Insights Unlocked
How customer journey mapping and storytelling unlock innovation at G2
Mon, 14 Apr 2025
Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4l9JDil ----------------------- Got a question? Want to recommend a guest? Or do you want to tell me how the show can be better? Send me a voice message via email at [email protected] ----------------------- In this Insights Unlocked episode, UserTesting’s Jason Giles sits down with Dane Howard, Vice President of Product Design at G2, for a powerful conversation on the intersection of storytelling, design leadership, and purposeful innovation. With a career that spans design leadership at Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft, Dane brings a wealth of experience—and a passion for creating human-centered experiences. Dane discusses how G2’s visual customer journey map became a transformative internal tool, using storytelling metaphors like cities and theme parks to create clarity, alignment, and excitement across the organization. He also opens up about his personal “three-legged stool” approach to balancing full-time work, advocacy, and creative passion projects. Whether you're a product leader, UX professional, or design enthusiast, this episode offers actionable insights into how to keep your work rooted in purpose and aligned with customer needs—while also making space for your own growth and creativity. What you'll learn in this episode: Why storytelling is an essential leadership skill in design and CX How G2’s customer journey map turned into a city-wide metaphor that boosted internal alignment Tips on keeping internal artifacts like journey maps alive and evolving The power of framing design work through the lens of customer experience How to balance career, passion projects, and mentorship with intentionality Resources & Links: Connect with Dane Howard on LinkedIn Connect with Jason Giles on LinkedIn G2.com danehoward.com Dane’s LinkedIn article on G2’s Customer Journey Mapping project Learn more about Insights Unlocked: usertesting.com/podcast
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of this podcast episode?
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, Dane Howard, Vice President of Product Design at G2, joins the show for a conversation that dives into storytelling, leadership, and the power of purposeful design. Dane shares how a bold customer journey map became a unifying force at G2 and why blending creativity with intention leads to better experiences.
He also offers some tips and insights for finding balance in our creativity. Great stuff. And if you have a guest suggestion, question you want answered, or you want to tell me one way you would improve the show, please send a voice message via email at podcast at usertesting.com. Thanks. Now onto the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, viewers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, senior manager for content production and user testing. And joining us today as host is Jason Giles, user testing's vice president of design. Welcome, Jason. Hello, everyone. And our guest today is Dane Howard.
Dane is a seasoned design leader and visionary in customer experience, currently serving as the Vice President of Product Design at G2. With a career spanning leading global companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft, Dane has built a reputation for blending storytelling, strategic design, and innovation to create impactful customer experiences. Welcome to the show, Dane.
Thanks so much for having me.
Dane, really excited to have you. We were talking really quickly prior to the show. We've got so much overlap, but you and I have never actually met in person. So this is kind of a treat for me. It's really nice to meet you. For me as well. You have had a really impressive career leading design and innovation at Amazon and eBay and Microsoft.
Can you tell us a little bit first about what is G2 and what drew you there? And then how does your role allow you to shape the customer experience in new and innovative ways?
Yeah, thanks so much for the question. So G2 is like a marketplace, but it brings sellers of software together with buyers of software. So if you think of it from a marketplace dynamic, one of the founders asked the question, why is it easier to have reviews for a $20 pizza than it is for a $20,000 piece of software?
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Chapter 2: How does G2's customer journey mapping work?
We do that times, you know, in an exponential way and provide valuable data to sellers so that they can help build their trust and pipeline to help grow their business.
Cool. And what brought you there?
Well, if you look at my background, I've done a lot of different kinds of categories. So I've worked in B2C, I've worked in B2B, I've worked across insurance and e-commerce and sports. And even just when I was at Microsoft, I was doing hardware. So I really love this idea of using design and enhancing my life, if you will. I think it just makes for a really interesting life.
But G2 gave me an opportunity to do something new. But I could leverage the experience of eBay. I had spent about seven years at eBay. And when you build a marketplace, when you are a third party looking in on, let's say, buyers and sellers, trust is key. So it's really important that I could leverage some of that experience, but also lean into a category that I haven't really known that much.
But the red thread, as most design leaders have, is that opportunity to build a team, grow a team, uplevel the quality of our offering. We work in squads, so it's really important that we build high-performing squads in an agile way. So that's really been the red thread throughout. And G2 is at a really interesting stage of preparing to grow to the next level.
That's amazing. That's awesome. I'm sure they're thrilled to have you. You know, in addition to the amazing design journey that you've had, you've also stayed really involved in mentorship and advocacy work, Stand Beautiful, Black Players for Change.
How do you think that design and research professionals can create this better balance between their careers and these other fulfilling aspects of their life, whether that's a passion project, advocacy, or just general personal growth?
Yeah, I love this question. So I think for most designers that are on a journey, they go from an icy path, and they ultimately get to some point where they have impact and influence. And for me, I had built some proficiency at driving a lot of traffic or selling a lot of widgets. And I think I was a little bit late to the game, but I wanted to infuse purpose And I really discovered this at eBay.
