10 Years of ZoCo: The Journey of a Human-Centered Studio
Lacey, the ZoCo team of one, circa 2013.

10 Years of ZoCo: The Journey of a Human-Centered Studio

ZoCo Design is TEN. My oh my—how the years have flown by. As ZoCo's founder, building this company has enveloped a significant portion of my life—and the majority of my professional life. Isn’t that something? 

The story of ZoCo’s growth is one of tinkering and invention. Of introspection, plot twists, and experiments. But for all that has changed, much is still true. In 2013, I set out to improve experiences and humanize technology through an integrated UX practice. 

Connecting people and product were central to the mission on day one. Looking back, I’m proud to say this is still my thesis.

If this is as far as you get in my monologue, thank you for being here. Thank you for your support, encouragement, and interest. Below will likely be the longest thing I’ve written since undergrad, but I only get to do the whole ten-year thing once—so giddy up.

TL;DR:

  • My past agency experience and a failed startup inspired the vision for ZoCo.
  • UX has been our bedrock since 2013, a time when the UX industry was new and narrow.
  • Investment in our culture is the foundation of ZoCo’s success.
  • Entrepreneurship requires personal growth and introspection.
  • I am as enamored with this company and team as I was in 2013. LFG.


THE SPARK

How did we get here? 

I started my career as a designer—and like many others who eventually start businesses, I found myself disenchanted with the way things were done. 

Many moons ago, I was pushing pixels as a digital designer. I was crafting beautiful things online in my weapon of choice, Adobe CS2 (yes, that long ago). Even then, I struggled with the label of being a designer. The word had baggage. It meant “the picture maker,” or the “make it look pretty” person.

I soon realized I was more fascinated with the people I was creating for, and how they would interpret what I made. As I designed ads, brands, and website after website, I kept asking questions to learn more about these users: What are their goals, and how might I design this app to meet them? What are they expecting, and why? How can this website connect with them, and how might it influence what they do next?

I wanted to know what was happening between people’s ears. 

But these questions were often met with resistance. Visual design was my swim lane, and integrating into other teams like research, strategy, or engineering was not the norm. 

I felt disconnected from the people I was designing for and even isolated from my own team. I realized that I wanted to understand the perspectives of others, free of silos, and I wanted to impact product development holistically. I couldn’t do either of these things as a single leg of a relay race. 

This was the first indication that my current reality wasn’t clicking. I believed—then and now—that design can do so much more. I believe design deserves a seat at the table, playing a key role in business strategy, customer centricity, behavioral design, and even change management. But my perspective felt like an outlier.

What potential could I uncover if product development became a team sport, informed by the end users of those products? The wheels were turning. 

Meanwhile, my career was developing beyond agency life. 

In the evenings, I was building a technology company with my soon-to-be spouse, Alex. The concept was called sideNOW, a social debating app. We found some success, receiving modest funding through an accelerator program, hiring an engineering partner to bring the technology to market. This story ended up being a short one, although perhaps one of the most impactful in my career. 

Our startup eventually died, but I was deeply moved by the entrepreneurship community we found ourselves in. The leaders and peers in the tech community embraced Alex and I. They were collaborative, genuinely helpful, and oh-so empowering. Amazing new friendships were formed with others in startup-land, valued mentors became my champions, and most strikingly, I learned that failure is not so bad. A fruitless startup instilled the courage and confidence to keep building.

This is the moment I became aware—if there are things I seek to change, why don’t I just do it myself? 

In my final months working for someone else’s agency, I set off on a journey of freelancing. This led to a brief day-job detour to build skills I knew were lacking, but ultimately created a season of testing and learning. This only encouraged me further, giving me the headspace to dream, and build a book of clients at night. What was next?

I envisioned starting my own agency.


UX BEGINNINGS

On April 17th, 2013, ZoCo was born. I officially struck out on my own to build a studio with the founding principle of design as the connection between tech and humanity. 

Curiously, UX wasn’t even in my vocabulary in 2013. While I was inspired by the rapid growth of digital product teams on the coasts, user experience was not yet a common label in Columbus, Ohio. But that’s exactly what I was building—a UX studio, connecting all the best I knew from human-centered design, design thinking, and agile.

In hindsight, this is wild to me. Fast forward ten years, and we all take for granted how much UX as a discipline has matured. It has gone from non-existent to pervasive. Further, the best UX becomes invisible—because when you’re prioritizing it, experiences are seamless. UX is the backbone of the most successful tech companies, and it’s rare these teams are unaware of its immense value. That said, if you’re still on the fence, check out the stats from Forbes, Salesforce, or Forrester. TLDR: Investing in UX is a winning strategy.

