started J5: what do we actually do? That sounds crazy to someone that has never built a company from scratch, but think about how long it takes us to really understand ourselves, a lifetime! So why should it be any different when you build a company?
It took me twelve years to answer it simply. We make experiences better. Service design is how we do it. A kinder, more beautiful future is why.
I started J5 with a “why”.
When I started J5, I was given the book by Simon Sinek called Start with Why, and it gave me language for something I already felt. I didn't want to build a company defined by a list of products or services. I wanted to build one with purpose.
My why was clear from the very beginning. I wanted to create more human-centred organizations: places where the customers felt important, and employees were valued for their efforts. I wanted our work to add up to a kinder, more beautiful future.
That purpose led us to service design. It gave us a way to hold together two things that often pull apart. The first is a deep understanding of the people an organization serves. The second is an organized, yet creative, way of working backwards from that understanding into everything behind the experience: the employees who deliver it, the services and processes, the technologies, and the culture.
The question that always stumped me
Our why (a kinder, more beautiful future) was never in doubt and our how (service design) became more clear every year. But our what always eluded me. Were we digital transformation experts? Healthcare experts? Transformation consultants?Service design experts? Absolutely, and we are proud of all of them and more. But none of those labels captured the point. They described our context or our method, not the result we existed to create.
The answer turned out to be simpler than any of them. What we do is make the experience better. For patients and families. For residents and citizens. For members and customers. And for the employees who show up every day to deliver those services. Once I started to see that more clearly, everything else started falling into place:
Why: a kinder, more beautiful future.
How: the multi-disciplinary practice of service design.
What: better customer and employee experiences.
"Executive" pointed me inward, toward running the business. "Experience" points me toward the thing the business exists to do. If experience is what we do, it belongs in the title of the person leading the company. Changing it was my way of saying that our loud, and holding myself to it.
What it signals
I hope this small change says three things.
To our clients, it says that experience is not a layer we add at the end. The organizations we work with, in healthcare, government, and the private sector, are under real pressure to do more with less. Too often, experience is treated as secondary to efficiency. Our view is the opposite: when a service is designed around the people who use it and the people who deliver it, adoption goes up, waste goes down, and efficiency follows. Experience is how you get there, not what you give up along the way.
To our team, it says that the experience of working at J5 is everything. The quality of what we deliver to clients can only ever be as good as the experience of the people doing the work. If I expect our service designers to care deeply about the employee experience inside a hospital, bank or government ministry, I owe them the same care here.
To you and your organization, it is a small invitation. Every organization says the customer is at the centre. Far fewer put experience at the top of how they work. I would love to see more leaders and managers ask what it would mean to own experience as part of their role, rather than delegate it to an innovation function, marketing or customer experience department.
Where I am now spendingf my time
The real test of a title change is in my calendar and how it shifts.
Closer to the work. I spend more time in the room with clients, listening to how services feel from the inside. Not only reviewing deliverables, but meeting leaders, managers and frontline staff, and understanding where the friction lives. That is where the most important insights come from, and I don't want to learn about them second-hand.
On the experience of our own people. I am investing more attention in how our team works together, learns, and grows. That includes how we bring new people into J5 and how we build the confidence of designers to lead complex work with senior clients.
On capability, not only projects. Some of the most meaningful work we do is helping organizations build service design capability from within, so they can keep improving long after we leave. I want to be part of those conversations early and even do some of the teaching, because they are conversations about culture and leadership which I care about deeply.
Less time on the things others can own. Operations still matter enormously, and I am fortunate to share the leadership of J5 with people who bring real strength there. Stepping back from some of that work is not stepping away from responsibility. It is a deliberate choice about where I can add the most value.
Service design continues to deliver our “what”
Clients rarely come to us wanting service design for its own sake. They come because an experience isn't working, for the people they serve, for their staff, or both. Service design is the discipline we bring to change that, in a way that is practical, repeatable, and even learnable.
We think about experience as a whole system. Our Total Experience framework looks at four connected areas: the strategy behind a service, the customer experience, the employee experience, and the operating system that holds it all together. It also asks an honest question that is easy to skip: is the organization ready to make the change? A great customer experience built on a strained workforce or an outdated operating model will not last. When all four are designed together, the change sticks.
That thinking shapes the three ways we work with clients:
Assessing existing services, so leaders can see clearly where experience is strong, where it breaks down, and where to act first.
Designing new services, and redesigning existing ones, with the people who use them and the people who deliver them.
Transforming from within, by building the skills and confidence for teams to lead this work themselves.
What ties these together is a belief that the value of our work should be measured in human outcomes as well as organizational ones. Time given back to a nurse. A form a resident can finish without calling for help. A team that feels trusted to improve the service they deliver. Those outcomes show up in adoption and in the numbers, and they also show up in dignity, trust, and wellbeing. As Chief Experience Officer, that is what I am now accountable for.
An invitation for you
I don't think every leader needs to change their title. But I do think every leader could ask the question that led me here: what does my role point my attention toward, and is that where the most important work lives? For me, the answer was experience. Better experiences are our “what”. Service design is our “how”. And a kinder, more beautiful future remains, as it always has, our “why”. That future is not built by strategy decks alone. It is built one service, one interaction, and one person at a time.
If you are thinking about what experience could mean for your organization, I would love to hear from you.
John Vardalos
Chief Experience Officer
J5 Design
John.vardalos@jfive.com
