Discover the 5 essential lessons that shaped a career in UX design and product development. Join Emanuel as he speaks with Adam Malamis, principal of Blue Goose and head of product for Gander, about what it takes to design mission-critical systems that users can trust.
Adam shares real-world insights from designing a flood management platform for the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), a project that required managing complex data, cross-functional teams, and high-stakes decision-making. Learn how to hire the right expertise, spend time with your users, iterate fast, frame feedback correctly, and celebrate wins along the way.
Whether you're building a government system, a B2B SaaS product, or optimizing marketing workflows, these principles apply to any project.
Watch The Recording
Topics Covered
- Hiring expertise to move faster and build better
- The power of user research and discovery workshops
- Rapid experimentation and iteration cycles
- How to ask for and give meaningful design feedback
- Why celebrating wins matters for teams and clients
- Applying UX principles to AI-driven product development
- Traditional SEO vs. AI search: where to focus your efforts
Key Takeaways
- Hire expertise you don't have: accelerates timelines, reduces burden on clients, produces better work
- Spend time with your users: job shadow, observe workflows, ask thoughtful questions
- Experiment and iterate fast: frame experimentation clearly, specify what feedback you need
- Tell clients exactly what feedback you want: present designs in meetings, never via email alone
- Designs never speak for themselves: always present in context with workflow explanation
- Celebrate your wins: showcases impact, builds team morale, creates project champions
- Five users generate clear UX signals: you don't need 50 participants to find patterns
- Traditional SEO isn't dead: but for B2B, prioritize AI search and higher-intent discovery paths
- Partnership over vendor relationships: show consequences and tradeoffs, then respect client autonomy
- Rapid customer feedback loops drive success: speak to users weekly, iterate based on signal
About Adam Malamis
Adam Malamis is the principal of Blue Goose and head of product for Gander, a B2B AI search analytics platform built for marketers.
His work spans UX research, product strategy, government and nonprofit systems, accessibility, and AI-driven product development.
Connect with Adam
Full Transcript
Emanuel: Hi, everyone, and welcome again.
Emanuel: My name is Emanuel, founder of How About Some Marketing and digital marketer by day and night. I help businesses grow from their digital marketing channels, paid, organic, through their website, paid advertising, meta lead generation, and so forth. I've created How About Some Marketing with the idea of growing a community of peers and have a resource of information, something that I would want to have in my activity, being paid ads, being organic, being even how to be a better team member, how to work better with everyone else, how to even use and leverage better design for the work that you're doing.
Emanuel: And for example, I'm not a great graphic designer, but I ended up myself and in the... inevitably we need to adjust some and tweak some stuff. So some concepts are very important. I wouldn't be much of a marketer myself if I wouldn't tell you to go to howaboutsomarketing.com and subscribe to the newsletter because that's where you'll find today's recording, future announcements for future webinars, and we do have some announcements to make.
Emanuel: I'm really excited about the future, and Adam, feel free to share at any time if you want to at this moment or not. And of course, past webinars, we had tremendous guests, so there's something to learn from each one. That's what I can say. Follow, share, subscribe howaboutsomarketing.com. That being said, it's my pleasure and privilege to introduce today's guest, Adam Malamis.
Emanuel: Now, I do have a bio here that has been used for promoting this, but I won't do justice. So I would like Adam, before he starts his presentation, just to briefly, for 30 seconds, 40 seconds, introduce yourself and tell us what do you want people to know about you, the Adam the professional, and what today's topic is all about, of course.
Adam: Sounds good. All right. So hi, everyone. My name is Adam Malamis. I've had a, about a 25-year career in design, 20 of which have been really focused on UX and UX research. I'm the principal and owner of Blue Goose, an agency that specializes in developing high-profile government and nonprofit websites and critical applications like the one we're going to chat about today.
Adam: I'm also the head of product for Gander, which is a B2B AI search analytics company that's built for marketers. Something you should know about me other than my love for gardening the best thing and my favorite thing about my work is getting to talk to passionate people about the work that they do.
Adam: I think that excitement is contagious, and getting to talk to nerdy people about the work is just something that's really gratifying for me
Emanuel: Excellent. I'm happy you're here. Without further ado, I think you have a couple of slides and a couple of things that you would like to share with our audience, and I think it's time to do that now
Adam: Great. Okay. So during this presentation, you're going to hear me talk a lot about what great UX is. And great is this really loaded and subjective term. So when I use great, I mean that the person on the other side of the screen is able to accomplish whatever task they set out to do with as little unintentional friction as possible.
Adam: And that's really key, unintentional friction. So I think it was Jared Spool that said that good UX is often invisible, but sometimes great UX involves friction. So think about the time where you've deleted something and you didn't have a confirmation anymore. There were times where that happened. So when we talk about unintentional friction and then intentional friction, you're going to see that kind of highlighted throughout this presentation. So let's start out. The project that I'm going to talk to you about today was for the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, specifically the flood management team, and their mission is to reduce the risk to life and prevent property damage caused by flooding. So what made this project the most difficult of my career?
Adam: One, it's really complex. It had a lot of data, as you'll see, and it was all interrelated and lived within a self-contained ecosystem. And then that data was really granular, and precision really matters for the flood team's decision-making. And lastly, it required expertise our team just didn't have.
Adam: So we had worked with the TRCA for two years prior to winning this project, but the depth of knowledge that was required we needed to hire up. It needed a subject matter expertise. I also wanna take a moment here to shout out to the TRCA team, one, for being supportive of this webinar, and two, for being an absolute pleasure to work with.
