[Top Agency Series] Navigating the Future of Intelligent Products With Mark Rickmeier of TXI Digital

Mark Rickmeier is the CEO of TXI Digital, a Chicago-based digital product innovation firm specializing in UX research, design, and software development. With over two decades of experience, he has led the creation of more than 100 digital products for clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to mission-driven nonprofits. Beyond his role at TXI, Mark is the Founder of initiatives like Walkshop, a leadership development retreat, and the Sticky Note Game, a facilitation technique enhancing team collaboration. He is also an active member of the Forbes Business Council and the Fast Company Executive Board, contributing thought leadership on innovation, company culture, and inclusive design.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:21] Mark Rickmeier discusses TXI Digital and their approach to product innovation
• [04:30] Common challenges clients bring to TXI, including data chaos and AI uncertainty
• [07:10] How TXI helps clients rethink solutions beyond initial requests like mobile apps
• [10:43] The Double Diamond framework in design thinking
• [16:01] Mark shares key insights from walking rail yards and observing repair operations
• [19:56] The data pyramid: building a foundation for intelligent products
• [24:35] Transition from digital transformation to intelligent product development
• [25:42] The unexpected work with Tyson Foods using design thinking for food innovation
• [32:48] Future of software interfaces shifting from apps to agentic AI
• [37:02] How TXI maintains a strong company culture through unique initiatives

In this episode…

Creating a digital product is more complex than building a mobile app or launching a new platform. Many companies waste time, money, and resources by rushing into solutions without fully understanding the problems they are trying to solve. So, how can organizations shift their mindset to ensure they are innovating in the right direction from the beginning?

Mark Rickmeier, an expert in product innovation and intelligent systems, shares how companies can avoid costly missteps by adopting a discovery-first approach. He emphasizes using frameworks like the Double Diamond method to better understand user needs before jumping into development. He advocates for integrating design thinking early in the process, gathering real user insights, and validating assumptions rapidly. Mark also stresses the importance of building a strong data foundation to prepare for future AI and intelligent product opportunities, encouraging businesses to think beyond traditional digital transformation toward smart solutions.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Mark Rickmeier, CEO of TXI Digital, about building intelligent products through discovery and design thinking. Mark discusses the critical importance of solving the problems first, shares lessons from projects spanning industries like rail, healthcare, and food innovation, and explores the future of agentic AI interfaces.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mark Rickmeier on LinkedIn | Website
• TXI Digital
• Walkshop

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “The goal, again, is to help them build the right thing and then build the thing right.”
• “Sometimes the problem a client presents isn’t actually the problem that needs to be solved.”
• “Agile helps you build the thing right, design thinking helps you build the right thing.”
• “You really want to be able to get direct insights from users to inform how you solve.”
• “If you don’t know the root of the problem, we really can’t help you effectively innovate.”

Action Steps:

1. Prioritize user research before developing solutions: Spending time with end users early reveals true problems and prevents costly misaligned projects.
2. Adopt the Double Diamond framework for discovery: Following a structured exploration process uncovers broader opportunities and prevents teams from rushing into building unvalidated solutions.
3. Invest in building a strong data foundation: Without clean, accessible data, companies cannot leverage AI effectively or build truly intelligent products.
4. Challenge client assumptions during initial project discussions: Asking clients to explain the real problem ensures projects address actual business needs and build stronger trust.
5. Prototype and test rapidly before committing major resources: Early user testing with simple prototypes avoids wasted development and accelerates smarter decision-making.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Mark Rickmeier of TXI Digital. You can check him out.

And Mark, before we formally introduce you, I would like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. Let’s see. I had Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity help sell agencies, and he’s got the Second Bite Podcast because he finds an agency will sell. And then if private equity sells again sometimes they make more in the second bite than the first. And so it was a good conversation around the agency space, M&A space, valuation space.

That was an interesting one. Kevin Hourigan was another one of Spinutech. He’s had an agency since 1995. Mark. So it was interesting to see the landscape of not just agency life or entrepreneurship, but also the internet.

