J.M. Downey
Head of Experience Design, AT&T Business
Experience is either designed deliberately—or fragmented by default.
I’m a researcher who ended up running design organizations. I lead Experience Design for AT&T Business: product design, user research, service design, and innovation across the networking, security, and connectivity products we sell to companies of every size.
Customers experience one company, not our org chart. For the last four years, my work has had one goal: get the customer into the room before the big decisions are made, not after.
How I work
1
Start with the whole service.
In a large company, every team knows its part of the journey deeply and hands off at the edge. So wherever I go, the first thing I build is a view of the whole service, made in a room with the people who actually run it. Usually it becomes the document people argue from, and that’s how you know it’s working.
2
Treat the business as a design constraint.
Designers and researchers like to frame it as us and them: we know the customer, and they won’t listen. I think that framing is a failure of design. Legacy systems, sales incentives, budget cycles, and decades of decisions nobody in the room made are the materials. The job is to change things inside an organization that wasn’t built to think the way we do, without waiting for it to come around.
3
The screen is the last decision.
I don’t care much what a screen looks like. I care what it does. My designers care how it looks, and they should. But in a company this size, much of the look was settled before anyone moved a pixel. The open questions sit upstream: Is the need real? Is it ours to solve? What is it worth? Get those right and the screens get easier. Get them wrong and no amount of polish will save them.
Work
Three threads from the last several years. Product names are left out on purpose, because the pattern is the point.
Building design into the business
Anyone can hire designers. Getting a company to bring design in before the decisions are made is the hard part. →
Moving design upstream
The expensive decisions get made before anyone opens Figma. That’s where design needs to be. →
Making the whole service visible
Every team knows its own part of the journey. The customer lives in the handoffs between them. →
About
I lead Experience Design for AT&T Business. My organization spans product design, user research, service design, and innovation across the networking, security, and connectivity portfolio.
I started as a strategist at Leo Burnett, then spent years as a design researcher and strategist at Conifer Research and IA Collaborative, working with clients like Airbnb, Amgen, Capital Group, and Samsung. That’s where I learned the thing I still lead with: what people ask for and what they actually need are rarely the same, and the gap between the two is where most products go wrong.
Since then I’ve mostly built design capability where it didn’t exist, first at UnitedHealth Group and then at AT&T. I’m most useful when the answer isn’t settled yet: whether an idea has merit, what the customer actually needs, what belongs in the offer, and what has to be true for the whole experience to hold together.
I trained on both sides of the table: a Master of Design from the IIT Institute of Design and an MBA from DePaul. That’s most of why I treat the business as a design constraint rather than an obstacle, and why I’m skeptical of any design argument that can’t survive a budget conversation.
Record
2024–present
Head of Experience Design, AT&T Business
2022–2024
Director, Design Strategy & Innovation, AT&T Technology Solutions
2020–2022
Director, Product & Service Design, UnitedHealth Group
2018–2020
Principal, Design Research & Strategy, IA Collaborative
2016–2018
Senior Design Researcher, Conifer Research
2015–2016
Strategist, Leo Burnett
Education
Master of Design, Human-Centered Design Strategy, IIT Institute of Design
MBA, Brand Strategy and New Product Management, DePaul University
BA, Media and Persuasion, Miami University
Teaching
Adjunct, Interprofessional Projects, Illinois Institute of Technology
I’m from West Lafayette, Indiana, by way of Chicago, and I live in Dallas now. Off the clock: disco, nerdy video games, and pets with no snout to speak of. Weaknesses, unchanged since my first bio: English bulldogs, pugs, spelling, Oreos.