Episode #35: Research-Led Product Innovation and Design Communication with Jake Taylor

Product design leaders have to improve today's workflows while making room to imagine what comes next. In Episode #35, Jake Taylor explains how research, varied industry experience, and clearer design presentations help teams make progress without treating early work as final.

What you'll learn

• How experience across industries can strengthen design judgment

• Why high-priority initiatives benefit from dedicated research

• How external users, community members, and internal experts provide different evidence

• What future-focused design work adds beyond planned feature delivery

• How to present design decisions without becoming defensive

Turn varied experience into a design advantage

Taylor began exploring web development in high school after seeing older friends work in the field. He studied multimedia and web design at the Art Institute of Colorado, then entered product work as an interaction designer at CQG. There, he learned from senior designers who had joined from Frog Design while the team modernized a legacy application with new patterns, interactions, and visual design.

His later work crossed agency, healthcare, wellness, government, consulting, freelance, enterprise, and startup settings. Taylor once worried that moving between industries might keep him from developing enough depth. He came to see the range as an advantage. Each environment exposed him to different constraints, people, and ways of thinking.

One example was his work on a design system for monitoring space-related systems within the Department of Defense. The operating context shaped the interface: dark command centers called for dark screens, bright indicators, and symbols that could stand out quickly. The broader lesson is not that every designer should move industries. It is that context changes what good design requires, and experience with different contexts can expand the questions a designer asks.

Pair delivery work with research and future thinking

At JumpCloud, Taylor led a team of five designers at different career stages. Much of his day involved helping team members move designs and discussions forward. He also tried to reserve part of his attention for product innovation. In his description, innovation is not limited to adding a feature or improving one workflow. Design can also examine several connected workflows, simplify them together, and make a more holistic future state visible enough to discuss and test.

That future work competes with urgent priorities, so it needs deliberate space. Taylor describes carving out roughly 10 to 20 percent for ideas that may not yet appear on the roadmap. Putting those ideas on paper gives the organization something concrete to socialize, evaluate, and potentially fund. This makes design a participant in shaping direction, not only a function that responds to the next sprint.

Research supports that direction. JumpCloud assigned dedicated research to its highest-priority projects, including work with potential revenue impact. The aim was to validate ideas and confirm that the team was addressing user needs before a general release, sometimes through beta or early-access groups.

Taylor outlines three main research channels. The team could hold research discussions with external users. It could also learn from a community of IT administrators who were willing to offer feedback in a more passive format. Finally, JumpCloud had hired experienced IT administrators into roles across the company, creating a group of internal subject-matter experts.

These sources are useful for different reasons. Customers and early-access users can respond from direct experience with the product. A community can surface recurring concerns over time. Internal experts can provide fast access to domain knowledge during everyday product work. None should automatically replace the others. Together, they give the team several ways to challenge assumptions before committing to a broad launch.

The structure also helps with a common leadership challenge: keeping many important projects moving while raising risks and requests for help at the right time. Research does not remove those coordination demands, but it gives decisions a clearer foundation than internal preference alone.

Present design as a conversation, not a defense

Early in his career, Taylor became attached to designs and took critical feedback personally. He changed his expectations: if an initial review gets about 70 percent right, that can still be a productive result. The purpose of review is to find gaps, not confirm that the designer already solved everything.

He also learned to anticipate the audience. Before a meeting, he considers the feedback a stakeholder commonly raises and identifies decisions that may attract attention. Explaining a deliberate change and its reasoning early can prevent the discussion from turning into a defensive exchange. Mentors and Tom Greever's book, Articulating Design Decisions, helped him develop this approach.

Listen to Episode #35

Listen for a practical account of how design leadership connects present delivery, user research, future concepts, and communication. Taylor's advice is especially useful for teams that want feedback to improve the work rather than become a verdict on the person presenting it.