David Justh
Complexity-Informed Strategy ⬦ Applied Research ⬦ Discovery Guide ⬦ Information & Service Design
16 years of experience as an executive-facing thought partner and change agent who:
Clears noise and develops trust through chains of defensible logic
Protects revenue and mitigates risk in complex adaptive systems
Influences decisions to bring high-visibility projects across finish lines
Architects organizational readiness and operational coherence in fluid problem spaces
Reads situations, smooths over tensions, generates internal commitment, inspires action, and makes calls when playbooks don’t fit
Field testing semiautonomous military drones
This page summarizes 7 projects. Detailed presentations with visual artifacts available for live shareouts.
Employer: Shield AI
Features: B2B, strategy, human factors, military, aviation, startup, risk assessment, Agile, Lean, sprints, influence, leadership, alignment, conflict resolution, organizational ergonomics, service design, design crits, research (desk, discovery, guerrilla, foundational, empirical, formative)
Product innovation through organizational innovation
Designing stakeholder engagement to build and scale strategic, resilient organizational learning
Premise: Researchers twist themselves into 🥨 trying to gain influence in organizations that are often structured to deflect interpretation. With this context, this case involves a process to expose veiled warnings at a simulated flight test, which amounted to a warning call for my teams to reconsider what they thought they knew (a hermeneutic event). Specifically, it’s an expository account of how I resolved a conflict of perception, communication, and expectations (1) in an unorthodox way and (2) in a challenging business environment and information landscape.
Value & Impact: By weaving together elements of risk mitigation, decision-making frameworks, research democratization, forms of non-verbal communication (paralanguage), philosophy of science, and underutilized rhetorical persuasion techniques — and also by shining a bright light on the subtle yet inescapable presence of biases in research theater — I:
Exposed a problem the organization didn’t know it had
Effected a dynamic compromise
Gained cross-functional allies
Actualized a test lab
Socialized better research
Reduced cycle times by 57%
Successfully launched the company’s first research ops and knowledge infrastructures
Improved organizational communication by connecting knowledge across teams
In the end, this effort enhanced product coherence and trust among flight operators
Advocating for “brilliant basics” in human-AI teaming
Applying first principles to a complex adaptive mission planning system headed toward its 1.0 release
Premise: Set in a semi-regulated space, this story outlines how I prevailed upon a team of designers unfamiliar with how foundational human factors concepts would aid their work in the design of a multi-modal system focused on ISR missions (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Topics fundamentally relate to the interplay of information processing (emphasis on human limitations, from human factors) and meaning processing (emphasis on leveraging capabilities in a control system, from cognitive systems engineering). Topics include:
Signal detection
Color psychology
Situational awareness
Task & work performance
Aesthetic usability effects
Human-AI function allocation
How people do and don’t learn
Occupational stress and emotional valence
Germane cognitive load (the working memory effort allocated to managing intrinsic load)
Value & Impact: By bringing clarity to a sophisticated socio-technical system through broadened upward communication — the nucleus of research — designs better conformed to military standards and began to satisfy customer/government expectations. This study demonstrates one such non-NDA-protected feature (among 29 instruments I worked on).
Employer: Indeed
Features: B2B2C, strategy, leadership, applied anthropology, organizational alignment, service design, conflict resolution, research (desk, discovery, empirical)
Navigating asymmetry, power relationships, and AI to embrace paradox and difference
A story of measuring thrice and cutting once: Reflecting on how — and how not — to lead a strategy kickoff
What? (Context)
George Bernard Shaw might’ve put it best: The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
In technology organizations small and large, it’s not unusual to spend more than 50% of one’s time in meetings. While this aspect is popularly lamented, such rituals often are the work. They’re inherently social and even political in nature, from frequent stakeholder engagements to performance reviews.
