What we talked about
John Weiss, founder of Human Design, joins Federico for a conversation on building brands that move people:not just markets:in an increasingly synthetic, AI-driven world.
He shares the origin of Human Design, founded in 2013 to solve human problems through strategy, design, and storytelling. Over the years, the agency has helped nonprofits, startups, and major brands like Nike, Land O’Lakes, and Twitter uncover clarity, purpose, and emotional resonance.
Show notes
John Weiss founded Human Design because he realized the skills agencies use to help brands sell products could instead be used to solve problems that actually improve people’s lives. The original plan was to build an app, called We Fought Back, meant to help people fighting serious illness build sustained community support, and then shut the agency down. The agency took off instead.
What we covered
- Human Design’s core framework asks three questions about every product or campaign: Do people want it (enough to research and seek it out)? Do they feel it (enough to talk about it and bring others in)? Do they value it (enough to purchase it and integrate it into their life)? These three filters replace aesthetic judgment as the primary test of whether work is good.
- The best creative environments protect time for boredom, wonder, and sitting with a problem, what Weiss calls “working the problem” rather than jumping to the solution. Agencies that operate on short timeframes default to scanning what other brands have done and what is trending in culture, which produces derivative work even when the intent is to be original: you end up exploiting what works rather than exploring something new.
- For the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Weiss’s team built a campaign around the idea that if the Endangered Species Act falls, every species eventually falls, ending with human beings. They recruited celebrities to act as advocates for their species of choice, creating a narrative arc where defending animals and defending people became the same story.
- When Land O’Lakes hired them to be seen as more than a butter company, Weiss’s team pushed back on the brief. Rather than convincing audiences that Land O’Lakes was something other than what they were known for, the answer was to talk about what they actually cared about: the American farmer. The insight that 1% of the global population feeds 100% of us became the foundation of campaigns around wifi access in rural communities, regenerative farming, and food deserts, none of which mentioned butter.
- Weiss teaches User Experience 2 at the University of Colorado and opens every course by telling students not to add a modifier in front of the word “design.” Calling yourself a graphic designer or a UX designer narrows your mindset before you start. His instruction: pick up a pen before you pick up a mouse, and spend time identifying the core problem before you know what the solution will look like.
- The biggest leadership lesson from more than a decade of running Human Design: stop equating decisiveness with leadership. Weiss described how acting fast eight out of ten times looks great, but the two times you were wrong, without pausing to gather information, caused disproportionate damage in money, team churn, and rework. Vision and patience, he argues, are better markers of leadership than speed of decision.
About John
John Weiss is the founder of Human Design, a brand transformation agency based in Boulder, Colorado, which he started in 2013. The agency has worked with organizations ranging from Nike and Land O’Lakes to nonprofits and mission-driven startups, and Weiss teaches advanced user experience design at the University of Colorado Boulder.
- LinkedIn: <linkedin.com/in/johnweiss>
- Website: https://humandesign.com
Episode 79 of the PreVetted Podcast.