Adam: Hey, team Okay, so the goals of the project. Originally, we had a previous flood management platform, and it was reaching the end of life. They wanted to upgrade both the platform and the way that they worked with the data that they were getting from it. So when our team conducted the initial kickoff meeting, we discovered four goals.
Adam: One, assemble critical information in a single source of truth, which would allow for faster and more accurate decision-making, which would reduce potential flood damage, helping the TRCA to fulfill their public mandate
Adam: Okay, so who's using the platform and what's important to them, broadly speaking? There's an author, Tamara Adlin. She authored The Essential Persona Lifecycle. She had this philosophy that I had adopted, that if we don't make X persona, and in this case TRCA flood staff very happy, we've failed. So that doesn't mean that we're going to be sacrificing the experience of other users, but it does mean that we need focus.
Adam: And so for flood duty officers or flood staff, they need to be able to trust the tool with the decisions that protect people's lives. So they needed to have clarity under pressure, accurate gl- granular data, and a clear path to task completion. Now, there's also secondary users, so external stakeholders, partners, and the general public, which largely required informational pieces.
Adam: There were other conservation authorities that were using it for their particular jurisdiction and not site-wide or ecosystem-wide access. There's also the media, who mostly used visualizations and for factual reporting. And lastly, academia. So academia and researchers. One of the goals from a feature perspective was to start an open data initiative, which would give academics and researchers the ability to download a wealth, years, decades' worth of data without going through a lengthy request process, which at the time they had to do.
Adam: Okay. So what does success look like? What are our KPIs? The flood team was already doing exceptional work, and the project was going to be judged by one metric, which was to reduce the time it takes to make an accurate decision. And there was an immense amount of impact, too. Faster decision-making allows flood messages, so the warnings, to go out quicker, which is bed, better lead time for stakeholders to prepare.
Adam: So this one metric spanned multiple roles and situations that extended beyond the organization. To give you an example the Toronto Transit Commission, or the TTC, uses the Don River page, you'll see an example of it later, for transit closures. And now that you have a bit of context about the project, its stakeholders, and what we were trying to accomplish, let's jump into the lessons. So first lesson: hire expertise that helps you move faster and build better. As I'd mentioned, this project required immense amount of subject matter expertise. And so while our team are all experienced designer, designers and developers, we aren't engineers, and we certainly aren't hydrological engineers.
Adam: So the people who were going to use this platform they spoke a different language. They had a different daily vocabulary that we needed to pick up quickly. So to give you an example, I'd need to know how an FDO reads gauges that have HA and HHA, or high alert and then high alert, and then the subsequent actions they take based on their onboarding menu.
Adam: I'd also need to understand the process that moved flood outlook to flood watch to flood warning, and the differences between those terms. They also had years of experience, education, and a contextual understanding that our team completely lacked, and we couldn't simply just brush up on. There was no manual to be like, "This is how you become a hydrological engineer."
Adam: So what we did was hired an independent engineer to translate for us. We included them in every part of the process. They were part of discovery, copied on emails, and work a- with all members of our team and the TRCA team to help bridge the knowledge gap. And so quick shout-out to Pete too, by the way.
Adam: While we might have been able to make it work without them the project would've taken way longer, it would've cost us a lot more, and more importantly, it would've placed an undue burden of education on our client. So by hiring this outside talent, we made everyone's lives easier and the project was far better for it.
Adam: Next lesson, spend time with your users.
Adam: So this is likely the best and most foundational lesson that a marketer, a designer, or a founder can learn. And I get it, it's a bit of a design and startup cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason. It's almost like saying, "Be curious." Yeah that's kind of part of the role, right? So to get more detailed on that, I found that if you learn how to ask really thoughtful and insightful questions, it really helps your career, and in my experience, more than any other skill you can develop.
Adam: So for this project, the time spent with the TRCA team predominantly through discovery. So you can see here after the initial kickoff meeting, I facilitated design workshops with their engineers and our development team as observers. And you can see that they're right here, they're presenting. The best way I've found to determine where the friction points are is to understand the landscape and the mental models of your primary users.
Adam: So we wanted to get them involved. We got people warmed up and wanted to have them comfortable expressing their ideas. So we started by breaking them into groups to brainstorm optimizations to a single problem or workflow. Then here, as you can see, they had to present it to the group. The group would then ask questions and give feedback, and this whole workshop is very structured, and it was important to me and also to the rest of the participants to feel comfortable sharing their ideas.
Adam: Now, if this is done well, the entire team feels like they've contributed to the design, which is really helpful for any kind of change management. And that actually helps create project champions inside the organization, which is also really important if you wanna take calculated risks or try something new.
Adam: You'll also get really valuable insights into the team's workflows, how they think, how they problem solve, and that was really helpful for me as the design lead.
Adam: As part of discovery, we also did an intense documentation review of all of their standard operating protocols, and we also got to watch them in action by job shadowing. So I would visit their offices during events. I would sit with them at their desk. I would go into the field with the dam engineers on site at the actual dams.
Adam: And watching them in action helped me ask questions in context and get an idea of the more administrative aspects of their work. This led to another workshop where we're exploring the jobs to be done. For this particular project, we used something called McGovern's Top Tasks framework, although Jobs to Be Done framework is also excellent.
