References

I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from some of the smartest, most talented, and interesting individuals on the planet. Together we designed, built, and delivered amazing digital experiences while delighting enterprise software customers along the way.

Here are a few of their recommendations. There are many others at LinkedIn.

Leadership team members

Guido Jouret

ABB | Chief Digital Officer, ABB

July 18, 2020 - San Jose, CA USA

“Tim established the ABB Ability™ Customer Experience (ACE) program at ABB. This was an innovative program that established centers around the world where ABB invited CxOs from top customers to attend a workshop to accelerate their understanding of the digital solutions that could improve their business. Tim developed a "design-thinking" methodology based on benchmarks of similar practices at other companies and from his prior experience at AutoDesk. Tim hired a team to run the initiative and manage the local teams conducting workshops, developed the tools to implement the common methodology, and helped created hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunities for ABB thanks to the "early and senior" engagement with customers. Tim is super passionate about customer experience, a creative thinker who is always trying to imagine "what's next/what can we do better". His energy and enthusiasm are infectious (in a good way!).”

Sanjeev Sharma

ABB | CEO & MD ABB India & South Asia I Chairman of the Board ABB GISPL, I Member of the Board ABB India Ltd, APPSIL & SCCI

July 17, 2020 - Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

“Tim is known to me in his global leadership role for setting up ABB Digital Customer Experience Center across the globe and developing associated tools for customer engagement. I found the global practice run by Tim truly path breaking in engaging customer problem statements thru solution discovery using ABB portfolio & partner solutions. Tim has ability to keep leadership and working team well engaged into programs run by him. I see Tim doing exceedingly well in a Tech Savvy Startups, CX design Innovation, Team leadership of global programs to reach global scale and results.”

Kay whiting watanabe

ABB | Vice President ABB Ability Digital Transformation Communications

September 12, 2020 - San Jose, CA USA

“Tim was amazing to work with. He built an action-oriented team that established a global reputation for urgency, swift execution, speed, and agility. As his program was an internal "start-up", Tim did not let ambiguity paralyze the team. He modeled a proactive, pragmatic just-do-it, learn fast forward approach, quickly launching and iterating as needed. As others were thinking about what to do, Tim and his team were doing it. This acceleration enabled them to exceed their targets and IRR. Tim introduced our ABB team to the OKR approach, immediately establishing clear business targets tracked via 7 KPI's. He openly and transparently shared progress broadly online. His small team set a new high NPS record at ABB quickly contributing to sales growth. Tim had a big impact on increasing customer loyalty and lifetime customer value across ABB divisions. Although a small entrepreneurial team, Tim attracted some true talent from both inside and outside, many early in their careers - always good to see. He continuously challenged, coached, and cultivated individual's talents preparing them for more senior roles on other ABB teams. Tim's humble approach, respectfully candid leadership style and reliability earned him the trust and credibility of ABB's executive committee, CDO staff, his team, colleagues and many important customers. I would love to work with Tim again and highly recommend him.”

Franco Gatti

ABB | Product Management Excellence Lead presso ABB S.P.A. - Electrification Business

July 17, 2020 - Milan, Italy

“I had the pleasure and honor to work with Tim over the last 2 years. Tim joined ABB to lead the creation of a new culture in Customer experience, in the context of the large scale digital transformation launched by ABB a couple of years before. He has created and lead an amazing team, and he has created from scratch a CX framework based on people, tools and spaces, operating at a global scale. He has always been a supporter of the Product Management function and community, helping in the development of skills in the area of design thinking, co-creation and new ways to drive customer engagement. The ABB Customer Experience centers created by Tim around the world have generated significant business opportunities, above and beyond expectations.”

Mickey McManus

Autodesk | Senior Advisor and Executive Coach at BCG, Co-Author, Trillions; Research Fellow Emeritus, Autodesk

March 10, 2017 - San Francisco, CA USA

“I knew Tim casually and intermittently through the first year or so of my fellowship at Autodesk. And while I had a sense of his deep passion for design and his ability to pull back and see the forest for the trees, I didn’t get a chance to see him in action. But more recently I worked with him and saw him take a struggling and chaotic field organization that had been through one too many disruptions and turn it around so that it had a shared sense of purpose. He also drove surprisingly good results (I was a skeptic about the timeline for change and how much could happen). I’m not sure how many miles he put on but I felt like he was the hardest working one of us just based on the way he was tireless out and about with the field around the world to help shape, support and guide the work. He’s a system thinker at his core and excels when he can bring design patterns and systems to engineering and business challenges.”

Dilesh Patel

SDRC (UGS/Siemens PLM Software) | Evangelist & Keynote Speaker, The eVSM Group. Visualizing, Untangling, & Improving Value Streams.

