Designing Digital Products Without Bias: We Chat with WP Engine Velocitize Talks

Interview Transcript: Designing Digital Products Without Bias

Joshua Cranmer: We want them to understand where we’re coming from, from a philosophy standpoint, but also from a care and consideration of our own co-workers.

Lauren Cox: This is Velocitized Talks, and I’m Lauren Cox. Today, I have with me Joshua Cranmer, the president at Mile6. Welcome Josh.

Joshua Cranmer: Thank you so much for having me, it’s a real honor.

Lauren Cox: Thank you. I would love for you to tell me a little bit about Mile6 and what makes you different.

Joshua Cranmer: Mile6, first, I’ll start with this: in 2026, we’re in Philadelphia, so we’re going to get to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, right, but also we’re going to celebrate 30 years of Mile6. That’s a huge milestone. The advent of technology of, the internet, Mile6 being there pretty early on. Over that time frame, 30 years has brought us a lot of experience. It’s brought a lot of process improvement, efficiencies that allow us to be the best digital product agency that we can be today and hopefully into the future.

So that’s a little bit about Mile6. We are a digital product agency, and we kind of coined the idea of this engage for breakout growth. Where we found a lot during the last couple years, especially this move to digital transformation that was insisted upon us, everyone’s reacting to it. Now we’re being a little bit more proactive. We’re finding that there are these ceilings that we need to help clients get around, or through, and that breakout growth idea for clients, customers, or partners on the brink of fantastic growth, that’s where we fit in.

Lauren Cox: Is there a project that you’ve recently launched on WP Engine or one of your favorite projects that you’ve launched with WP Engine that you’d like to talk about?

Joshua Cranmer: First of all, they’re all my favorite. I don’t, I mean I can’t label one as my favorite, but we’re really passionate about a recent project that we did on WP Engine that was fantastic, and really great people that work there as well.

We do a lot of work with associations and nonprofits, not exclusively, but we do tend to work with some member organizations specifically because it really aligns with our priority of user experience and designing and building for the users’ benefits and goals.

So if you work back from that idea, then working it out and a more user focused website for this organization, this association, would actually entail a little bit more robust research that the client themselves would be excited to engage in, which is also like inspiring. You sit in a room with them. You knock out, ‘Hey, who are the users?’ like, how do we make a demographic for them? What are their goals? What are their outcomes that they’re looking for? And then to see that kind of play out through the entire journey, to a final product that integrates with a CRM or a scheduling and calendar application or an e-commerce arm, which is all what happened for this particular association.

It creates a user-focused end goal for the websites that I think are pretty unique. In fact, there’s an entire login portal for their members that creates a custom experience just for them, including some dynamic content and suggested blog posts and articles. And in addition, they have a community they have access to the back end of this login that I think is really special for this organization, and it’s been live for 3 months to this taping, and it has worked really well, and the client’s really excited.

Lauren Cox: So it sounds like you do have a very user-centric approach. What factors into the way that you think about that for a new client?

Joshua Cranmer: Right, well there’s a couple things that factor into it.

One, what is business if not to benefit the people that pay you, right? So if you’re an association, you have a member-type-based situation, or you’re an e-commerce website, and you need to sell a product. Making it as frictionless as possible through the entire journey is the goal. Helping influence, but matching that with empathy to say, ‘Hey what decisions do you have to make that are difficult in order for you to make this purchase?’ or ‘to make this decision from a B2B standpoint?’ or…

I’m sorry I’m listing a whole bunch of different industries, and well, that is our kind of MO a little bit too. From an e-commerce standpoint or a B2B standpoint, we’re helping people make informed decisions and we’re helping clients give the information that they need to help hit every touch point along the way.

It’s robust in its process because it starts from that user experience, as mentioned before, that user persona. So we start there, we work them all the way through the wireframe process. We actually bring in unique nodes in the wireframe that align back to the defined user personas that we’ve done in the strategy process, that you can click on. They’re interactive; you can click on them and open up a little window that actually gives our reasons for putting that block, module, image, or text where we put it in the wireframe. So there’s a backing to the reason all the way through the design process, and not just a nice-to-have. It’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ type situation. It’s more of we need to inspire people to engage with this in today’s digital landscape, we need to make it worth while.

If we can figure out how to make sure that we’re answering all those questions in the most convenient and structured process possible, then we’re going to win at the end of the day for our client.

Lauren Cox: So, this process that you go through and philosophy, do you think it’s a differentiator to other agencies in this space?

Joshua Cranmer: One of the big differentiators for us is this idea of bias. We like to kind of drive on on the journey of building websites and these experiences, or even our applications, custom bespoke applications we make for clients, the goal is to drive past that bias exit towards the real destination, which is going to be the user goal. If we can work back from there, that’s the win.

A differentiator for us is to work through our own bias to make sure it doesn’t show up every time. That’s what allows us to design and develop for many different industries and markets because we’re going to take from that moment of style guide that you’ve gotten from your branding agency, now we’re going to start to work out alignment from users all the way through the destination of business goals.

