Leader Spotlight: Driving a mindset shift in legacy organizations, with Imran Riaz

Imran Riaz is Head of Product and Design at Air Products, an industrial gas solutions and technology company. He began his career in software development for SDU Inc and then moved to CheckFree and Information Control Corporation before transitioning to a UX role at American Electric Power. Imran then joined ANSYS as Head of User Experience and, later, Johnson Controls as VP and Global Head of UX. Before his current role at Air Products, he held leadership roles at System Soft Technologies and Digital Thinkings.

In our conversation, Imran talks about how he’s worked to change legacy organizations’ mindsets from being output-based to outcome-based. He shares his current initiative to build a center of excellence for product and design at Air Products, as well as how to demonstrate the value of product and UX throughout the organization.

Spearheading an organizational mindset shift

Based on your experience, what are the key mindset shifts you have to drive across engineering, sales, and executive leadership when introducing product management and UX into a legacy organization?

The challenge within large, global legacy organizations is that they’re engineering/solution-centric and, therefore, very output-focused. As engineers, we have to meet deadlines and build specific features based on what we know our users want. Changing that mindset to one that’s more outcome-based rather than output-based is a huge challenge.

Over the last few decades, my work has been around thinking as a customer value-driven organization rather than an output-driven organization. How do we understand the challenges our customers face and what impact does that have on the business? That’s where user experience comes in and why we combine product management and UX disciplines. Then, how do we align internally to make sure that sales, marketing, engineering, and other operational functions are working toward the same goals and values — all based on where the customers are and where they want to go?

Creating that urgency within the organization and rallying around customer centricity has been key to shifting the mindset from output to outcomes. It’s not easy. Roughly 20 percent of the organization will be on board right away, 20 percent will likely not get on board, and the remaining 60 percent is who you need to worry about. It’s really important to convince the majority who aren’t sure that delivering value is what will ultimately propel the organization further. You do this by delivering early wins and building partnerships and creating champions within the larger organization.

Air Products has been around for almost a century. How do you think about enacting change in a company with so much history?

When I joined Air Products, my boss and I actually talked about how this is not something that can be measured in the next 12, 18, or even 24 months — this is a mindset shift for an organization that’s almost 90 years old. It’s gone through multiple changes and shifts over time.

With that in mind, we knew we had to take a very measured, strategic approach to bringing product and user experience to the organization. We didn’t want to force it upon people, but rather have them see the value themselves through the work that we do. So I launched multiple pronged strategies that included picking global projects to support as pilot projects, delivering best practices and a playbook, and establishing a center of excellence.

Building a center of product excellence

What are the first principles you established to define what good product management and effective UX should look like in this context?

This is fundamental in our work. The basics of product management is defining vision and key strategies for the product, and I try to apply the same mindset to bringing product management and design to the organization. We have been focused on a multi-tiered strategy and principles. It’s around solving the real customer problems and aligning the outcomes — not outputs — to the business value. This means creating a true partnership with the businesses.

On the user experience front, we want to design for clarity and usability, not just for the aesthetics. A lot of organizations fall into that trap where they focus more on how it looks rather than how it works. There’s a fine line and balance to it. When we think about it, user experience is amazing when it’s invisible, but you have to have it to make the product successful. They go hand in hand.

How do you determine where to begin in terms of product lines, teams, or business units when introducing formal PM and UX practices into a legacy organization?

We decided when we embarked on this journey at Air Products to not hire an army of product managers. Instead, we wanted to build a center of excellence around product management and product design, bring in key strategic leaders and skills within the organization on both fronts, and have them be mentors and coaches for the rest of the organization. So, we’re deploying this multi-tier strategy of delivering best practices to teams that are already working on the products, and giving a product playbook with tools and techniques to be successful.

We also decided to only take on a couple of pilot projects as an example at the start. That way, the organization can understand how this works and how product management and design would fit into the existing processes and tools.

I don’t like the idea of throwing everything out the door and starting from scratch — it creates too much disruption and doesn’t add value. Instead, we’ve been looking at existing processes, tools, and skillsets within the organization and upskilling people. A few key experts sit in the organization who can serve as mentors and run global product and design activities. That way, people can learn from the real work being done inside our products rather than going off of external examples. That’s brought us a lot of success.

Organizational cultures evolve over time

What approach have you taken to kick this off and demonstrate the value of this new way of working?

The approach that I’ve taken is not to start where it’s easiest, but where it matters most. The product team has been helping with two large global initiatives that will have huge impacts on both our top and bottom lines. The easiest thing to do would have been to take on a small project and run with it, but then we wouldn’t get the connection and alignment to the larger business community that we serve.

With that said, this strategy doesn’t work for every organization. I’ve been in companies where we had to take small steps at a time. You have to create a strategy that works for the organization’s culture. Cultures don’t work in a void; they evolve. You have to be part of that evolution.