Adam: We facilitated sessions, multiple sessions per day that lasted about a week, and these were really long days. So for every workshop, we did at least two, three-hour workshops per day. There's at least an hour or two of cleanup, documentation and other kind of administrative tasks. So there's a lot of conversation, and then you also want to be able to help the team work through how the site could work, not how it works currently, because they had an existing platform, but to be aspirational, to think beyond what's existing currently and beyond their current skill set or ideas.
Adam: So one of my favorite questions to ask is to tell them to wave their magic wand. How would a specific feature work? What could it eliminate from their workflow? And what would they do with the time that they gained back? And so you can see here we had a whole whack of stickies. The vast majority of these were consolidated into user stories.
Adam: And so for those who aren't familiar, user stories are part of an agile framework, and what they do is they document the technical scope of a project from the user's perspective. And so this Trello repository of user stories was the technical source of truth for the scope of the project. And it has a list of the tasks to be completed and the features that, and functions that the site would in include.
Adam: It also had something called acceptance criteria, which gets really granular into how a specific feature or function would work. Now, by the end of this whole week-long process, we had about 254 user stories of varying complexity that were further consolidated down to about 173 interrelated features and functions.
Adam: Now, at the time, this was in 2017, this seemed like a lot. Just to give you an idea, in comparison, Gander has about 317 consolidated features and functions that's been whittled down from several hundred, and only 50 of them are part of our future product roadmap.
Adam: Lesson number three: experiment and iterate fast.
Adam: Now, this both externally and internally within your own team. So involving clients in the experimentation phase can be valuable, but it has to be framed correctly. We'll get to that in a minute. As you saw, we had an extensive discovery process that lasted for weeks before we even started the design process, but it's still impossible to anticipate every need from every stakeholder in every situation, including fringe cases, even with that kind of careful planning and execution.
Adam: Okay, so let's get right into it. So here you can see we have three iterations of these cards. These are rain and stream gauges, which are the core element of the platform. They contain the information and trends that shape exploration and subsequent decision-making. Now, this was the core design component and they were supposed to go to scale with different kind of information.
Adam: So you can see here our first iteration, there's not a lot going on. Our second iteration and our third iteration have very similar feels with different granularity of information. So when I say that this, the information in the project that made it really difficult for us to get our head wrapped around, a decimal place actually matters, and you'll see that more often in subsequent screens where two versus three versus four decimal places actually make a difference. And here you can see there's a little bit of a difference between the, what we had shown here with the little gauges around precipitation and the final product that's actually serving as a card currently. As I mentioned, in these stream gauges you have three levels of granularity beyond the decimal place. You're able to switch out timeframes. You have your HHA or high-high alert, and then your normal water flow level. But this basic design pattern fed into this larger ecosystem, which you can see here. So this was the interactive map and a list of all 68 rain, stream, and dam gauges. This was our first iteration. So you can see here we've got all of the info, or at least some of the the info around the stream level and flow upfront, just so you could see it at a glance. We've explored different shapes and iconography, different different color...
Adam: it would've been different colors, if you could see it. You'll see it momentarily. But different icons, different shapes, and then the level of granularity alongside the cards. Much of the initial design stuck in our second iteration, but we changed what happens on a click. So here, if there are multiple gauges, so stream, rain, and dam gauges, which often there are, especially at the dams, you had to be able to see how many gauges from afar there were there.
Adam: And when you click in, it would show you the three gauges that were there. When you clicked on one of the actual gauges, you'd have more information like you saw there, which led to a less cluttered screen. Speaking of clutter though, you get a little bit more information here. So when someone only turned on rain gauges alongside precipitation data, we needed to see at a glance across the entire GTA and its ecosystem how much rain was actually falling, because that would affect stream levels.
Adam: So again we have to be able to anticipate fringe cases in design. So in this instance here, you can see that we've got ninety-nine millimeters, and then in other instances we have it sunny, and then you've got just the variety in between. So the design has to be flexible. And so in mission critical projects where fringe cases cover loss of life or loss of property, we want it to be as comprehensive as possible.
Adam: And this is what it ended up looking like. So if we go back, you can see that on the sidebar there, there's a couple of other options that weren't included in the final design. So we have things like the watershed boundaries, all of the dam gauges, precipitation data. So you can turn some of the clutter off. For us, this is a lot of visual information. For FDOs or flood duty officers, this is day in and day out, so they get the system. And here I'll show where it overlaps Environment Canada's weather radar system as well. A little bit more about what the rain gauges look like when they're in action.
Adam: And future iterations after we had launched the site included precipitation timeframes as well, so you could see the different amounts of precipitation after an event had occurred.
Adam: So getting into it here, you can see that right now we've got a totally different screen. We still have the cards that kinda make up the basics of the visualization.
Adam: We have three different iterations of a dam page. So we explore different ways of presenting data, increased or decreased precision and granularity, different visualizations, and then different hierarchy of primary and follow-up actions. We did the same thing with the actual dam operations page, so you can see that there's a variety of information here, overlapped here, but we included a third and final dam with a few more actions on the sidebar.
Adam: And this is actually what the page looks like. Now, this slide is directly from the TRCA's training deck. And so for someone who's using this platform day in and day out, the amount of information isn't overwhelming. And one thing I've learned about design in general, especially when you're creating a platform like this, is that it doesn't need to be intuitive for everybody.
Adam: We're not making a platform for everybody. It needs to have a set of learned processes for a very specific type of user. So going back to that adage that Tamara Adlin mentioned, if we don't make flood duty officers very happy, we fail.
Adam: Getting more into some of the stream gauges, you can see a lot of overlap in the designs, in the visualizations.
