The listening tour

Every time I’ve joined a company in a new industry, there’s a stretch of about six weeks where I can’t contribute much. I can design screens, but I can’t tell you whether what I’m designing is possible, legal, or something the company already tried and dropped.

The fastest way I’ve found to shorten that stretch isn’t reading. It’s talking to people, on purpose, before I have anything to show them.

Nine or ten conversations

In my first three months at Daimler I had nine or ten conversations with people across business, technical and sales. They weren’t design reviews or scripted stakeholder interviews. They were half an hour each, roughly like this:

• What do you actually do here, in your words?
• What does everyone new get wrong?
• Which system do you complain about most?
• Who should I be talking to that I haven’t?

That last question is what turns a few meetings into a tour.

The complaint question

“Which system do you complain about most” gets the most useful answers.

At Daimler the answer, over and over, was OWL, Online Warranty Links, the system that holds all the warranty and claims data for parts. It’s slow, it’s old, and everything depends on it. I heard about it from a salesperson before I heard about it from an engineer, which told me its slowness was already showing up in customer conversations.

Nobody would have put OWL in an onboarding doc. It’s shaped almost every flow I’ve designed since.

What I do with the notes

Raw notes from a listening tour are close to useless a month later. You write down what surprised you, and what surprises you in week two is obvious by week six.

So I run them through Claude and ask a narrow question: how does each comment affect me, as a designer? Not “summarize this.” A salesperson complaining about lead times is a limit on what a delivery estimate can promise. A warehouse manager mentioning two yards is a hint that a fleet’s truck list shows up already split in two.

Then I do it again after the next few conversations, with the earlier notes still in there. It builds on itself. The second pass starts catching places where two departments told me opposite things.

The uncomfortable part

You have to do this before you’ve made anything, which means every one of these meetings is you asking for half an hour and giving nothing back. That’s uncomfortable, and it’s worth doing anyway. Otherwise you spend the same half hour six months later, in a room, defending a design that was never going to work.