What we talked about
Makoto Kern, Founder of IIIMPACT, joins Federico Ramallo on the Prevetted Podcast to share his journey from robotics engineering to becoming a product strategy and UX design leader helping enterprises de-risk complex software development. With more than 21 years of experience across cybersecurity, energy, healthcare, and SaaS, Makoto has guided Fortune 500 executives and high-growth startups to launch market-ready products while building sustainable product development practices.
Show notes
Makoto Kern built his UX career by accident:starting as a robotics and manufacturing automation engineer, he noticed that the software built by engineers for factory floor workers was nearly impossible for non-technical people to use, and started solving that problem. Decades later, he runs Impact, a consultancy whose “Strategic Immersion” process has one simple premise: the hardest part of launching enterprise software is not the design:it’s changing the minds of the people inside the organization.
What we covered
- Makoto’s entry into UX came from a $25,000 Turtle Wax project he found on Craigslist:an interactive virtual garage built in Flash:which convinced him to quit his engineering day job and go all-in on UX consulting. He was born and raised in Chicago and relocated to Austin about 11 years ago, where Impact grew substantially.
- The Strategic Immersion process runs two to three days of intensive workshops that get all stakeholders:from CEO to customer support:into the same room to reach explicit agreement on business goals before a single wireframe is drawn. Makoto compared the alternative to building a house, having people move in, and then asking what they actually wanted.
- Enterprise software has a fundamentally different user dynamic than B2C products: users are forced to adopt whatever leadership mandates, so the initial reaction to change is almost always negative. Getting adoption requires disrupting well-worn workflows people find comfortable, even if those workflows are inefficient.
- He described stakeholder misalignment as essentially universal:”99% guaranteed in most companies”:and noted that when he runs feature-prioritization workshops with sticky notes, leaders often cluster their votes near whatever the CEO points to first, revealing that alignment is performative rather than genuine.
- On AI, Makoto tracked a real-world case where a company redirected all engineering resources to integrate AI into their product, then monitored usage through an analytics tool like Pendo and found users submitting one or two prompts before abandoning the feature entirely. His diagnosis: the company wanted to say they had AI, not solve a user pain point.
- His closing argument was about cognitive dissonance: a developer who asks AI to write a marketing plan will be amazed at the output because they know little about marketing. A marketer who uses AI to generate code will feel the same. The gap in domain knowledge makes AI look like magic in areas where you are not the expert:and that illusion is what drives unrealistic expectations about what AI can actually replace.
About Makoto
Makoto Kern is the founder of Impact, a product strategy and UX design consultancy based in Austin, Texas, that specializes in de-risking enterprise software projects through its Strategic Immersion methodology. He has over 21 years of experience across cybersecurity, energy, healthcare, and enterprise SaaS.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productuxdesigner
- Website: https://www.iiimpact.io
Episode 55 of the PreVetted Podcast.