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#strategy

#agentic

#video

#leadership

Redirecting a 1,000-Person R&D Organization Toward Agentic AI

Qlik has been around for a while. And the R&D group has grown quite large, so much that it has been divided into 3 separate orgs, each with their own culture, priorities, and roadmaps. There was no unified product vision. When I joined as Lead Designer for Qlik Answers—our AI-powered RAG product—I saw engineers and architects building features in isolation, with no shared understanding of where AI was headed.

After presenting Qlik Answers at our company conference in June 2024, I started interviewing customers. What I heard was a fundamental disconnect: we were building tools, but customers needed agents that could actually take action.

Slide from the presentation

Jun – Oct 2024

Timeline

1,000 person org aligned

Key Metric

Lead, Strategic Vision

Role

Jun – Oct 2024

Timeline

1,000 person org aligned

Key Metric

Lead, Strategic Vision

Role

TL;DR

Executive Summary

When leadership isn't seeing around corners, sometimes you have to show them what's coming. By partnering with my manager (now Global Head of Design), we designed and storyboarded a strategic vision video that made the agentic future tangible. The board loved it. The result: we unified the company under a shared agentic focus and redirected the entire R&D organization—before it was too late.

Agentic AI meets you wherever you are

The Problem

No shared vision

Qlik had grown through over the years through acquisitions, now with three separate R&D organizations with different cultures and competing priorities. Teams were building in silos. There was no north star for where the product was headed.

No shared vision

Dismissing the Agentic AI future

While the rest of the industry was racing toward agentic AI, our teams were skeptical. They saw LLMs as incremental improvements, not transformational shifts. We were investing heavily in RAG retrieval—useful, but not where the market was going.

Dismissing the Agentic AI future

Customers needed agents, not search

In customer interviews after Qlik Connect, I kept hearing the same thing: they didn't just want to find information—they wanted AI that could act on it. Our current roadmap wasn't going to meet that need.

Customers needed agents, not search

Turning data into action drives the business forward

The Solution

Partner with the right person

I couldn't redirect a 1,000-person org alone. My manager—a former CEO with a track record of challenging the status quo—saw the same problem. We decided to go around the skeptics and make our case directly to leadership. Together, we had the vision and the credibility to pull it off.

Partner with the right person

Show, don't tell

Executives don't read slide decks. They respond to stories. We designed and storyboarded a strategic vision video that showed what agentic AI could look like in our product—not abstract concepts, but concrete user experiences. I scripted the narrative, designed the visual flow, and we produced a video that made the future feel inevitable.

Show, don't tell

Take it to the board

We got the video in front of the board. They loved it. More importantly, they understood it. The abstract "agentic AI" debate became a tangible product direction they could rally behind.

Take it to the board

We got the video in front of the board. They loved it. More importantly, they understood it. The abstract "agentic AI" debate became a tangible product direction they could rally behind.

Take it to the board

We got the video in front of the board. They loved it. More importantly, they understood it. The abstract "agentic AI" debate became a tangible product direction they could rally behind.

A closing slide to close it out. For the close.

The Outcome

The board's endorsement gave us the mandate to redirect R&D. For the first time since the acquisitions, all three organizations aligned on a shared focus: agentic development.

This wasn't just a strategy change—it was a cultural shift. Teams that had been building in isolation started collaborating. Architects who were skeptical started prototyping agents. The roadmap shifted from incremental RAG improvements to agentic experiences that could actually transform how customers work.

We did this before the window closed. If we had waited another 6 months, we would have shipped a product the market had already moved past.

What I Learned

Don't wait for permission. When you see the future more clearly than leadership, your job isn't to wait for them to catch up. It's to make the future so tangible they can't ignore it.

Partner with the right people. I didn't do this alone. Finding a partner who shared the vision—and had the organizational credibility to act on it—was essential.

Storytelling is strategy. A well-crafted video did more to shift organizational direction than months of meetings ever could. Design isn't just about interfaces. It's about making ideas real.

It has truly been a privilege and an absolute joy to work alongside [you Josh]. Witnessing the incredible dedication, precision, and creative brilliance you’ve poured into bringing this year’s Analytics and AI keynote demo to life has been nothing short of inspiring. The level of craftsmanship and finesse you brought to every detail is a testament to your talent and commitment. This kind of seamless collaboration, where ideas flow effortlessly and ideas are elevated through mutual trust and passion, is rare—and it’s been an honor to be part of it. I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve achieved together.