Nitin Julka

Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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Exciting news to share from the ELB Learning team! We’ve kicked off a five-year partnership with the Defense Acquisition University to help modernize and scale its learning ecosystem. 🎉 Our flagship eLearning authoring tool, Lectora™, will play a key role in powering world-class acquisition training, and our team will assist faculty in creating engaging and compliant digital training across DAU’s global network. We’ll also provide onboarding implementation and technical support, including LMS migration assistance, train-the-trainer programs, and expert services for course, game, and simulation design. I’m proud of the work our team is doing. Shout-out to our Government Services division, led by Peter Banfield and Ray Resendez IV, MBA, and our partners at DAU for believing in the transformation ahead.

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Leaders from the Massachusetts AI Coalition are working with their teams to drive impact across the Commonwealth. Here's a quick update for those interested in following along. - Beacon Taskforce: A Founder Starter Pack is being assembled from the feedback of 30+ founders. Consistent themes are present (fast/flexible capital, free work space, GPU credits, connections to founders/operators), making consistent solutions testable. Excited for the first Founder Starter Pack to go live in early H1. - Tavern Taskforce: Tomorrow's event is ON. Excited for Luke Winston-Almanzar, Co-Founder & CEO of Reservoir, Ryan Jacobs, Co-Founder & CEO of Agency Robotics, and Shilpi Gupta, Founder & CEO of her company will be speaking on the "Industrial AI Builders Panel." - Banners Taskforce: Heads down. Cranking away. Working on a launch of our first big initiative on April 1st. Remember folks: The weather in New England is a feature, not a bug. 😉

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Over the past decade, we’ve run one of the leading talent marketplaces, helping the world’s top companies access independent talent to power their most critical work. Along the way, we’ve learned what modern staffing firms need to succeed: speed, automation, digital candidate experiences, and fewer manual, repetitive tasks.  We’ve been quietly building our own proprietary technology to solve these workflow challenges and improve our own productivity as a company. Today, we’re bringing that technology to the broader industry with the launch of GraphiteOS, an AI-powered recruiting operating system that we believe will fundamentally transform how staffing firms operate in the years to come. This isn’t just a product. It’s the technology infrastructure staffing firms need to operate faster and more effectively in an AI-driven, “agent-first” world.  We believe this technology will enable levels of recruiter productivity and client satisfaction that have never been seen before. Recruiters shouldn’t be stuck juggling disconnected tools and performing repetitive tasks. With GraphiteOS, we’ve built an all-in-one platform that connects the dots - sourcing, matching, screening, onboarding and billing - so teams can focus on what matters most: the high-value work that drives placements. I’m incredibly proud of what our team has built and, more importantly, what it will enable for our early customers where the platform is being deployed as we speak! Learn more at www.graphiteos.ai #GraphiteOS #StaffingTech #FutureOfWork #AIRecruiting #StaffingInnovation

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Leadership in 2025: Designing for Alignment, Not Control Many leaders continue to confuse alignment with control, leading to over-engineered processes and unnecessary layers of oversight that hinder momentum. The most effective leaders, including those at TPG, prioritize alignment around mission and outcomes. When the vision is clear and metrics are established, teams require space rather than micromanagement. This environment fosters creativity and accelerates execution. A recent article in Harvard Business Review emphasizes that the strongest organizations thrive not on tighter control, but on cultivating systems of trust and alignment that promote speed and resilience. Today’s leadership is about removing friction, clarifying communication, and trusting the systems in place. #Leadership #Alignment #StrategicOps #TPG #CapitalEfficiency

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Wondering what Forward Deployed Engineers actually are and when it makes sense to use them? I recently had a great conversation with CJ Gustafson on FDEs, and how we use them at Invisible Technologies. We spoke specifically about FDEs as a GTM choice, how the economics change when engineering is pulled forward into the sales motion, pricing models, metrics to measure health of business and lots of other things. Check out more on the latest Mostly Media newsletter. If you're not subscribed, highly recommend subscribing. Link in comments.

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Post-close GTM breakdowns aren't usually about founder capability. They're about structural shift. Founder-led companies often grow through instinct, relationships, and product intuition. Post-close, expectations shift toward repeatability, process discipline, and scalable execution. Without clear alignment around new GTM roles, cadence, and enablement infrastructure, friction naturally follows. The issue isn't leadership. It's transition. PE firms that proactively support founders with GTM clarity; defined processes, role design, and structured enablement, see faster stabilization and stronger post-close acceleration. At SFE Partners, we help bridge the gap between founder-driven momentum and operator-led scale, building the GTM playbooks and infrastructure that turn traction into predictable growth. Learn how we support founder-to-operator GTM transitions at https://bit.ly/3Mzjf53 #PrivateEquity #GTMStrategy #RevOps #ValueCreation #SFEInsights

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