Adam: A lot of the data is the same. And again, it works within a self-contained ecosystem. So we explore different visualizations, different levels of granularity, and also what information would be above the fold. Again, you can see here how the the actual page looks in person on the live site and how people are using it. One of the most interesting parts for me is seeing how people who aren't part of the TRCA team are using visualization data. So you can see here we have a tweet talking about some of the heaviest rainfall that w- is ever seen in the Toronto region, and how they're using the visualizations from the site in one of their tweets.
Adam: That takes us to lesson number four. Tell the client the kind of feedback that you want. Now, I learned this lesson very late in my career, and you'll remember I said at the beginning of lesson three that you might want to include the client in experimentation. So sometimes you might want to share a concept, something rough, maybe a new design pattern, and then you're going to need feedback from your client, so you send it out to them.
Adam: Then they send you back a list of revisions that aren't focused on the thing that you were trying to test. So thankfully, this has an easy solution. I always anchor a presentation with, "This is experimental, and I need feedback on X, Y, and Z." So in that instance, it would've been on the granularity and the order of the data presented rather than just ask them, "Hey, what do you think?"
Adam: I also find that it helps to let them know that you're experimenting and to expect numerous revisions, otherwise you run the risk of them not understanding the process or getting it and being frustrated with the sheer amount of effort involved on their part. So anchoring in that effort is really helpful.
Adam: So here's a concrete example of this.
Adam: I had said before when we were talking about discovery, about being aspirational. So in their previous platform, they didn't have a reporting feature. So I had emailed screens for their new reporting feature, steps one through six, which allowed them to create complex visualizations from a variety of gauges, data, and events.
Adam: It also allows the team to see flood trends, analyze how flood events, like in a retrospective or postmortem, how they unfolded within a single season, a single event, or through multiple events or multiple seasons. The entire design was experimental, so it hadn't been part of that previous platform. And so when I sent them these screens that followed the reporting process, I made three mistakes.
Adam: So mistake number one, I shouldn't have emailed it to them. I should have scheduled a meeting and presented to them rather than letting the the designs speak for themselves. A sub lesson 4A, designs never speak for themselves. Always present your designs and the workflows to your clients. And now I was 16 years into my career at that point, and I still made that mistake, and it was a rookie move. Mistake number two, I didn't specify the feedback that I wanted. I really wanted to understand how easy it was to flow through and what other data they would need in which step. My third and final mistake was that I didn't frame that some of the details throughout the steps were not really based in reality.
Adam: They weren't actually coming from real data, they're just placeholders. And so you can see some of the revisions that we got here are very focused on those kinds of details. So instead of actually getting through the experimental process, we had multiple sessions of revisions and multiple emails that could have been avoided with a couple of lines and a single meeting. And the final lesson, celebrate your wins.
Adam: It is great for the client. It is great for team morale. And sometimes agency side, you have so much work on your plate that it gets missed. And I just wanna show you guys, this is what a happy client looks like. So what before you is an actual slide that the department manager used during a presentation to the team in leadership and after we had a successful launch.
Adam: Now, this launch, long time coming. The project took 14 months end to end, and ran in beta concurrently with their existing system for about six months before becoming the standard. And so when I see something like this, it tells me that the client gets it, and it is the sheer amount of effort that our team put into developing an exceptional product specific to their needs.
Adam: The immense amount of planning, the thought process, the experimentation, the late nights. The client just gets it, and they appreciate your work. More importantly, your work is making an impact. When the flood duty officers experimented with the new system, obviously they had critical feedback as far as some things that they'd changed that they may not have thought of, but by and large it was overwhelmingly positive, which tells us that we are building something bigger than ourselves.
Adam: And for me, that's one of the most satisfying feelings you can have as a designer
Adam: Okay, cool story. So what? How transferable are these lessons? I can tell you that project spurred a proprietary project methodology that I've used in almost every project since. And being honest here, I've had to re-experience some of those lessons firsthand.
Adam: So for Gander we had the same sort of lessons, and they influenced how we built this project.
Adam: So again, Gander is the product platform that we had built that helps B2B agencies and brands understand their visibility, their reputation and sentiment, and helps them optimize for both traditional and AI search. So lesson one, hire expertise that helps you move faster and build better. We have a very talented and hardworking senior team. We've also been working with public-facing AI since about November 2022 when ChatGPT was first released. But we're not AI natives, and there's a wealth of things that we didn't know about machine learning and large language models. So yes, we can read, yes, we can experiment, yes, we can go through all of the studies in arXiv, but it's a really poor replacement for first-hand knowledge and exploration.
Adam: So what we did was hire AI engineers, and this grew our knowledge considerably and allowed us to ship better features and faster. And in a marketplace that's really crowded, that was really important. So that allowed us to focus on what we did very well and spend more time with your users. Again, I really wanna hit home that this is by far the best advice I could give you.
Adam: Learn how to ask really insightful, thoughtful questions, and your career as a designer, a marketer or a founder will be that much better.
Adam: So how did we do that with Gander? Every week since we started building, I speak to at least two marketers, organic search professionals, CMOs, agency owners, or CEOs.
Adam: This helps me get an understanding of how people are thinking about this very young industry and their growing level of adoption. And so to translate that into startup language, I'm really learning about my product market fit. But it's so much more than that though. It gives me an opportunity to create content that educates our customers and the industry as a whole, as you can see here with our quarterly Gander report.