And at the time, eBay owned PayPal and Venmo and several other companies. And there's a strong sense of purpose in the PayPal Giving Fund as well as eBay for Charity. So I would loan a lot of my time as well as a lot of my designer's time that were also interested to say, let's not neglect this valuable purpose.
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Chapter 3: Why is storytelling important in design leadership?
And so I was able to lean in and use design for good and make some impact on some of those endeavors. But with regards to Stand Beautiful and Black Players for Change, these are things I do through my studio. I have what I call a professional three-legged stool now, which allows me to kind of sit in the center and be balanced.
And I find that this makes my work better when I have other things that I can do that provide different insights, but also help balance me out holistically. So I balance that between my full-time gig at G2 my coaching and advisory work. And then the third leg of the stool is what products or projects I run through my studio. So I enjoy that quite a bit.
That's amazing. As you speak about the three-legged stool, right? Like the reinforcing of each one of those and how one infuses the other. And that's really inspiring. I appreciate that. Sure. When you last year, when you joined G2, you guys created the very first visual map of the customer journey.
Um, and for those of you listening, like when you hear of a customer map or journey map, you probably have something in your head, but I am telling you, you need to go online. You need to look at this thing. You guys took a really innovative approach.
Um, can you kind of talk about why you put such an investment in that, why that project has been really important to the team, um, and then to G2 itself?
Yeah, that's a great question. So I want you to imagine the last time that you are a newbie, you might be onboarding at a company and like many executives, you kind of do a listening tour and you kind of listen around to how does the business work? uh, what does this department do? What do you do?
And I started getting all these great stories and the way that they were being told to me was kind of like, imagine we were working on a car together, but you got invited into the engine bay and you saw this, the most amazing and sophisticated wiring and functionality.
And you're like super impressed, but then you might ask a simple question, which is like, so what part of the car does this connect to? And they go, oh, this is the braking system. Like, okay, okay. So immediately you have an understanding that when the driver presses the brake button, all this magic happens. Well, that was my experience going through G2 just in my humble onboarding.
And so my proposal of a customer journey map was in a way kind of a proposal on how I could rationalize the business. And the thing is I've learned is that I needed a clear understanding about how different functions would touch the experience in order for me to connect different groups, but also to rationalize the experience itself.
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Chapter 4: How can design leaders find balance in their careers?
But there's just enough detail in it that you could give it to someone who's been there 100 times or someone who's never been there. And you can still find your way to the base of the ride at 10 a.m. the next morning if you're going to meet them. And I think we set out on this ambition and goal to say, you know, G2 is a marketplace. It's a website.
It's a combination of a .com and a series of B2B tools. And we came up with the analogy of a city. And for us, that took a little bit of leap of faith, but we started to do like 15 different workshops inside the company first. We started to describe and it started to make sense for us. Then once we launched it, we took it on tour internally. And what was amazing is that groups started to lean in.
We have, let's say, an integrations team. Integrations are using software to connect one piece of software with another. And when the integrations team said, oh, can we be the concierge? We're like, absolutely. And so then they sought out to be the best concierge possible. And it so happened that in the journey, that was at the base of this big tower where we have a lot of our offerings.
And so when they found this particular analogy, it helped them describe what they do even better inside the organization. So we've since took it on tour. We've printed it all over all of our offices. And we now use it as like a... a new artifact when we're doing brainstorming and when we're bringing different departments together. And that's been really useful for us.
And so some of the ROI is attributed to how many groups have seen it. The ROI is attributed to how many experiences that are across department make it onto the roadmap. The other is we are turning it into an education module for all new employees this year.
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Chapter 5: What innovative approaches did G2 take for their customer journey map?
And so it hasn't even become external yet, but we wanted to make sure that we were aligned internally in order for us to then take it externally. And so that was really a big portion of last year. And so we're excited about what this year brings for the next version of the map.
The, you know, you touched on something that we often talk about is like, how do, when we think about our staff and the amazing talent that we have, like, One of the things that we find is to keep them engaged is to understand the context that they're working and the potential, where they fit within this big machine. I mean, you and I were both at Microsoft, right? This big, massive machine.
And I remember so often being like, I don't know, I'm just working on this cog, man. And it took a long time for me to get that appreciation of the context and how my work fit into something broader. And I think, although maybe not something absolutely measurable, I can imagine that impact that it has. Clearly, you understand it since you're running all your new employees through it, but...
Um, yeah, I, as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, this is so much more, not just engaging, but allows you, I think, because you've used the metaphor and it's so approachable and you can really drill in and see both the zoomed out view, but then the contextual view it's, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm excited for, uh, for it to go, go public.
Yeah, thank you. Well, one of the things we learned along the journey was regardless of our function, the experiences we ship together unite us. And I would attribute a lot of that thinking even back to Airbnb. There's a project called Project Snow White years ago where they hired a Pixar storyboard artist, and they actually storyboarded their entire guest journey and their host journey.