And we do hold them [bias] back so I’ve said multiple times that we’ve been talking about users, but business goals are in the same echelon when we’re having that discussion. They have to be aligned for a cohesive business to run and make money. We understand that business. We need to align with our clients on that fact, but at the same time, we know that the users are going to drive the trajectory. As many products we all know do; the use case of those situations develop and evolve over time.

When we take bias out of it we also are able to iterate on a more regular basis.

Lauren Cox: There’s a lot that’s happening in this world at the moment, and so I would love, especially in your new role now at Mile6, I would love to hear about what gets you up in the morning. What gets you passionate about moving the business forward?

Joshua Cranmer: There’s so many ways I can answer that. I’m going to focus on the team. We have some pretty solid values at Mile6. We actually intro those values at the start of every discussion we have with a new prospect or client. We want them to understand where we’re coming from a philosophy standpoint, but also from a care and consideration of our own co-workers.

You’re hearing the word ‘co-worker’, not ’employee’. We view each other as co-workers. We don’t use the word employee in any of our language, any of our writing, anything like that, so that’s why I’m going to start there. Being inspired by them is really cool.

We actually just had a team retreat. It’s our annual team retreat. We’re a remote team that came all the way into Philadelphia and had some special time. We got to learn about conversations, communication; we also got to have a lot of fun. What I would say is they’re a vast, diverse group of individuals that we have, that have different skill sets and different fun ways that they live their lives. With hobbies and what inspires them, but they all bring some of those aspects to work, and then I get to lead them, which is nonsense. Me out of all people. So these fine individuals come to work every day. They give me answers to questions I couldn’t even think to ask, and that’s what’s inspiring in the best possible way for those answers.

It’s not like, ‘Oh no, I didn’t ask that question,’ no it’s like, ‘Oh wow, I didn’t even think to ask that question and you’ve answered that and you’ve given me that baseline for why we’re making the decisions that we’re making.’

Lauren Cox: Do you find that also the team members that you have create a longevity with the customer relationship as well?

Joshua Cranmer: Oh yeah, hands down. The company was founded in 1996. We’ve had a client for 26 years. That’s nonsense, that doesn’t happen, but here we are with clients over a decade, over 15 years. Still working with Mile6 in deep ways. Not like ancillary, like we’ll send you stuff if we need it, no like active, working relationship. They call, we meet them in person a lot of times, too.

I’m always getting compliments about the team. It’s the greatest pride that I have. Answering questions, solving things, [hearing] ‘oh hey Jim did this thing the other day, and he was really good, he really solved some problems for us,’ like that’s what I love to hear.

Lauren Cox: The flip side of passion is what will keep you up at night. Is there some technology, or is it clients?

Joshua Cranmer: So this one’s tough because it’s bringing up real aspects of our day-to-day operation. We care deeply about the work that we do. There is a space between caring deeply and being effective in our consultation. Sometimes clients maybe have a little bit too much of their own bias in the discussion that doesn’t allow for inventive or iterative processes to succeed. Well, how do you go about that in a positive way, because you can hear it hopefully already from me now, we’re a pretty positively based organization.

Lauren Cox: Yeah, I can hear that.

Joshua Cranmer: Yeah, we like that. So, the thing that keeps me up at night is: how do you positively spin or positively address some things that you could see as real hurdles that the client is walking into without taking a leap to get over the hurdle? And how do you keep, especially in today’s age of technology, some people do not lean too much into technology, to know maybe I should not do this thing X, Y, and Z.

The embracing of AI has some big positives. Big fan. We’re all in on that. Our innovation team’s working towards that as well, but sometimes use cases shouldn’t be suggested or consulted upon. We try to find a way to say, positively, your IP, your data, maybe that you’re opening AI up to is a security risk. It’s opening up processes that people shouldn’t have a view into and AI is learning from that, so we need to make sure that we’re a little bit careful there.

Lauren Cox: What are the milestones for some of those key decisions to actually finalize the outcome?

Joshua Cranmer: The first steps that we work through with them is to get a philosophical alignment, and that starts with the realization that Mile6 heartbeat is iteration. We build to iterate because nothing is just finished or 100% perfect at launch. We understand this, like the Winston Churchill [quote], “To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often.”

Here we are saying our heartbeat is iteration, and running through our veins is intention, so we’re working through these two core elements, and being philosophically aligned on those is a key first step for any client engagement. Understand that we’re going in. We’re going to make our best effort, and we’re going to use all the information we have today to make the conclusions that will lead to the launch of an MVP. After that you’re going to get real user data that’s going to inspire that iteration on those feature developments that are going to help whether it’s a WordPress website, Shopify website, whether it’s a custom application that we’re doing with you, a mobile app, you’re going to get real data from users that are going to help you understand what to do next. And what to improve next, and then you’re going to align those to business goals and outcomes that either you’re held accountable to a board or you’re held accountable to your C-suite, or any of the above.

But at the end of the day, you’re going to make more clients and more users happy by working with Mile6 and our process.

Lauren Cox: Well, thank you so much, Josh. It’s a pleasure.

Joshua Cranmer: Thanks for having us.

Lauren Cox: Thank you. This is Velocitized Talks. I’m Lauren Cox, and today we had Joshua Cranmer, president at Mile6. Thank you.

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