Adam: But much like UX, search practitioners are really passionate about what they do. People were willing to share their fears, their frustrations, their workflows, their experiments, their aspirations, their wins and their losses. Like I'm not saying it's intimate, but it was personal. And it's also time really well spent as it gives you that opportunity as a designer to build something that can change the face of an entire discipline.
Adam: Lesson three, experiment and iterate fast. So our design process is the same. We start with an extensive discovery and then experiment and iterate. So in this instance, experimentation and iteration started with me scribbling on a tablet. I defined some of the problems and hypotheses I had around some of the workflows.
Adam: We determined that for every problem that, that each feature and particular screen would solve, our designer Moon and I would brainstorm together and experiment with different ways of solving the same problem. And she's of course incredibly patient because that's what I sent her, and this is what she outputs, something that's a little higher fidelity.
Adam: So you can see going back some of the let's call it this chart here and some of these scribbles actually turn out into real aspects and data that we're producing. That turns into our first release, and after more ta- or after speaking with customers more, getting feedback, understanding some of the problems they're trying to solve with their particular screen, it changes and iterates.
Adam: So as we continue to con- talk with our customers and we do so weekly, this is really important that you're improving the product, the screens, and you're helping themselves solve their biggest problems. And you can see over a short couple of months we started with this, iterated, experimented, got feedback, and ended up something that was a lot more mature.
Adam: Moving on to lesson four: tell the client the kind of feedback that you want.
Adam: So every time we released a new feature, we would ask specific feedback from our customers, and often those who were really excited to test functionality first. But sometimes the feedback we got was really difficult. And this is verbatim, we were told that the prompt page was a waste of a click without relevant metrics.
Adam: And I learned early in my career that every time a customer or client gives you feedback and doesn't leave, one, it's validation of the service or product that you're offering, and two, it's an opportunity to build something better, and I take that to heart. So we took that feedback and created something different.
Adam: So we improved the prompt page here to include metrics and deltas, or the changes from the last reporting period. And then we got more feedback from a group of different customers that the data could feel really overwhelming, especially for more generalist users, not dyed-in-the-paint SEOs. So now we're developing a function that can turn those deltas on and off. And sometimes when we speak to our customers, we get excitement, which as I've mentioned, is really contagious. So about two weeks ago, we released an MCP connection between Claude and ChatGPT and the data layer of Gander. This would allow clients to query the data directly rather than relying on this dashboard.
Adam: That was a game changer for us. So every agency and in-house SEO that we spoke to had existing customer workflows and context in their AI chatbots and platforms. And really it was a warning bell that we really needed to meet them where they were. And so what you're seeing here is the actual responses from the LLM and depending on which plan you're with, you're getting thousands of citation and answers that you have to sift through every month.
Adam: So what better than to be able to pull that into your chatbot, mine that information and get actions from it? Again, game changing for us And then sometimes we get recommendations that's for the development of something completely different or maybe even the redevelopment of an existing one. So at one point early on, an agency customer came to us with a typical situation.
Adam: The client had rebranded. Now here you're seeing a citation page, but this is a bit of a separate scenario. The client had rebranded and after they explained the problem in detail, we developed an entirely new set of features for managing brand aliases or the different names that AI refers to you as.
Adam: So I'll give you an example. Our agency is called Blue Goose, but our domain is thebluegoose.co. So is it Blue Goose or the Blue Goose Company? And it comes up as both in AI search. So if we're going to say that we are the most accurate analytics platform out there, we have to give customers and clients a way to consolidate the numerous ways that AI platforms output the name of a brand.
Adam: In this instance here too, you're seeing a piece of feedback that we received from about a handful of our customers are saying, "I'm sifting through all of these citations for every prompt, but it'd be really great if we had an understanding of share of answer or sentiment and a central place where I could review all of my re- or my citations to mine trends across all of the prompts that we're tracking."
Adam: So that's what we built.
Adam: Now, most of our customers started in traditional search. Many of them had been in the industry for decades. So staying on top of industry news allowed us to integrate with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, extract fan-out and grounding queries from AI responses, and compare to the traditional search data that we were getting from those two tools.
Adam: Now, if we hadn't been keeping on top of that industry news, talking with our customers and asking them for specific feedback, we could have missed building one of the most popular features on the Gander platform.
Adam: And lastly, celebrate your wins. I think I'm saying this just as much for me as I am for you.
Adam: It's a lesson that I'm still learning. Running an agency and a product company, there's always something that needs to get done. So I'm often in do mode, and I'm really thankful that I have a team that's comfortable calling me out on that. So we decided about three years back to do something during our weekly team meetings and it's called Weekly Wins and Lessons Learned.
Adam: So as I said, we're doing this for about three years, and during our meetings, team members can shout out to one another, and we can talk about the cool stuff that we've done and what we've learned. And that's helped us draft a number of things, improve processes, schedule retrospectives for other projects, understand processes that we could adopt or ones that we can just let go.
Adam: Again, really important for us as a team and also for morale. So those are the five lessons you can take with you for every project. If you have questions, please, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or you can ask them now if you'd like.
Emanuel: Wow. Wow. Where should we start? Thank you, Adam. Thank you. Let's I'm gonna put this, leave this for on the screen for a moment and then put ourselves there. You see me taking notes. I like to take a lot of notes, handwritten notes, so I'm gonna skim through them again because they're important. And in the meantime, feel free to drop your comments in the comment section, and Adam will address them.
Emanuel: First of all, thank you so much. This was really interesting. Let's take it from the beginning. What was that quote again at the beginning? And whom exactly? So I write it down. I can watch the recording of course, but let me write it down right now
Adam: Okay, which quote was that?
