Work for Humans Podcast: The Experience IS the Brand | Alder Yarrow (Revisited)

Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Alder Yarrow (Experience designer, founder of Hydrant, CPO at Chibo)
Release Date: January 20, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores a transformative idea: experience is the brand, not just for customers, but also for employees. Host Dart Lindsley reunites with Alder Yarrow, a pioneer in customer and employee experience, to discuss how companies can reimagine work as a relationship and engage deeply with both customers and employees by studying the totality of their experiences. They dive into methods such as experience modeling, in-context research, and grounded theory, using vivid case studies and memorable stories—including the influential manager work practice study they conducted for Cisco. The conversation is packed with practical takeaways on how leaders can embed these principles in their organizations.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Experience as Relationship and Brand

• [00:03] Yarrow: "When we relate to a brand, we relate to that brand as if it were a person... your experience of work is your experience of the relationship that you have to both individuals, the larger collective that makes up this entity called your employer, your job, your company."
• A brand isn’t just a logo or a story—the sum total of every experience, interaction, or moment a person has with a company defines the brand.
• Extending the logic, work itself is a relationship as deep and complicated as any other major life commitment.

2. Defining Experience Design and Experience Modeling

• [03:45] Yarrow: “Experience design is...involved in designing the interaction between a company and a customer...or some sort of transaction between two parties.”
• Experience design is broader than user experience—it covers all interfaces with a company, digital and analog, including physical environments and human-to-human interactions.
• [04:51] Yarrow: “Brand is nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of all the experiences that a customer has with you and how they feel about that....I believe the experience is the brand, the brand is the experience.”

3. Case Study: Financial Services Client

• [07:58] Alder describes a project for a financial services company struggling to engage individual users of its 401k services.
  • His team analyzed call center interactions, company communications (paper, digital), and internal processes.
  • Found a disconnect between what the company wanted to offer and the actual customer needs and experiences.
  • Experience modeling revealed areas where company intentions and real-world impact diverged, surfacing critical gaps.

4. Experience Modeling in Practice: The Cisco Manager Study

• [11:54–20:36]
  • Early-2000s project for Cisco examined HR, finance, and facilities interactions from managers' perspectives, using in-context research and experience modeling.
  • Multimodal research: field interviews, shadowing, self-journal studies, and limited system tracking.
  • Discovered a major gap between core corporate assumptions and the reality of managers’ day-to-day lives.
• [20:36] B/Lindsley: “For me, that was the event. The event was actually being in there. But what were the steps to actually setting up a project like that?...making that project matter to the company.”
  • Yarrow: Emphasizes starting with a powerful question, scoping, segmenting, and being flexible in the field to let new patterns emerge.

5. In-Context Research vs. Traditional Methods

• [14:19] Yarrow: “You go to where the customer is rather than bringing them to you...in context research is about saying, well, we don’t want to pull people out of their environments because when we do so we lose an incredibly rich amount of information.”
  • Stories: Pager/Instamatic studies, office fly-on-the-wall observation, self-report packets for remote participants.
  • “What really sang was seeing people in their life.” - [23:55]
  • Unexpected findings (workarounds like sticky notes with system steps, “shadow IT” solutions managers built themselves).

6. Grounded Theory and Emerging Insights

• [27:18] Yarrow: “Grounded theory is a way of doing...qualitative social science research...something launches you...and you ask a lot of questions...then you look at the data and you see what emerges from it.”
• [29:09] Lindsley: “One of the hardest things for me...was how to go into a situation and not know any[thing]...to convince myself that I knew nothing...and just observe and let the patterns emerge.”
• Value in letting go of assumptions to let deep, sometimes counterintuitive insights surface.

7. Case Study: European Electronics Brand US Launch

• [30:56] European electronics firm tried to import a successful product and sales model from Europe to the US.
  • [32:14] US electricians were independent “ronin samurai,” unlike guild-based European ones—so the company needed new credentialing and sales tools, not just product adaptation.
  • [34:18] Lindsley remarks: “It has nothing to do with the product...It has everything to do with the route to market.”

8. Employees as Customers

• [34:42–39:55] Extending the “experience as brand” concept to employees.
  • Work is not a simple product—it’s all-encompassing, intimate, “something you climb inside and inhabit.”
  • [39:25] Yarrow: “The product is not just a product, it’s a relationship. And relationships are what send us to the therapist…they’re about the interplay of concerns between two individuals...or a collective.”

9. What Do People “Buy” from Work? The Say-Do Gap

• [40:30] Yarrow: "To me, it all boils down to one word – help."
• [46:41] Yarrow and Lindsley discuss the “say-do gap” and the limits of self-reported data. Observation uncovers real motivations and hidden costs.
  • [48:51] “The ‘what job do you hire your job to do for you’” approach unveils multiple motivations—money, security, growth, meaning, taking care of family—but also misses what employees “pay” beyond money.