This case concerns a related construct: leading a high visibility project kickoff, specifically the organizational processes, power relationships, and social learning surrounding them, since flows of process, influence, and learning are often the vectors that drive invention and innovation. (These versus organizational culture, which is typically ill-defined and tends to represent culture as deterministic.) In this case, a study brief about designing for different types of ATS partner integrations resulted in an unexpectedly knotty, misaligned, and failed kickoff due to:
Many influential cooks being in the kitchen, each of whom had their own agendas and understandings of the information landscape
It happening soon after (1) a large scale re-org and (2) my arrival at the company
Misalignment occurring despite my best laid plans. For instance:
Studying the problem space, or so I thought
Being unaware that key players were missing
My having enhanced our OKRs to POKRs (where P = “perspectives”)
Strategy never really being “just strategy”
So what? (Actions)
The show must go on, as research strategists functionally serve (1) as the glue on a team or project, and (2) as business therapists. Undeterred, I borrowed from the concepts below to identify, confront and direct communication and ownership issues that are prone to arise when designing socio-technical systems, especially amidst re-orgs, which have become the new black:
Group cognition: e.g., macro, situated, distributed, team, social
Incident response: e.g., detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery
Systems Convening: A distinct leadership stance that holds space across boundaries to align unlikely partners and nurture long-term social learning in complex environments. Relational and contextual in nature, “conveners” create conditions for change by weaving together people and ideas across silos, often without formal authority.
Boundary objects: The social equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife (e.g., adaptable, multipurpose) within an infrastructure, these objects bridge different groups and disciplines without requiring full consensus. They facilitate coordination across communities with different perspectives, goals, and practices.
Now what? (Results)
By triangulating the above, and being motivated by impact over recognition — since, after all, strategy and research typically happens backstage anyway — I accomplished the following:
Surfaced latent blockers related to organizational constraints, territoriality, and information asymmetry. In so doing, I successfully:
Navigated discordant power relationships, learned different teams’ playbooks, and gained allies
Linked several teams that didn’t customarily communicate with each other
Identified a generative AI fly in the ointment, which was sacrificing realism for scale and efficiency
Cleared enough air to allow key owners to collaborate
Re-scoped and rewrote the study brief, which meant identifying enough enabling constraints to proceed
Launched the study
Acknowledged the kickoff’s shortcomings, including persnickety political questions I usually dig into on the front end, but didn’t
Socialized the lessons learned to leadership and product peers: e.g., the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights
Employer: Viator
Features: B2C, SaaS, travel product strategy, e-commerce, segmentation, information architecture, content design, expert review, research (pathfinding, formative)
How to reduce marketing costs by creating a more targeted SEO/SEM strategy through research
What motivates people to travel? Which information sources do they trust? Which devices do they prefer? What kinds of emotional bonds are formed?
Premise: On behalf of one of the world’s largest travel excursion sites — and in a bid to make the site more navigable, relatable, sticky, and resilient — I conducted an expert review of booking processes and a meta-analysis of primary research to systematically assess multiple dimensions surrounding travel planning. With 116 participants, rich data coding techniques allowed the inquiry to move from the abstract to the concrete, and substantively address attributes related to:
Brand loyalty
6 influencer typologies
Threats to the company
Content design and IA governance issues
10 new customer archetypes through segmentation
Theories of value, motivation, trust, and customer identity
Traveler priorities, tactics, goals, obstacles, emotions, and technologies
Biases related to participants, methodology, and, naturally, the lead researcher (myself)
Value & Impact: Ultimately, the effort revealed opportunities that speak to how the company can alleviate high SEO/SEM costs through factors related to personalization and the psychology behind how people search for information. Actionable recommendations were added to the roadmap and then global navigation, used by 35 million monthly users. At a high level, prime examples include:
Content funnels organized by interest
Content funnels organized by geography
Client: Nuance, a Microsoft company
Features: Product strategy, medical technology, healthcare, risk assessment, workplace culture, research (foundational, formative), experience mapping
It’s cheaper to understand your users than to apologize to your shareholders
A story of opportunity cost: Saving money through the evaluation of nurses’ attitudes toward AI-powered speech technology
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
Premise: As frontline workers, nurses face numerous challenges. How do they communicate with colleagues and patients? How do they record and share patient information? What are their workflows and priorities?