Emanuel: About making the customer happy making the personas creating personas and making them happy
Adam: yes. Okay. So Kira Adlin she said, "If you don't make X really happy, you've failed." And so that, the intent of that quote is that you really need to focus on one customer, not necessarily at the expense of every other user that's going to be using that platform. But it's, it is really important to to make sure that you have focus.
Emanuel: And that sounds very similar to something Steve Jobs said when he answered an, a question during a public s- speaking event where he was on stage and somebody probably a former employee. When he returned to Apple, somebody asked: "What have you been doing for the past seven years?" And whatnot, and he knew stuff that he couldn't argument at that time about changing operating system and whatnot.
Emanuel: But I feel like what's his name? John Ternus, the new CEO might have this, hopefully this quote at heart because let's put it this way, not sure if you're an Apple or a Mac user or not, but for the past 10 years, good customer experience is exactly the opposite of what Apple and macOS has been for its core users essentially, or whoever they started with.
Emanuel: You answered-- My first question was how long was the entire project? But I think you answered four month- 14 months
Adam: 14 months end-to-end, yeah
Emanuel: How long did it take? How many people on your team?
Adam: Okay, so this is interesting. We've we've always been really small and mighty. So the biggest our team has ever been is eight, and we compete against teams of... that are much larger for government contracts. But we're all senior level practitioners
Emanuel: Yeah, and it's efficient. I'm assuming it's way easier than to have a... Let's put it this way. I like to think that you don't have useless people in your team, right?
Adam: I am very proud of my team.
Emanuel: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. And I was curious what this, what was its structure?
Adam: Pretty flat. Pretty flat. So all of our teammates can speak to clients. And so every team member involved in kickoff and discovery, the artifacts that are generated from those discovery sessions are less important than the actual journey of that discovery. And when you include developers and designers in those sessions, they get their own perspective, their own metal- mental models, and they bring more to those sessions when you're actually brainstorming design and workflows
Emanuel: Kevin: "how do you determine how much time to budget for your UI/UX workshop?" I'm guessing the complexity of the site is a big difference.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. Yes, the complexity of the site is a big a big influence. If you want me to quantify the UX workshops, at minimum 12% of budget. That's the formula we use is minimum 12%. As the site gets more complex, and of course my background is responding to RFPs and issue or in writing tenders, so they typically have a scope that's in it, and you get an idea, and then you have a contingency.
Adam: I like to use, again, 12% for the budget but contingency-wise, at least 10%.
Emanuel: Okay, excellent question. Great answer. Let's see. Nobody else so far has any, but feel free to drop them. I have a few more. Pa-pam. Then to your br- your project right now especially about the changes based on the feedback that you're getting. So how many iterations, and most importantly, where do you actually stop?
Emanuel: Because I know there's an old saying in web design, I think, if you ask everybody what they want, you'll end up with another porn site or something like that. At the end of the day, everybody has a vision f- of something. When, how do-- What's your process of deciding, when to stop?
Emanuel: And do you have something like, okay, we're gonna make changes every three months, every six months, every I don't know, something like that? I'm speaking from a user's perspective. I'm very frustrated with Cloudflare, for example. Not sure if you use Cloudflare, but they keep seem to justify their paycheck every month or so, where they make significant structural changes to the, all the elements that they have inside the dashboard.
Emanuel: And right now, actually I agree with the changes that they made recently. The biggest frustration is you develop this automation, right? This muscle memory of where things are, and now you, instead of clicking once or twice, you click four or five times to get to the same place, which is okay if that makes logical sense.
Emanuel: In most cases m- I mean, they don't. But also it's very frustrating, especially when you work with multiple clients, going through the same process a lot is frustrating. Coming back to making the UX happy. So from your perspective, when do you, how do you tackle all this? Not sure if what the question is here.
Emanuel: How, either how do you tackle this or, and what's your process? When do you say stop, and when do you push actually changes that matter? Is it the consensus with the team? Is it one man that makes the decisions?
Adam: Okay. Those are great questions. So first, the most iterations I've ever had were in that TRCA project. We went over one of those screens, I think I only showed you three, but no fewer than eight times. It was just one ba- we were banging those out for weeks trying to get the granularity right, the visualizations right.
Adam: With Gander, we've had to go through a comparable amount of iterations for our overview, our prompt details and our prompt pages. One, the industry is moving exceptionally fast, and so as more things become apparent, we have to move quickly to be able to outproduce our competitors. But more importantly we are very mindful of the amount of data that we're producing and how we're presenting it.
Adam: I think we've all had an experience where we go into an analytics tool and you're presented with this wall, like this, you're just there with a bunch of numbers. You're like, "Where the hell do I start?" So one of the things that drove our design philosophy was this mantra of get in, get insights, get out.
Adam: Oftentimes agencies and account managers have maybe 30 minutes to prep for a client meeting, so they should be able to either get into Claude or GPT or into the dashboard, have a, an understanding of what's changed month over month in 30 minutes, and then go speak to the client and tell them what's changed and how they've made their lives better and easier.
Adam: So you have to understand that mental model first and foremost, and the amount of pressure that the various stakeholders with an agency or with an in-house marketing teams are exercising. So how do we decide what to change, when to change? My background being in UX, I'm Nielsen Norman certified, and one of the things that I learned from Jakob Nielsen was you can get signal from five users and that's it.
