Martha Cotton, Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, brings 25 years of experience bridging anthropology, design, and enterprise transformation. Known for helping large organizations understand people, navigate change, and design for adoption, Martha shares how empathy, collaboration, and partnership shape modern design leadership.
In this episode, she and Jochem explore how designers can speak the language of business, why data partnerships matter, and what it really takes to drive customer centricity inside legacy organizations. They examine the future of journey management, organizational transformation, and how AI will reshape creative work.
Guest Bio
Martha Cotton is Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, where she leads design research and drives customer centricity across one of the world’s largest financial institutions. With a background in cultural anthropology, she has built a career spanning boutique studios, global consultancies, and enterprise design leadership.
Her work focuses on designing for adoption, shaping change inside complex organizations, and elevating design as a strategic partner to the business. Martha is also an educator and long-standing contributor to the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry community.
Takeaways
- Designing for adoption ensures experiences deliver sustained customer and business value.
- Design leaders must articulate impact in business terms, not just craft terms.
- Organizational change succeeds when it’s driven top down, bottom up, and radiating from the middle.
- Strong partnerships between design and data unlock measurable outcomes and credibility.
- Journey management becomes transformative when supported by diverse data and cross-functional collaboration.
Chapters
00:00 Setup and warm up
02:27 Intro to Martha Cotton
03:44 Martha’s career through line
05:46 Why empathy still matters in business
08:17 Skills needed to thrive in complex enterprises
12:04 Craft, business impact, and designing for adoption
14:42 How design leadership is evolving
16:37 The rise and pitfalls of design thinking
19:58 Making new ways of working stick
22:11 Breaking the glass ceiling for design
25:23 Moving from order taking to partnership
28:53 Charm offensive and influencing without disruption
30:57 Learning business context the hard way
32:40 Early days of digital transformation
33:45 Making transformation stick in enterprises
35:04 Top down, bottom up, and middle-out change
39:32 The challenge of creating opportunities inside enterprises
44:00 Design and data partnerships
47:26 The evolution of journey management
49:29 Data-enabled journeys and organizational reality
54:41 What Martha wishes she could change
55:47 Thinking about AI as a creative partner
58:29 Where to find Martha
LinkedIn
Guest: Martha Cotton
Host Jochem van der Veer
The Experience Edge