And so that was an interesting one. And many more on inspired Insider.com. This episode’s brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect their dream relationships and partnerships.

We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run your podcast or an easy button to do that. We do the strategy, accountability and the full production execution. And second, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients, partners, prospects, even gifts to staff from a culture perspective.

Easy and affordable. And all people do is give us a list of the people, and we send a sequence of follow ups to those people. So, you know, Mark, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background to make it all easy for our company to build the relationships in so they can run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire on the podcast in Second Cell.

So send people tasty treats in the mail ongoing. So check out rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I’m excited to introduce Mark Rickmeier.

He’s the CEO of TXI. TXI stands for technology, User Experience and Innovation. They’re a consulting firm that designs and delivers custom software. They’re located and headquartered in Chicago. He’s also the founder of Walk Shop, which is a hiking plus leadership development five-day retreat that takes leaders out in the woods to disconnect together.

Obviously connecting. But Mark, thanks for joining me.

Mark Rickmeier: 03:13

Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to getting into this together.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:15

Talk about start off, talk about TXI and what you do. I’m going to share the website so people can see it.

Mark Rickmeier: 03:21

Nice. So we describe TXI as a product innovation firm in that we are helping our clients figure out two things. One, what is the right thing to build, setting up a strategy and helping them think through where is their opportunity in white space in the market for them to create a competitive advantage? And then after they think about what’s the right thing to build, then you think about how do you build it, right. So what does have the agile and engineering and design discipline to be able to create digital products and bring them to market.

So you have a high-functioning strategy and research team on the build the right thing side. And then you have a really high-functioning engineering design and delivery capability on the right side. And the unique thing about TXI is being able to do both of those things in one organization.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:03

I know you help a lot of different industries. You know, digital health, biopharma industry 4.0, manufacturing, comms and media. What do people come to you with? Because like you say, you know, that makes sense. It’s like you basically help them solve problems.

And maybe sometimes they don’t even know what the problems are. Because there’s a white space there. What are people coming to you asking to start?

Mark Rickmeier: 04:30

It’s funny. So sometimes these days we get one of a couple of different questions. One is I have data everywhere and I don’t know what to do with it. I’m not quite sure how to leverage data to be able to drive my business forward. I know a lot about some of the systems I want to build, but we’re seeing a lot of especially with legacy systems, a lot of what I call swivel chair integration, where someone’s like, all right, type something into this system, and I swivel over to this other system.

I do some other thing in this other system and like a humans trying to connect all the dots. And so there’s no real cohesive understanding of, of their, of their business operations. Another common question I get is my board is telling me to do something with AI question mark, like what is the thing I should be doing? How do I leverage this new technology? I don’t really understand what’s changing in that space.

And then occasionally we’ll get someone who comes in with a solution in mind. And this is probably the hardest one for us because we have to actually back them up a bit. So we’ll get someone coming in and saying, hey, we want to build a mobile application, and we have to say, great that you have that ambition, but step back. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? We are far more interested in that, because there’s lots of different ways you could go about delivering software, and maybe the mobile application is the right path, but oftentimes there’s maybe going to be a different way or an alternative way to solve that problem.

And if we don’t know what the root of the problem is, we really can’t help you. So like one of the things we really try to avoid, if you ever hear the word just on a phone call, it is not an engagement. So if someone’s like, you know, I already have five developers, I just need two more. Great. Go call a staff hog firm.

There’s lots of them about. That’s not who we are. Or someone says, you know, I don’t need a designer. Just make it look pretty or I don’t need to talk to end users. I just want to make it do this.

I just want a mobile app. We really need to understand the root cause, the problem we’re trying to solve. And from a design thinking perspective, really try to understand and quantify that problem before we get too excited about a potential solution. So I would say that the third kind of thing that people come to us with is where they have that solution in mind. And we got it.

We got to back it up a minute and get more concrete about the users we’re trying to serve and the problems that they’re facing, that we can make sure we solve the project the right way. One of my favorite stories was a university who said they wanted a mobile app. And we said, we can do that. It’ll cost you half $1 million and it’ll take you a few months to go live. Or maybe this thing that looks a lot more like a chatbot, which can go live in six weeks, is actually the better option.