Adam: So if you have a design that you wanna test, go get feedback from five people. That's it. Five, 25, 50, the signals tend to be the same. I think the only exception to that is information architecture where you're testing out a site's navigation. I like to do that in cohorts of about 25 to 50, but that's-- I'm a data nerd going back to design, yes, I think that five has been good. So if we get feedback from five of our customers that tell us something similar, then we understand to make a change based on customer feedback. I work with the platform every day, as do our developers and designers, and so they're planning with it, understanding the data.
Adam: They've all gotten into the understanding of the SEO industry, how AI search and traditional search are different. So they're playing too. So every week we have scrums every day. We have a weekly team meeting. We discuss these ideas and then we prioritize. I would love to tell you that this is something that we're like, "Oh, we planned out six months in advance.
Adam: Things are easy."
Adam: We pivot all the time, and it's pivoted based on either customer feedback, new industry pieces that are coming out or something that we've discovered that makes our workflow for our clients that much more much easier
Emanuel: Okay. I'm looking to see there's no other questions from the audience. So signal, for five users, that's okay. Not sure if my questions would be for you, the UX/UI person or based on the presentation today, but when do you push back as a contractor? So not the,
Adam: All the
Adam: time?
Emanuel: not the client y- of course, yeah. But what are some no-nos like okay, some I've, I can't get past this or whatnot.
Emanuel: And at larger scale, for example, I deal with customers we have websites, building websites, and, even in 2026, as a user, I, when I go to a website, I expect some things to be there. For example, an About, I check the About page. A Contact, it should be easy, fairly easy accessible. It's not just once when a customer asks me what remove that Contact tab from the main navigation because it's, I know I don't want it or s- stuff like that.
Emanuel: So I guess the question is no compromise when there's no compromise on it, and then how do you ... Some lessons, some advice when to push back, when to, you know that a feature is really necessary, and it's a good experience, and the client doesn't really have the argument doesn't make the arguments of not pushing back
Adam: Sure. There's a few pieces to that question. So I'll start off with I had a client just a little before we did the PRCA project or perhaps a little after. And we were going back and forth a lot for some of the designs. And it was feeling almost a little contentious. And I asked for a face-to-face.
Adam: I flew to Ottawa to meet with him and sat down in his office and he said, "Adam, I'm gonna teach you something that I learned." So I was like, "Okay, tell me." As the client, we we pay for the right to make our own mistakes. And so I asked him to explain, and that was a, that's a powerful statement. I'm not even dramatizing this.
Adam: That's what he said to me. I'm sitting in his office face-to-face, "Adam, we pay for the right to make our own mistakes." And so what I took that to mean, and it's a lesson that I carry with me now, yes, we have a lot of expertise, but there's a certain arrogance that comes with thinking that you know better than your client.
Adam: So it has to be a collaboration. It has to be. It has to be a partnership. It should never be a vendor-client relationship, in my opinion. The more you collaborate, the more that you try to solve a specific problem, I think it's really really important. And so how I took that particular statement was that yes, as experts, technical and design, we can give them the consequences of that decision.
Adam: We can give them the prospective trade-offs of any kind of feature and changes that they'd like to make. But at the end of the day, it's their website, it's their application, it's their campaign. They get to make those decisions, and the best we can do is tell them what the consequences will be, both positive and negative.
Emanuel: And usually drink a half a bottle of whiskey at the, in the evening just to I think the... Or is it just me who take things too personal?
Adam: We all start there, I think. I think it's it's hard not to, especially when you're the designer. I remember at the beginning of my design career, I... God, you'd never wanna give me feedback. I was so defensive. And now it's "Okay, give me feedback. Tell me all of it. I wanna hear it, and can we make this thing better?
Adam: Talk to me why. What did you experience?" And you get, you bring that kind of passion and energy, again, it's contagious
Emanuel: It is. Jesse has a question. What's the ratio of importance of traditional SEO versus, say, the future with LLMs and AI? That's more specific
Adam: That is very specific. Thanks, Jesse, for that question. I think it really depends on the industry that you're in. Direct-to-consumer, I'm seeing about 80% of search is still traditional versus AI search. When you get to the B2B market, though, it changes pretty drastically. If you're in tech, 94% of searches according to 6sense start an LLM.
Adam: If you're-- Let's take the most conservative, let's say the trades, around half. So in terms of weighing where do you put your focus, traditional search, people who say SEO is dead aren't paying attention. It's not dead. It's not even on life support. It's still there. So let's assume that at least 50% of your search traffic will come from a traditional search engine or traditional channels, and the other 50% B2B will be AI search. Oh, one thing I should mention too, even if it is 50%, I tend to tell our B2B clients to focus more on AI search because the conversion rate is so much higher.
Adam: SEMrush did a study1 back in October that said that clients that get leads from AI search, they're 4.4 times more likely to convert
Emanuel: That's something I've experienced myself. And to add to that, because theoretically SEO is a field of expertise of mine, SEO stands for search engine optimization traditionally, but I always refer to it as search experience optimization. So at the end of the day somebody's looking for something.
Emanuel: There's this mantra, right? People don't need a drilling machine. They need a hole in the wall. So people are s- are looking for something. It can be, it was the Yellow Pages at one point, then it moved online to search engine solution, search engines. Now it's into something more, more complex, right?
Emanuel: Because instead of me doing 30,000 searches, opening 100 tab- tabs, I prefer to have a dialogue or a conversation that will help me determine the product or the Service that I need. I've been working more and more with Rufus, with Amazon's AI, for example, right? Because I'm asking, okay, is this good for the other product?