June 15, 2009 - Cincinnati, OH USA

“I first met Tim when he came into the company (SDRC) to manage user interface development efforts in a formal setting. He was always a "heavy hitter" in his ability to innovate on opportunities, gather a strong team and get things done. Socialized ideas very well and allowed all of us to put our best thoughts forward. I worked with him on a variety of areas include product planning, company acquisitions and major accounts marketing. I would put him in my top ten list of the people I met over a 20 year career at SDRC. Tim is extremely competent, very personable, and I pleased to recommend him without any hesitation.”

Doug Collins

June 15, 2009 - Cincinnati, OH USA

“Tim led the effort to build for the first time within SDRC a competency for evaluating and improving upon the usability of the organization's software products. Two aspects of his work impressed me: his focus on creating venues for structured customer engagement and his ability to convince the product line managers to embrace the process as a way for them to improve their offer. Over time we were able to sell the software based on the strength of its usability -- its ease of use became a meaningful point of competitive differentiation.”

Steve Ryan

Rockwell Automation (RockSoft) | President at SICK, Inc.

January 23, 2016 - Boston, MA USA

“I had the pleasure of working with Tim at Rockwell Software when I was business unit lead for process software and he was the leader of our customer experience and usability group. I don’t believe I have met a more creative, charismatic, customer focused, out-of-the-box, not accepting of status quo business professional in my career. He challenged our software company to take things to another level and then led us there. He is strategic, a good thinker and tactical, a good doer. I would enjoy working with Tim again. Where ever he is I know he will be moving that organization to a better place.”

Employee team members

Louis Rondeau

July 18, 2020 - Zürich, Switzerland

“Tim is a customer experience (CX) design guru, his strategies are incredible, and he is expertly managing our team for three years now. His ideas are exceedingly creative and his start-up mindset resulted in speed, agility and outstanding results for ABB. He successful implemented a brand-new CX program in a 130-year old, multi-industrial global corporation. In less than 18 months, his team contributed to double-digit MUSD new sales opportunity value & maintained a net promoter score (NPS) of >65%. His hands-on approach to coaching, motivational speaking, innovation and customer experience has earned him the respect of his team and peers. Overall, it was fantastic to work together with Tim, he was one of the best managers I have ever had, and I would love to work together again with him.”

Paola Garbagnoli

ABB | Customer Experience Innovation Design Lead | Digital Transformation

July 19, 2020 - Zürich, Switzerland

“I have been working in the ABB Customer Experience Innovation team driven by Tim since 2017. Tim has created a strategic ABB Customer Experience program from scratch, brand new to ABB. With his passion, leadership, and outstanding skills in Design Thinking, Agile, Lean Enterprise, and Digital, he achieved impressive results in a timely manner. Together with our team, Tim has built and established a successful set of Tools, Customer Journey, People, Physical/Digital Space, accelerating ABB and our customers Digital Transformation, achieving excellent results and a world class impact. Tim has a “fast-moving” and “getting it done” approach, he has driven our team in “start-up” mode, since the launch of the program. I have learned a lot from him, he is an innovator shaping the creative future of his team.

Moreover, he establishes and maintains trusted and loyal relationships with his team, as well all the stakeholders. I have been honored working with him!”

Bob Van der Donck

Autodesk | UX Design Subject Matter Expert at Autodesk

February 5, 2017 - Portland, OR USA

“I have worked for and with Tim for several years in Autodesk’s Lake Oswego UX department. It has always been a pleasure to deal with Tim and he has been for me both a source of inspiration and motivation to test things out on the cutting edge whether it was in UX research or product design. He pioneered the UX shop at Autodesk and introduced the company to modern research techniques like Eye tracking and user workflow analysis methods. Tim is above all a team player, who in a courteous manner, can bring out the best in the team. I have always appreciated his willingness to involve the entire team in hiring decisions to make sure the team bonds well. He will be a very valuable addition to any software team and I see him strive equally well in smaller startup environments or in larger group or companies that need fresh ideas.”

Boqing Xue

Autodesk | Designer at Google

June 24, 2016 - San Francisco, CA USA

“Tim hired me and was my manager when I joined Autodesk. Tim's passion, business acumen and strong communication made him a visionary UX leader. As a mentor, Tim was clearly interested in helping me grow. When I came onboard, he offered to arrange meetings with key stakeholders so that I could get insight into organization structure and culture. Whenever I have questions or concerns about a project, Tim responded right away elaborating both background and long term vision - and even had back channel conversation with stockholders to clear out the obstacles. Her patience and willingness to help have made me motivated to do the best job I can.”

