Joe Woodham on Building Torii Consulting and the Future of UX Design | Ep 262 | DevReady Podcast

·35 min·2 clips

Joe says most AI projects are failing because they are not designed in the right way.

Joe Woodham joins Anthony for a clear, grounded conversation about UX and business. He describes his company, Tori Consulting, as a UX design consultancy that helps enterprise businesses understand how people use digital products, remove bottlenecks, and improve ROI. Anthony gives Joe space to tell his own story. Joe begins with door-to-door sales, which taught him how to deal with people. He then moved into IT recruitment, even though he had no background in IT and did not fully understand recruitment at the time. That detour becomes part of the point. The conversation keeps circling back to one simple idea: product work is easier to change early than after a system is already live. Joe says a wireframe or Photoshop file is cheap to adjust, while a running product is not. He is direct about the value of speaking to real people before building. If nobody is asked what they need, teams risk spending time and money on the wrong thing. The enterprise side of the discussion gets especially concrete. Joe points out that large organizations often have customer service, sales, marketing, finance, and analytics data that can show where users struggle. They can also run A/B tests and other research at scale. That gives them more room to make better design decisions, if they actually use the information. Startups face a different situation. Joe does not pretend they have the same resources, but he says they can still do cheap user research and talk to potential users directly. He mentions Michelle from Hey Juno as an example of that approach in practice. Across the discussion, the warning stays consistent. Do not build just to build, because an idea is not automatically a fit for the market. The episode closes on cycles and new tools, with Joe talking about bringing people along and keeping pace, and he also points listeners to LinkedIn and his podcast All Things Design.

As heard by us

A practical case for user research before the build gets expensive.

Joe Woodham presents UX as a practical lever for enterprise teams, not a design luxury. The focus stays on how users move through digital products, where bottlenecks form, and how better choices can improve ROI.

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When UX has to prove business value, this episode is worth your time.

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