We can deliver you mobile app.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:46

So Mark, you were saying, you know they came to you. We have this great solution, right? We want a mobile app. And you’re like, well, I like how you frame it. It’s like we can charge you $1 million.

No, it wasn’t a million, but whatever. And it will take a year. Or we could use this chatbot thing that accomplishes the same goal for a fraction of the price, and we can launch it in six weeks.

Mark Rickmeier: 07:10

I think that was the beginning of when clients started understanding the difference between like a custom dev shop and a product innovation company, because we could build them a mobile app and it would go live on time, and it would probably cost half $1 million, and I don’t think anyone was going to use it. Or we said we could deliver a totally different solution that more accurately met the needs of their users, and we could do that in about six weeks. The goal, again, is to help them build the right thing and then build the thing, right? So you have a strong technical foundation, but you have to move beyond the agile ability to execute projects well, like an awfully big waste. And this is something how I used to think about things.

But like they would come to us. We’d build them an MVP or minimum viable product. We go live in a few short months. If you’re finding out at that point that it’s not going to have high adoption, you know what a waste of months and time and resources. So a big part of that discovery process is trying to figure out what the right, real solution to the problem could be.

And oftentimes it’s different than what the client initially asks. So that’s just part of being a good partner or being a good consultant, especially if you’re in that brand of being in product innovation as opposed to custom software. If they came in saying, I want a mobile app, the answer is not, let’s go build you a mobile app. The answer is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And trying to dig into that as much as you can, because there may be other ways of delivering higher value.

And in this case, save them a bunch of money in the process.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:30

Yeah. So the MVP, they originally come to you with maybe a totally different MVP.

Mark Rickmeier: 08:37

Yeah. Exactly right.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:38

Talk about the discovery process a little bit because, you know you really I have experienced this you know Client. Maybe they have spent a long time thinking about this. And so even though you are like, here’s maybe let’s get to the root of the problem, they — you’re putting it in a nice way so they listen to you. But I know that clients are sometimes set in their ways. Or they could be.

Mark Rickmeier: 09:07

I think the main thing you really have to advocate for is getting time with the end users that will be impacted by the project, like in this one case, it was a school and the administration was trying to improve the lives of their students, but the administration was coming up with the requirements. In this case, it would say, great, let’s go talk to some students first before we start getting too excited about what the administration thinks that they want. And so there’s an opportunity to educate. And, you know, you don’t have to spend years or months doing this, but like having time to do user research and spend time doing rapid prototyping and validating some of your assumptions. Early, early, early allows you to start getting more informed decision around where the product should go.

This is the great value that design thinking teaches us. It kind of takes the benefit. Agile did a lot of work in the 90s and the 2000 of professionalizing that further. How do you build the thing right? How do you have a really solid execution engine?

But agile is not a great answer for how do you build the right thing. And so that’s where you have to move beyond your ability to execute solid MVPs. You got to think about how do I understand earlier the needs of my users and better triangulate what the real opportunity is. That’s where design thinking starts changing how you operate, and having a more rigorous discovery process to get inside the heads of your users and really starting to uncover their true needs.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:21

Yeah. Talk about the discovery process a little bit because it’s really an important foundation. And it sounds like obviously starting with what’s the problem and then talk. It sounds like you want to actually talk to users or potential users and validate assumptions. What else is a part of the discovery process when a company comes to you that’s so important.

Mark Rickmeier: 10:43

So there’s a whole rigor around how you do user research, that you’re not informing the users or kind of guiding the users. You really want to be able to get direct insights from them, and then use those insights to start informing how you might solve a problem. So the reason I actually have, if you’ve ever seen the Double Diamond, it’s a metaphor for how you go about trying to involve design thinking in this early, early stage in discovery. And so if you think about the first half of the diamond is you’re expanding out from a point and you’re going wide and saying, let’s go talk to various different users and find out like what we think the problems are. And then we narrow down towards the end of defining what’s the key problem we want to solve.

