Case, SF X-Strategy
How might we turn an awkward handoff into a flywheel?
#ai_gtm #innovation_architecture#financial_services#experience_strategy#hcd#salesforce#2021We built a senior-altitude innovation practice inside one of the world's largest enterprise software companies — because the gap between a signed contract and a transformed business was costing everyone.
Professional Services had a problem that nobody wanted to say out loud. The sales cycle ran at the executive level: vision, ambition, transformation. Then it handed off to implementation teams who were excellent at delivering software but less equipped to hold the strategic altitude the deal was signed at. The executive who championed the engagement would drift. Momentum would soften. The thing that got sold, a better future for this business, would slowly compress into a project plan.
John Armstrong, who ran Digital Strategy and Design, put the question plainly: how would you build an Ignite organization, but for Professional Services?
The answer was the XDS, XD Strategy.
The XDS was built to span the gap. To meet the executive moment, carry it through implementation, and turn a point-in-time vision into a continuous innovation engine. Not by adding more project management, but by deploying Human-Centered Design at the strategic layer: understanding what the business actually needed to be in five years, mapping the friction between here and there, and sequencing the experiences, data foundations, and organizational changes that would get them there in a way that kept compounding.
The methodology ran in a consistent arc: understand the business and market position, conduct qualitative research to define the most desirable innovation spaces, synthesize into a pilot structure, sequence the experiences that would delight users and drive progressive business growth, and architect the data foundation that would make future implementation meaningful rather than just complete.
For Banking and Wealth Management clients, this meant sitting across from a Chief Digital Officer and speaking the language of regulatory constraint, legacy infrastructure, and competitive urgency simultaneously. It meant knowing when to push toward a bold pilot and when to protect the executive from a bet they couldn't survive losing.
We grew to 60+ practitioners and $70M in annual revenue in 18 months. The methodology didn't stay in the practice — it got infused into Salesforce's Financial Services GTM organization, where it became the standard operating framework for how field teams approached their top accounts.
The XDS's deepest contribution wasn't the revenue. It was the proof that the space between sold and scaled is where the real work lives, and that it takes a specific kind of thinking to hold that space well.
The Experience Strategy Group is...
> Grounded in qualitative research
> Deployed at executive altitude
> Built to compound, not conclude
> Native to Salesforce's Human-Centered Design mindset
> Now embedded in Financial Services GTM
→ This project took place while Jad was in his current role at Salesforce.
