From Joe's Desk
Hey Reader,
This week we're rolling the Experience Helpdesk from soft launch into full launch. Support flows are live. Courses are loaded.
We'll have more to say about it very soon, but check out our new landing page to learn about what we're building and the philosophy behind it.
— Joe
Co-founder, Johns & Taylor
This Week Our Team Helped...
...prepare Experience Helpdesk for Its Full Launch
This week the Experience Helpdesk goes from soft launch to full launch.
Two new mini courses landed on the shelf — six modules each, with text lessons, video scripts, and workbooks — covering how to build experience-driven teams and how to design feedback systems that actually close the loop. You don't build that kind of library over a coffee break. The depth lets a new member ask "do you have anything on giving feedback to the team?" and hear "yes — start here."
Alongside the courses, the team rewrote microcopy across every public channel where the Helpdesk introduces itself, approved a full 18-email introduction sequence end to end, and shipped a new set of brand templates for shareable content. The plumbing that makes the helpful work easy to find and easy to share.
And then, on Friday, we locked the metrics baseline. One sheet. Six numbers. So that every gain or stall is visible from here forward without having to dig.
If your team is staring down a launch this quarter and the back room isn't stocked yet, that's exactly the kind of work the Experience Helpdesk was built to support.
Quick Tip
Before your next "we should redesign that page" meeting, pull the analytics for it. Most of what gets called "broken" is unmeasured. Look at the last 90 days of traffic, time-on-page, and conversion against whatever goal the page was supposed to serve. About a third of the time, the page is fine and the goals are unclear. About a third of the time, nobody's looked at the numbers since launch and the team is reacting to vibes. The last third is real work. But you don't know which third you're in until you check.
Links Worth Your Time
On the Podcast
In December 1924, executives from GE, Philips, and Osram met in Geneva and signed a contract that said one thing: we're going to make our lightbulbs worse. A century later, the contract has been quietly torn up. This episode looks at what's replacing it — Oregon's first-in-the-nation parts pairing ban, the EU Right to Repair directive that goes live in three months, why even Apple is shipping iPhone parts to your door, and what a 130-year-old cast iron company in Tennessee can teach you about the customer-relationship math that disposable companies are about to lose.
Listen to the episode →From the J&T Blog
Twenty years ago, executives smuggled iPhones onto the network because the consumer hardware was winning and security teams had to scramble to catch up. The same pattern is playing out now with agentic AI — except the thing sneaking in isn't a phone in someone's pocket. It's an autonomous agent spawning sub-agents in milliseconds, querying databases you didn't know it could reach. The governance gap here is a discipline problem dressed up as a tools problem, and most companies are about to find out the hard way.
Read the full post →The Experience Helpdesk Is Officially Open
After several months of soft launch, we're flipping the sign this week. The Helpdesk gives you direct access to our team for weekly strategy sessions, design reviews, and expert guidance — without a six-figure retainer. The desk is staffed. Pull up a chair.
Visit the Helpdesk