The people who break the rules—thoughtfully, productively, and with purpose—are the ones who show us what great really looks like.

One of the most important parts of our product strategy work is finding the people we call the “positive deviants”—the people inside complex organizations who consistently outperform their peers, despite facing the same challenges.

They focus on outcomes over process. They break rules when they need to, but get away with it because they deliver. They lead with passion, but also compassion. They make progress where others get stuck.

If you’re a Mission: Impossible fan, you’ll know the type. These are the Ethan Hunts of the business world—relentless, inventive, and fiercely loyal to the mission and their team.

Every industry has them. The ones who don’t just show up—they do the job. They create their own momentum, find a way forward through friction, and do so with optimism, energy, and a kind of contagious enthusiasm.

People who remind us what great work feels like 

When we find these people, we pay attention. Closely. We don’t just take notes—we take them to dinner.

We listen. We learn what makes them tick. We document their process. We steal their homespun methods. We dissect their best practices to understand how they were built, how they work, and why.

We also study how they lead—how they manage their teams, collaborate across boundaries, and earn trust across the org.

The best part of working with positive deviants is their passion. They show us what they love about their job—the thing that keeps them sharp, focused, and motivated. It’s not just the money. It’s something deeper. And you can feel it when you talk to them.

From field-tested wisdom to scalable systems

Most of our best work started with a conversation with one of these productive renegades.

We’ve turned their field-tested methods into experience journeys, strategic visions, and concept prototypes. We’ve built tools that scale their know-how so that the entire organization can benefit from their clarity, pace, and way of thinking.

This approach goes beyond designing the tool to fit the hand. It takes into consideration how the tool's functionality was determined. We ask, “Who shaped the tool in the first place? Were the assumptions behind it sound, or just widely accepted?”

This kind of scrutiny leads to a healthy examination of the current “best practices,” generates truly breakthrough insights, and yields products and systems that users adopt, embrace, and promote.

These relationships don’t end at discovery

We bring our positive deviants with us throughout the roadmap—as design collaborators, connectors, and gap detectors.

We return to them for feedback on the models and prototypes we build together. Their perspective sharpens our decisions. Their buy-in adds credibility. And their instincts help ensure that what we create delivers memorable value both for the business and for the people on the ground.

Want to design with your best people?

If you know someone in your org who fits this mold—a quiet high-performer, a creative outlier, an unusually effective cross-functional collaborator—bring them into the work sooner.

We’ve found again and again that the fastest path to meaningful change starts with the people already doing it right.

And if you need help identifying them or translating their genius into something scalable, that’s where we come in.