Bret Lorimore

Autodesk | Software Engineer at Facebook

January 24, 2016 - Portland, OR USA

“Tim has been my manager for the year and a half I’ve worked at Autodesk. This has been a truly fantastic experience and I believe that is largely attributable to Tim’s leadership. Tim is incredibly passionate about the projects he leads. He has great attention to detail and does not allow his team cut corners of any kind. I find this attitude very inspiring - Tim has always driven me to improve my best work. Tim genuinely cares about his employees and their success. Since my first day at Autodesk he’s invested in my learning and in making this internship as worthwhile as possible. He’s gone out of his way to give me the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects and to make sure these projects are well aligned with my interests and goals. I can say without question that Tim is the best manager I’ve worked for. I look up to him as a leader and mentor.”

Richard Chen

Autodesk | Sr. UX Manager, Autodesk China Research and Development Center (ACRD)

May 17, 2012 - Shanghai, China

“Tim Scanlon is one of the most talented and experienced people I’ve been working with in Autodesk. I’m the UX manager in Autodesk China Research and Development Center (ACRD). Tim is the Sr. UX manager in US, he is working with me as my mentor and counterpart. Tim introduced several new ideas and processes to not only me and my team, but also Autodesk UX community. He helped streamline the UX process in our organization. He introduced the UX 12 KPIs, which has been the guideline of UX team development. Specifically for my team, he came to China twice, worked with the and coached the team. He had a number of good initiatives, like setting up relationship with Universities, hold World Usability Day in ACRD, these helped my team grow a lot. It’s a pleasure to know and work with Tim in Autodesk.”

Christian Maylath

User Experience Design & Research

October 25, 2012 - Portland, OR USA

“Tim is one of those people that you meet once, maybe twice in an entire lifetime. You'll feel enriched by knowing him. Tim is genuine, honest, and kind. He's the type of person not only helps, but inspires you to do better. I've been with Autodesk almost 20 years and I've had over 20 managers. I can say without hesitation that Tim is the best manager that I've had at Autodesk. Tim is an excellent listener and always provides meaningful constructive feedback. It seems to be a natural extension for Tim to empathize with our customers and people in general. He is charismatic and a UX guru. If you have the opportunity to work with Tim, you'll find out that I'm not exaggerating.”

Partner team members

Eric Mika

Creative Director and Creative Technologist at Local Projects

July 27, 2020 - New York, NY USA

“Tim is a leader with a strong sense of vision and incredible energy. He's an innovative and strategic thinker who readily applies his deep expertise in business, design, and technology to build effective teams, solve tough problems, and deliver next-generation products and CX on a global scale. In his leadership of the ABB Customer Experience system, Tim demonstrated his ability to bootstrap new initiatives quickly and effectively. He advanced his team and partners with a clear sense of mission — while still retaining the ability to adapt to changing circumstances without losing momentum or compromising results. Tim's particularly skilled at balancing qualitative and quantitative factors to drive effective design decisions and leverage new technologies — from the big-picture strategic plan down to the nuances of user experience.

In sum, Tim's an exceptional and tech-savvy leader who can effectively define, accelerate, and deliver complex initiatives.”

Christian Bucher

Global AI / Data Specialist bei Microsoft

July 17, 2020 - Zürich, Switzerland

“I had the pleasure to work together with Tim as my customer where he built the ABB Customer Experience Center from scratch. Tim is an exceptional visionary who leads and executes very accurately by using best in class capabilities in design thinking, customer journey mapping and end to end user experience methodologies. His capabilities building Tech savvy start-up (creating something at global scale from nothing with speed & agility) is simply unmatched. Personally I experienced Tim as great Team Leader (X-Organisation) who is a global scale and results oriented player, always with best in class CX Design Innovation in mind.”

Richard L. Camp

Marketing executive with technology, healthcare, automotive and startup experience. Camp Creative

July 29, 2020 - Bend, OR USA

“Gratitude comes to mind working with Tim and his team. As they embarked on their charter to accelerate customer adoption of digital solutions for technology leader ABB, I learned a lot about what it takes to design a successful customer experience program. Tim's design thinking CX programs became the proving ground of ABB's value to a global audience of customers. An amazing accomplishment, but if you really want to know what drives Tim, watch him interact with enterprise customers. He moves effortlessly from deep technology conversations to sharing the rare gift of empathy for a customer's core need to solve thorny problems. Those moments of engagement capture everything that defines Tim's mission, to give customers the methodology, tools, and resources they need to understand the true business value of the brand he serves.”

Marco Danuso

Project Leader at The Boston Consulting Group

July 20, 2020 - Den Haag, Netherlands

“I've had the pleasure of knowing Tim for more than two years. He has a rare combination of strong vision and agility, which allows him to drive tangible results with speed. Tim is always pushing the envelope of CX and Design Innovation, pulling end-customers into framing, exploration, development and testing - and customers love it! Tim can also navigate and leverage corporate structures remarkably well, which enabled his unit to start impacting the bottom-line fast. I highly recommend Tim.”