Human Led, Agent Powered Design capabilty transformation.

Engagement overview

A new delivery model implemented for Merkle's global Design practice, that scaled at the speed of customer needs.

The double diamond wasn't failing because the designers were bad — it was built for a world that no longer exists. As SVP Experience Design Lead at Merkle, I replaced it entirely. X4 IGNITE runs three phases simultaneously, collapses design and engineering into a single delivery motion, and deploys 15+ purpose-built AI agents across the full lifecycle — each with defined inputs, outputs, and team ownership. Pods are cast by engagement complexity, not org chart. Senior talent makes creative calls instead of generating variants. This was a full practice transformation across 350 designers in a global operation, built and deployed from scratch. The gap between organizations still running the double diamond and those that aren't is widening.

I've already built the answer.