With or without a UX moniker, I knew on day one there was magic in connecting product and people. ZoCo’s thesis marries these two and always has. Investigating real-world problems that affect actual customers informs the design of meaningful solutions, and we embrace this in all of our work. We learned early that UX had the power to connect facts and feelings, and because we believe in its power so much, it’s the only thing we offer.  

This is unique—being a UX-only studio. Our deep focus on just ONE thing means we can experiment, invest, and build incredible depth. Someone asked me last week why ZoCo hasn’t built engineering capability and is rather doubling down on our core services. Yes, we’ve seen the opportunities, and perhaps engineering is a growth vehicle. But the reality is, I believe in the influence of UX so much, I don’t want anything to dilute its magic, divert our attention, or create conflicts of interest. We are fully invested in empowering companies through UX, bolstering their product teams to reach their unmet potential.

How have these beliefs manifested in our work? While only a spec of this novella covers the actual fruit of our labors, here’s a mini recap of our work and relationships over the last ten years:

ZoCo’s Client Evolution:

Startups — 2013–present

  • Our foundation is rooted in collaborations with entrepreneurs to bring their visions to life, a partnership trend that has been true throughout our history. We’ve worked with many of the known players in the region and beyond—from the successful exits of CoverMyMeds and Updox, to high-potential dynamos like ScriptDrop and Aware, to national names like TaskRabbit.

Corporate Innovation — 2014–present

  • Starting in our second year, ZoCo had surprising beginnings working with the innovation teams of some of the most influential companies in the world—from the Royal Bank of Scotland, to Lockheed Martin, to Schneider Electric, to many many of the biggest companies in our own backyard. UX is the perfect blend of rapid experimentation and human-centered problem solving to uncover opportunities and reveal the path forward. We’ve worked with dozens of corporate innovation teams, and still serve several known brands today (hush hush).

Social Impact — 2016–present

  • Human-centered design is meant to serve people and create a better future. Across our history, ZoCo has designed software to support addiction recovery, combat food insecurity, upskill impoverished communities, battle the digital divide, improve senior care, and even interconnect diverse social services through data platforms. I am hugely thankful to the impactful organizations we’ve worked with (especially you, Mid-Ohio Food Collective !), all of whom fiercely believe in the power of UX to improve people’s lives.

Product Teams — 2017–present

  • Midway into our journey, ZoCo really found its groove serving and embedding within product teams. While we’ve worked directly alongside engineering and technology throughout our history, the concept of a product team was nascent in Columbus back in 2013. In recent years, product squads have been on the rise, and today these teams are the most central focus of our work and partnerships. 

Fractional Embedded Model — 2018–present

  • Working directly with product teams made us quickly realize a new agency model was required if we were to find success. Scoping projects within products almost never made sense—we needed a way to embed as part of the client team, and provide flexibility to shift rapidly as we learned. We created a fractional, embedded model to serve the unique needs of product teams, enabling our crew to build depth in each business, right-size UX best practices in real time, and collaborate closely as peers.

Secret Sauce — For all time

  • UX is a mighty superpower, but the real contribution is in how we evangelize it. Providing a service, even an excellent one, is not enough. We want our clients to continue embracing UX long after we are gone, and so we expose our process, collaborate hand-in-hand to imbue our thinking, and uplift our clients and their potential within the larger org. Hearing that we’ve changed how a team thinks, normalizing both customer insights and experimentation as part of their practice—that’s the transformative difference we’re after.

Across ten years of clients, exposure and cross-pollination have composed our diverse perspectives. We bring the best of what we’ve learned from each team into our toolkit, honing our UX craft with the diversity of all those we serve. What ties each partnership together, however, is a love for iteration and customer-centricity. Each of our clients believe in UX and invest in it, empowering our team to do what we do best. 


TEAM LOVE

Over the last decade, I’ve had the privilege of turning my love for user insights and human systems inward to inform our culture. I’ve researched who we attract, what makes teammates successful, the values and behaviors we all share, and how to manifest the best environment, vibe, and employee experience possible. I’m truly enamored by optimizing ZoCo to best support our team, and I find this is the area I’m most likely to lean in today. These efforts have led to amazing team retention, multiple listings on the Inc. Best Places to Work national list (including this spring’s 2023 honors!), and a reputation for how we serve and prioritize our people.

My biggest learning? Building a beloved culture is very much like building a great product. You have to understand the value your company uniquely provides, who you attract (and why), and what journey you must provide to uplift and retain them. This helped us uncover our own “product-market fit,” leading to our core values of empowerment, mastery, and impact. I have a deeper dive into my cultural philosophy here, but the general theme is that you must define and invest in your culture intentionally. Then, you have to fight to protect it, or it may become watered down as your business evolves. 