By exploring such questions, this inquiry into occupational culture and technology used a desirability study to crystallize a client hypothesis that its high-touch AI-powered technologies (DAX, DMO) might find product-market fits for nurses in inpatient settings (e.g., ICU, medical-surgical, rehab). From discovery to readout, representative samples of nurses shared their attitudes, values, and lived experiences in a study both operationally and intellectually complex. Research yielded remarkably consistent themes, thanks to interpretivist and postpositivist techniques, including:
Cognitive interviews: To enhance memory recall, reconstruct context, provide detailed descriptions, elicit emotions, and detect loaded language
Different coding types: Codes are knowledge objects. Matching code types gives systematic form and flow to the data, has a de-biasing effect, and helps to avoid contested vision
Ethnomethodological workplace study: Applied interpretative phenomenological analysis to:
Contextualize lived experiences: e.g., perspectives, attitudes, values, beliefs, behavioral norms
Understand how participants perceived, constructed, ordered, made sense of, and acted upon their experiences and social realities (relates to Umwelt)
Facilitate theoretical development, which is far from an academic luxury, as it bolsters explanatory power, informs practice, and organizes reality
A detailed experience map visually summarized 800+ coding instances, 40 core findings, and 24 distinct insights, revealing 91% of participants either disinterested or hostile to the use of such technology.
Value & Impact: In the end, the engagement demonstrated that:
These were solutions in search of problems
Technology isn’t the answer to every problem, which, in turn…
Opportunity costs: This initiative saved the client millions of dollars and thousands of working hours. Nuance subsequently shifted its focus to narrower areas showing greater potential.
“Experience by itself teaches nothing. Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.” — W. Edwards Deming
Client: Chime Financial
Features: B2C, FinTech, SaaS, agile, product design, behavior change, content design, high-fidelity prototype, research (discovery, formative, summative)
A proof of concept to ease mental burdens associated with student loan debt
Premise: In 2022, American college students collectively owed $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, with 44% of fully employed borrowers saying they couldn’t afford monthly loan payments or were in default.
This work explored — and designed interventions for — a problem space fraught with angst. Surprisingly voluminous data were captured from a sequence of activities that included:
Market competition assessments: To assess the current landscape and mitigate risk by identifying trends, positions, threats, gaps, and opportunities
Charrettes: To foster iterative collaboration, generate imaginative ideas, resolve conflicts in time-bound fashion, and test feasibility
In-depth cognitive interviews: To enhance memory recall, reconstruct context, provide detailed descriptions, elicit emotions, and detect loaded language
Concept tests: To test hypotheses, prioritize and refine ideas, assess viability, mitigate risk, and inform development and strategy
The emergence of clear themes, feedback loops, and guided knowledge embedded inside of prototyped interactions led to welcome solutions that addressed financial goal-setting and integrated loan repayments.
Value & Impact: With an eye toward healthier financial living and reducing mental burdens, a proof of concept for a more comprehensive money management system provided Chime members with tools that afford greater agency through practical economics, which was this project’s remit.
Client: GoodRx
Features: B2C, healthcare, SaaS, e-commerce, product design, content design, research (exploratory, formative, summative)
Defining an opportunity space for the discount prescription giant
Premise: In a bid to increase customer retention and lifetime value, GoodRx sought to expand beyond its core prescription discount service by moving into a more holistic space built around a “Managing Illness” theme. In this instance, a bespoke usability study doubled as discovery in how it additionally explored a sizable investment opportunity: the wellness management arena.
The hybrid approach utilized a multi-stage protocol that leveraged customized heuristic evaluations, competitive landscape analyses, and a usability study with participants who:
Represented diverse sampling: They managed 11 chronic health conditions and used 16 other wellness resources for self-care
Responded to series of verbal probes in cognitive interviews
Completed randomized tasks to mitigate demand characteristics: To obtain accurate sentiments and discover how they attuned to value (“valueception”)
Dozens of findings were synthesized into 7 core themes, and a gap analysis revealed how GoodRx does and doesn’t help customers manage certain illnesses. It additionally revealed differences in mental models, which form rather variably against (1) the crowded field of comparable wellness resources on the market, and (2) the US’ opaque healthcare system.
Value & Impact: This work introduced to GoodRx the first critical assessment of emotional tolls associated with chronic illnesses, as well as the evolving self-care strategies that people form as a result. The client accepted the study’s findings and insights, which it used to inform design recommendations about how to rethink not only the existing content funnels in question, but even a wholesale reconsideration of its core service.