Are there any frameworks, processes, or methodologies you find to be most useful for embedding product thinking and user-centered design into an organization’s DNA?

One of the things I’ve found very useful is the Double Diamond design process. Implementing that from an innovation, alignment, and collaboration perspective — with both internal stakeholders and customers — has been a huge success for me. On the product side, it’s important to tie the customer’s needs through the vision and strategy, while also creating outcome-based roadmaps. This allows everybody to be able to visualize the vision and see it across their time horizons.

That’s a big sigh of relief for business partners because they can see the ideas visualized. A lot of the time, when we are trying to change mindsets and bring new approaches, people are uncomfortable because they cannot visualize them. This is where the Double Diamond approach of working with customers and creating outcome-based roadmaps is so helpful.

What’s your playbook for convincing a legacy organization that PM and UX are not just delivery functions but strategic capabilities?

The key message that I try to deliver is that, for us to become a more outcome-driven organization that delivers value for both our customers and our business partners, we need to have a partnership. I don’t look at PMs and the UX designers as individual teams outside of the businesses — I think of them as partners for success.

We want to focus on understanding the pain points. What are the customer’s pain points, and what are they asking for? We want to talk through the customer’s lens, which is always a good strategy to follow and incorporate.

For example, we are working on a few projects where we introduced the concept of user profiles and personas, as well as customer journey maps. The rest of the organization was then able to rely on UX and product as partners rather than groups that just have to deliver certain items. I also want to ensure that the rest of the organization feels part of delivering value. This allows everybody to be on the same page all the time.

This is exactly why we haven’t created an army of designers and product managers within the Air Products organization — we’re being there for the existing teams for upskilling them and arming them to be able to handle this on their own with support from our COE, and so they can continue experimenting on their own. Then, they can learn and feel empowered to do these things on their own. The key to success for me is empowering others and giving them the necessary tools and training so they don’t have to rely on us.

Demonstrating value and effectiveness

The PM role has shifted greatly in terms of the other departments it touches and collaborates with. What metrics do you use to demonstrate that PM and UX are driving business value, especially when working within legacy KPIs?

At Air Products, I didn’t find a lot of metrics in play when I joined and they are not alone in this sense, many other legacy organizations where I have led such initiatives had similar challenges. We were struggling with defining key metrics for our initiatives. Now, instead of focusing on UX and product metrics, I’m using product- and initiative-based OKRs. We are aligning on things like customer retention, support cost or productivity improvements, faster deal cycles, or improved revenue. This way, our way of working becomes very outcome-driven rather than focusing on small metrics, which may be very team focused rather than organizational focused.

Driven metrics are important, don’t get me wrong — you measure things, but they don’t necessarily translate into business outcomes. Since we don’t have a lot of metrics in play, my goal is to be outcome-based from the get-go. We’re working on defining OKRs to be initiative-based rather than standardizing everything.

Also, many times, organizations implement NPS or customer satisfaction surveys. These don’t necessarily tell you why something isn’t working or fully delivering value. That’s why having OKRs and continuously measuring them brings a lot more success to the organization than individual metrics. Metrics are important, but having them through the lens of the right outcome is key.

What types of governance structures and processes do you implement to make PM and UX functions as systematic and effective as possible?

There are a few that I’ve implemented across different organizations, including at Air Products Inc. We’re currently building product and design COEs within the organization, and we’ve delivered a new product playbook. We’re also implementing standard intake and prioritization processes. At the same time, I am also working within our larger process and operational teams to plug in product and design activities into the existing processes. That way, as they continue to evolve through the lens of product and design, we continue to gain more momentum.

We don’t want product and design to sit outside of existing processes, and for people to feel like it’s brand new. I want this to feel like something that has always been there. The way to make that happen is to ensure that we’re working processes and tools into everything as much as possible. I advise folks to stay within those guardrails — it’s necessary for long-term adoption and institutionalization. Governance isn’t about bureaucracy; it’s bringing guardrails against the chaos that change sometimes brings.

Lastly, what types of tools and infrastructure, such as design systems, product analytics, or discovery frameworks, do you prioritize to support scaling these functions over time?

Design systems are one of my absolute favorite mechanisms to bring scalability, reusability, and consistency within the organization. On the product side, we’re building a center of excellence. This comes with some dos and don’ts, as well as best practices. At the same time, bringing that vision and strategy upfront is where most teams start to get excited about the product we need to build. We’re working on shifting that mindset to asking, “What is our vision? What’s our North Star? What’s our strategy to get there? And why is this needed?”

Based on that, we can create outcome-based roadmaps. Visualizing the product journey helps bring clarity to the organization and puts stakes on the ground. These goals are therefore embedded into the long-term success of the organization and don’t go away, even with small changes.

To me, scalability starts with responsibility. It starts with the right infrastructure and the right team, which includes not just the tools and techniques, but the right people with the right skills as well.

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