I’m so grateful to my team for all that they’ve taught me, and the countless madcap memories we’ve made along the way. All of my favorites tie back to our antics. To name a few, I’m reflecting fondly on last week’s hijinks at the team retreat (ziplining, glow-stick dodgeball, and improv, anyone?), to years of Pinewood Derby victories, to seeing my team shine outside of their comfort zones. I am energized by their growth, their confidence, and all we are yet to achieve together.


REFLECTIONS & LESSONS

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge what this business has done for me personally, and how much I’ve grown as a human.

When I started, I will be honest that I was naive. I didn’t know all that ZoCo would require of me, and how much I’d have to stretch my own comfort zones to find success. I learned quickly that leadership is so much more than subject matter expertise, or even providing a strong vision. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, taken some wrong turns, and through it all have experienced foundational shifts in my thinking. Here are the takeaways I’m reflecting on today, and the qualities I will continue to lean into for decades ahead:

Vulnerability

  • Leadership can be isolating, and we all have expectations for how we believe we must show up. But time and time again, I realize that when I am my most authentic and transparent self, people honor my vulnerability. It’s not seen negatively, but as sincere and as human. Whether that is initiating an uncomfortable conversation, asking for what you want without apology, or sharing hard truths with those who may not want to hear them. I’ve found that radical candor has made all the difference, in building relationships, community, and culture.

Community

  • ZoCo wouldn’t exist without the amazing support, encouragement, and cheerleading of this community. From the very beginning, the tribe I’ve found in Columbus has created a stable foundation for me to build from. I am forever grateful to everyone who has provided advice, gut-checked my assumptions, or challenged my perspective. This has come from both hundreds of one-off coffee conversations and ongoing peer group relationships that have persisted throughout all of ZoCo’s history. My biggest takeaway? Invest time in finding your tribe. Thank you to everyone in mine! 

Culture

  • I’ve already said it, but it bears repeating: There is no more important use of your time than to understand, define, and optimize the culture of your company. I am sure I’ve put more hours into this bucket than most, but the benefits are palpable; for instance, when your team bands together during challenges, owns your mission like it were their own, and protects values as fiercely as you do. Culture isn’t top-down—it comes from within, and from recognizing the people you work with as the most important driver of the company you become. And if you don’t invest here, people problems will surely be your constant companion.

Empathy

  • ZoCo is a human-centered company, through and through. We don’t apply these principles solely to our work, however. This goes beyond design principles, and affects all aspects of our business—from employee experience to operations and finance. I’ve found that embracing empathy and honoring people for who they are as individuals means you have to get very curious. We ask hard questions at ZoCo, we are interested in the perspectives of others, and we seek to understand experiences with empathy. Not only does this honor people, fostering better relationships and a higher sense of psychological safety, but it shapes our business decisions to lead to better outcomes. 

Growth

  • One of the most unique learnings I’ve had is how I personally define and prioritize growth. ZoCo is certainly not a lifestyle business, and we exist to make a massive impact. But, that doesn’t mean I am energized by rapid headcount growth, or appearing on the Inc. 5000 list (even though we’ve been there). I am not. Instead, what I’ve learned is that I am very motivated by the mastery, experimentation, and learning of our team, by the impact we make for our clients, and by the advocacy we build for UX. I want ZoCo to be a recognized and celebrated UX studio, boutique in size, but larger than life in presence and reach. From this vantage point, I hope to impact clients we care about, evangelizing the power of UX within their companies and communities. How might I do this with the smallest team possible? I’ll get back to you—we’re on our way.


RARE MAGIC

When the company turned eight, I defined my journey as “rare magic,” and today this is as true as ever. Building ZoCo has been rewarding, challenging, and intoxicating. 

I set out to improve the experiences of people through human-centered design, and that is just what we are doing—for not only our clients but also our community and our team. It’s amazing to see my vision—that tiny spark at the beginning, kindled by so many—rouse to a flame. I am energized for what’s ahead and believe our future is one of abundance. 

ZoCo is as ambitious as ever, and I’m energized to continue delivering on our mission. Here’s to the next decade as champions for human-centered tech.

Lacey

No alt text provided for this image
Improv with part of the team at ZoCamp, 2023

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Lacey Picazo is the CEO of ZoCo Design, the UX studio collaborating alongside product teams to amplify their impact, add velocity and capacity, and champion customer-centricity.

Nathan Pickel

Program Manager: Injury Prevention and Treatment at Sunbelt Rentals, Inc.

1y

Crazy to watch your success through the years. I remember back to watching you design on a white dry erase board in a college dorm lobby. Thinking back now, this was probably a lot of UX then too. Congrats on your successful 10 years and cheers to the future.

Dave Cherry

Executive Strategist, Problem Solver, Collaborator, and Speaker on the topics of Customer Experience, Analytics & Innovation

1y

Congrats Lacey and ZoCo Design!!! Love seeing your success and the valuable contributions you continue to make to our community!

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