Trip ODell
Product • Strategy • User Experience
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Working Backwards, how my difference became a disruptive advantage

Amazon's Alexa is popular... very popular. In fact, in 2017 Alexa rejected more than 1 million marriage proposals, a 400% increase over the prior year. From Pygmalion to Pinocchio we humans are wired to convert things into people. Let's step back from the AI hype, lay down on the couch, and ask some tough questions... "tell me about your smart speaker...”.

Working Backwards: How my difference became a disruptive advantage

Originally presented to Accenture’s Global Design Community on 2/3/2021 at Practice Makes: Accessibility – A Remote Design Lecture Series

There are many ways to characterize difference, but somehow we've come to a defined difference in people as a deviation from the mean, as disordered and defective. In technology, differentiation is coveted, it's the difference between the original iPhone and everything that came before. It's the difference between Netflix and cable companies. Differentiation is what made Google the best search engine ever created. And Alexa more popular than Siri. What was the difference between all of these products and competing options is that they were designed to be simple and easy to use for everyone. Chief Experience Officer Trip O'Dell discusses invisible differences, dyslexia, innovation, and how his differences give him an unfair advantage in design, innovation, and business throughout a career at some of the world's most innovative corporations and startups.