And then again, the second diamond, you go wide again and say, how might we solve this problem in a bunch of different ways? What are the different ways we might do that? And then you can prototype and test those and come back and say, we think of the ones we tested. This is the best option to solve that. And so it’s a way to rapidly explore the needs of the users, to be able to map those out, to be able to use those with the disorder, to get down to the top pains you want to resolve and then having those in your mind.

So when you are coming up with concepts you are prototyping, you’re basing them on real problems and real needs. You have a persona in mind. I love that. That’s where we get excited about prototyping, because it’s not just a designer that can do that. This is where it’s helpful to have developers, you know, engineers, product people in the room saying, how might we solve this problem?

There’s lots of different ways you can do that. And then you have the ability to rapidly prototype those and put them in the hands of users. You’re not testing working software, but you’re testing concepts. You’re testing whether this is going to be feasible and viable and desirable. And then we can come back and say, we really think the best way to do this is this path.

So I think that little bit of time and energy spent in discovery can shave off hundreds of thousands of dollars in the actual execution of the work by not building unnecessary features or not going down the wrong path to begin with. And it allows you to validate. And if you’re going to fail, I mean, you’d rather fail on paper with a bad prototype than going and build a thing, an MVP, ship it to market and realize you missed the mark. So I think there’s a lot of how software was written in the 2000 has had to change to incorporate more design thinking strategies and opportunities in the early stage of discovery to make sure that when you actually are building something, you’re building the right thing, if that makes sense.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:01

Yeah. No, I love this discussion around because it’s really a way of thinking can be applied to any company in general. And there was an example I love for you to talk about the rail car company, because this is a great example. I just want to point out, I thought, I, I thought you just said the title of your next book. But I looked up and Double Diamond is actually someone does have that book.

You could rename it, but Double Diamond.

Mark Rickmeier: 13:29

It’s a framework. It’s been out for a while.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:31

Yeah.

Mark Rickmeier: 13:32

It’s a yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:33

Yeah, but your subheadline will be good. Whatever you would say. So, you know.

Mark Rickmeier: 13:38

Diamonds in the rough.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:39

Yeah.

Mark Rickmeier: 13:40

There’s definitely. So the rental car company was interesting because this is a business that has been around for over 100 years. Publicly traded company. They’ve been. So they lease railcars out and they maintain their own cars, figuring if they can extend the life of that railcar by 20 or 30 years by taking good care of it, that makes it a much more valuable asset on the lease side.

And it really only makes money when that car is actually out on the rails carrying goods. So they try to make sure they can minimize that service event where the car is getting fixed, because every minute it’s in the railyard getting fixed is a minute. It’s not earning revenue. And so our thought was, well, if you could walk around the rail yard with a designer, an engineer and a data scientist and a kind of an AI strategist and say, how might we think about improving the way railcars are maintained? If you can shave that down from 64 days down to 54 days, it’s millions of dollars of savings a year.

I think what was interesting is that the average time to repair a rail car in the US is around 110 days, something like that. So this company is already an industry leader by a wide order of magnitude at 60 some odd days, but the opportunity to get them even further would have huge ramifications, not just on the cost savings, but that improved operational efficiency would allow them to start, for example, maintaining other people’s railcars with the extra capacity they had, and then they get insights into fleets that they might want to acquire. So you start thinking about all kinds of other commercial benefits. So in this case, the discovery was is it possible? What can we learn by walking around the rail yard and again, not doing that from the Home Office, not doing that by talking to the operators and the executives who said, let’s go to the actual rail yard, let’s go walk around with, you know, the steel toed boots and the hard hats, talking to operators, talking to inspectors, cleaners and the repair yard to get a sense of what could we be doing to change the way we do this with the lens of a designer and a data scientist and an AI engineer, just because they see the world differently?

That’s what I think we’re at our best, is when we take people who have deep industry and domain knowledge about how to run a rail yard, and really good digital strategists and data scientists and engineers to think about how can we think about this problem differently and then master it together and think about what are some opportunities, what’s a white space? What’s a new way of operating we might be able to think through.

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