Emanuel: Is it compatible with this? Is it working with the other one, right? I'm looking for a trolley right now for my tripod and I'm asking all these kinds of questions as well. So it's going there. Again, it's about the experience. Now that's in-- that's an example for from Amazon, right? But think of Google, think of ChatGPT doing this at a larger scale.
Emanuel: So at the end of the day, it's the experience, and when you optimize for the experience itself, then doesn't matter the platform. Could it be Google, AltaVista, ChatGPT or the traditional Yellow Pages. At the end of the day, my job as a professional, is to make sure that when a prospect is looking for the product or the service my client offers, we show up at the top of the results, wherever those might be.
Emanuel: Plus, we tend to forget that SEO consists of three things. One, content, which is fairly important, and it's king, but it's not the only thing, right? It's the the backlinks, which is... And we know that, they're not really going away as much as anyone from any search engines will not name will tell you that become less and less relevant.
Emanuel: The fact is that we see differently. And the technical stuff, the UX/UI as well. So good luck ranking anywhere if your website is broken not crawling, have is all messed up with, I know, canonicals or schema or even that's even in the 2026 day we still see a lot of them having basic stuff broken for the website.
Emanuel: So yeah, that was a rant of mine, but I hope it made sense. Sorry for taking over, and I think you had something to say, Adam.
Adam: I've just saw another question from Jesse where he said that if a client has feedback that is just terrible, which is why I was laughing have you ever refused to implement it or is the customer always right? The customer signs our paychecks, so yeah the, yes. Another piece of advice I got from another senior designer, one more senior than myself, not every piece is a portfolio piece So yes if a client is insistent on feedback that is terrible, and we've been in that situation no.
Adam: No, I-- There's only so much you can argue, and at the end of the day, the client is paying to make their own mistakes. So yeah, we do implement it
Emanuel: Okay. Not every piece is a portfolio piece. I'm flipping it down because it's worth sharing again. Review-- revisiting it. If there aren't any more questions, and I'm gonna take a quick look to see... No, I don't have any. I've asked all of mine from now. One more time. If people want to connect with you, Adam, where's the...
Emanuel: Oh, sorry, not just me. Where's... Oh, sorry. Now, okay, there we go. Clicked the wrong button. And we have one more questions, but before we address that, if people wanna connect with you, where's the best place? I'm assuming to scan that QR code that's on the screen, but they can Google your name. You should be showing up or go to LinkedIn
Adam: I would say go to LinkedIn. You can Google my name if you want, but LinkedIn's the place to find me. I'm the only Adam Malhams out there, so yes, absolutely add me to LinkedIn, follow me if you have questions. Also I think there's another, there another question from Kiriti
Emanuel: Yes. Up.
Adam: One piece of career advice to MBA students who wanna work in AI-driven marketing.
Adam: Okay. Wow. You're
Emanuel: you take that one, Adam. You take that one
Adam: Yeah I... That's, it's a good question. When you say AI-driven marketing what does that mean? AI search or AI automation, agentic? There's... that's a fairly nebulous term. So can you be more precise or more specific, please?
Emanuel: I think it's referring to everything being AI first, AI driven. So whenever you do something, it's first AI. Take design, take search, take paid advertising, right?
Adam: And I guess it also depends on what industry you wanna go into, right? If you're going into strictly B2B, if you're going in-house, enterprise, not-for-profit, it's all going to look very different. Here's my advice. You can learn the technical skills. Those are fine. Your... I'm assuming that your MBA is going to be in person.
Adam: Take full advantage of your alumni network. Get mentors. Find mentors within every corporate job that you get. Find mentors if you become an entrepreneur. I've had mentors that are 20 years my junior, and I have learned so much from them. I still ask advice, and there's been times where I've mentored someone, and now they're at a career level where I'm like, "You are incredible.
Adam: I have some questions for you." So there's a certain humility that comes with that kind of mentor- being mentored and mentoring. I would say that's probably one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I could give you, is to take full advantage of your alumni network. Otherwise, develop your EQ, your emotional quotient.
Adam: It's something that comes not so naturally to me. I'm terse and direct in my communication style, and I've spent a considerable amount of time softening that. And it's only paid dividends. So figure out what your communication style is, figure out the soft skills, and absolutely 100% invest in yourself over and over again.
Adam: The journey never stops. It's such a trite thing to say, but it really doesn't. You're constantly in development. And I think no matter what age you are, you can always have a mentor.
Emanuel: And has nothing to do with AI, what you just said. AI driven environment or not, at least for the next couple of years it's gonna be still valid. And, try get a real mentor, not an AI persona mentor. Don't build a a profile, a, an agent, the mentor or something like that, regardless of what people online will tell you.
Emanuel: That being said, Adam, a pleasure and a privilege. I'm gonna do one more push on to encourage everyone to go to howaboutsomarketing.com, sign up for the newsletter. You'll see past recordings future reco- future events this event and many more. Adam will hopefully come back to us as a guest in the future as well, and we'll still having some information that probably will share as we go moving forward.
Emanuel: That being said, howaboutsomarketing.com. Adam Malamis, any final final words? That sounds very dramatic, but
Adam: No final words, but Emanuel, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Emanuel: Pleasure and privilege. I do these things to first to learn. So I learned a lot and hope everybody who watches this learned. Take notes. Until the next time, Emanuel signing off.
Adam: See ya.
Source mentioned: SEMrush AI Overviews Study.