10. Value Framework: Importance, Utility, Worth

• [49:19] Yarrow: “Value [has] three things: importance, utility, and worth...what do I have to give up to get it?...time, energy, money, lost opportunities”
  • The full assessment of experience design for employees and customers must weigh both benefits and sacrifices.

11. Transforming Organizational Mindset and Practice

• [51:36] “Best research in the world is only worth as much as the story that gets told.”
  • Storytelling and strategy must accompany research.
  • Executive buy-in is crucial; “it’s infinitely easier to have a study commissioned by the chief executive…than to start mid-level.”
• [54:26] “This kind of transformation is generational...It can’t start from anywhere except the CEO or the board. And it’s an enormously long commitment.”

12. Building Organizational Capability

• [55:31] Research, storytelling, and design: should a company build this in-house?
  • For scale and sustained impact, yes. But many companies start with external experts due to costs and skill gaps.
  • Hire not just creatives but business-oriented, pragmatic anthropologists and designers who understand commercial realities (not “artistes” or pure academics) – [58:32]
• Team Roles: Anthropologists, ethnographers, filmmakers/storytellers, visual artists, project managers, all organized to serve not theory but practical business outcomes.

13. Material of Experience: Moments of Action and Response

• [61:37] Yarrow: “Every experience is made up of moments. A moment is a period of time...in which an individual takes action and sees the result of that action.”

  • You can’t design everything, so focus on the moments that matter most.

• [63:19] Lindsley: “It’s a system that I’m testing—it’s like echolocation, where I send out a signal, I get back a signal. And so I’m constantly experiencing the soul of the corporation that employs me by testing it.”

• The key is not “layers” of brand experience but the ongoing, dynamic, call-and-response relationship between people and the company.

  • [64:17] Yarrow: “Your experience of work is your experience of the relationship...those signals...just like the ones we’re trading right here in this conversation...we are always taking care of all of those concerns. That’s what it means to be human.”

14. Trauma, Trust, and Emotional Safety in the Workplace

• [68:57] Google’s study on emotional trust and vulnerability (Project Oxygen): teams where psychological safety is present dramatically outperform others.
  • The quality of signals received (care, trust, responsiveness) changes the employee’s relationship to work.

15. Reflections on “What Do You Hire Your Work to Do For You?”

• [71:04] Yarrow: “...the opportunity to express my innate personal ability and capacity to think and design...I like helping other people accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish, which is this nice virtuous loop that shows me that I’m good at what I do.”
• [74:05] Good customers (and good employers) are those who can use and appreciate help, and amplify it in their own organizations or lives.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The experience is the brand. The brand is the experience.” — Alder Yarrow [04:51]
• "Every experience is made up of moments...taking an action and seeing the result." — Alder Yarrow [61:37]
• "What really sang was seeing people in their life." — Dart Lindsley [23:55]
• "Employees are buying something that's as big as a house… maybe more like a marriage." — Dart Lindsley [34:42]
• "To me, it all boils down to one word: help." — Alder Yarrow [40:27]
• "We are incapable as biological beings of having relationships and interacting with entities in the world, except as other individuals." — Alder Yarrow [64:17]
• "The best research in the world is only worth as much as the story that gets told about what you learned from it." — Alder Yarrow [51:36]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:03–01:00 — Framing experience as relationship
• 03:45–06:13 — Defining experience design vs. user experience / brand experience
• 07:58–11:17 — Financial services case study on customer experience
• 11:54–18:06 — Cisco manager work-practice study methodology
• 20:36–24:32 — In-context interview methods, workarounds
• 27:18–29:58 — Grounded theory and “knowing nothing” mentality
• 30:56–34:42 — European electronics company US market entry
• 34:42–39:55 — Employees as customers and the intimacy of work
• 46:41–49:19 — The say-do gap and understanding real motivations
• 51:36–54:26 — The challenge of translating research into organizational change
• 55:31–58:32 — Structuring and staffing experience research teams
• 61:37–63:19 — “Material” of employee experience—moments, signals, responses
• 68:57–69:44 — Emotional trust, vulnerability, and performance

Practical Takeaways

• Design for Moments: Identify, measure, and intentionally design the crucial moments in employee and customer experience.
• Start With Context: Get out of the office, observe people in their real environments, and avoid relying solely on focus groups and self-reports.
• Grounded, Emergent Research: Let insights emerge rather than just confirm existing assumptions.
• Executive Buy-In is Crucial: Research and change must be championed from the highest levels.
• Blurring Lines: The distinction between “brand” and “experience” is artificial—the experience is everything.
• Ongoing, Not One-and-Done: The best organizations embed these practices and mindsets deeply, with multi-disciplinary teams built for storytelling and translation.

Final Thoughts

Alder Yarrow and Dart Lindsley’s conversation is a powerful reminder that brand is experience, whether for customers or employees. The work of designing and understanding experience is messy, deeply human, and must be holistic—encompassing research, design, storytelling, and leadership. Only then can companies create workplaces (and products) that people love—and that love them back.

For full context and inspiration, listen to the episode in its entirety. For more, visit Work for Humans.