And they turned these into physical panels that were up in their office. And as the story goes, if you were having a meeting, it was useful and helpful to bring that panel into the meeting. And so even if you're having a predominantly legal focused meeting, it sits within the context of, well, this is the scene that came before this meeting, and this is the scene that's going to come after.
So how do we make this the best possible scene possible? And that's what united a lot of the functions. And so that really inspired me and really was kind of the hallmark of why I do a project like this.
Yeah. I'm sure you have broad aspirations, but how do you think about keeping an artifact like this alive over time? I know I've spent countless dollars and time in investing in things like personas and other things, but really the artifact itself, getting that created, that's only the first part of the work, right? The real work is getting it fed throughout an entire organization.
How do you think about that, some ideas around how you envision it being implemented further?
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Chapter 6: How do you keep internal artifacts like journey maps relevant?
So I've kind of reserved a little bit of budget to come back to V2 this year. And, you know, we have a whole part of the city that connects, you know, we have this data lake. So we're going to make it. We're going to, you know, have some cool people water skiing on it. And there's going to be an island on it. There's going to be lifeguards on it. And every...
every role around the lake can be attributed to someone inside the company that works on or near the data lake. Oftentimes, I bring this up because we learned that when you meet with legal or security or IT, And they're so critical to the uptime of a business or the security or protocol of what keeps a product safe. And so they need to have roles as well.
So we want to make sure that they can see themselves in this map as well.
I can really see the power of having this kind of common taxonomy or metaphor across because so many brands are really challenged with getting alignment internally. And, um, I love that even in your, how you're measuring the success of this might be like cross organization, cross team, uh, initiatives that are successfully never, uh, delivered. Um, and,
Are there other ways, whether it's storytelling or artifacts like this, or maybe you can give some examples of where it has literally helped break down some of those silos?
Yeah. You know, if you work for a small company or a big company, this is still a challenge for any leader, and particularly design leaders, because, again, the tendency is to want to stick to your division, stick to your goals. And everyone has an annual planning process. We just went through ours. And most planning processes...
that I've been associated with have a tops-down approach that is then met with a bottoms-up kind of empowerment phase. And the challenge is that when goals are stated, and they are stated in such a way so that they cascade distinctly into one of those silos, then there's very little motivation to have one division work with another. So we recently did a goal creation process.
We were inspired by... So Marty Kagan is an author. He's written Transformed. He's also written Empowered. He's also written Inspired. We really dug into Transformed. And what was great about it was how you actually articulate problem spaces. And as a leadership team, we made sure that we articulate... problems in such a way so that when they were cascaded, it required cross-division work.
And it's not a foregone conclusion that all of a sudden people will work closer together. But another thing that I've done as a design leader that's been useful is that we just launched at kickoff last week. So we do an annual meeting where we communicate our annual rhythm and our annual fiscal year.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from internal communication in design?
But design, when I say it, it somehow gets, it's like a loaded term for some reason, I don't know why, but a lot of internally, I find that it just feels like it's being interpreted as, oh, well, that's the design team, it's the design group. And so what I've learned to do is just shed some of the design functional language
And that's totally fine when I'm running my craft and running my design crits and speaking with other designers on their work. But when we're working collaboratively in our squads and working on, you know, we have a three-legged stool as well, which is like design, product, and engineering. And you're supposed to put the customer in center of that stool. That's in service of the customer.
And so I find that the stories land better inside an organization if they are customer-focused rather than design-focused.
Yeah, I totally get that. And that was actually going to be my question because I can imagine, depending on the organization, you coming in, hey, I want to like... illustrate our customer journey. Like what's this design guy thinking? Like, how is this real? And so I imagine you've probably, uh, think about what this particular culture or these stakeholders, uh, what would resonate with them?
Did you have to do that with, uh, coming up with the G2 map to, to, to figure out either what the right metaphor was or even like maybe the right format?
Yeah, well, it had never been done before. And I would say that this type of work plus any of the visualization work falls into this category of what's the company's appetite for its future? What's the company's appetite for serving a customer? And whenever I go into an organization, I mentioned listening to her, I try to pick up on clues.
And so it's great when your CEO is an advocate or the founder or anyone inside the organization that is a influencer that has a lot of influence. If they are a champion for the customer, you want to take note. You want to listen. You want to feed off of their energy and understand why.
There's a lot of talk about serving the customer, and I find that you have to also look for clues on what mechanisms or operational mechanisms or what's being done to translate that interest in serving a customer. And I go to the path of least resistance first and I start to create great wins there. And then through that organic interest, I start to then shine a light on it through storytelling.
And then I I'd say I'm fishing for a comment. And my favorite comment from a CEO or leadership or anyone from up high is, uh, So why aren't we doing that? That's my favorite comment because what it implies is that we've shown or shared something that is pretty awesome and it has the right amount of emotional and content or data surround the argument that says, well, why aren't we doing that?
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