About - Starve the Bards

LET'S MAKE COOL STUFF PEOPLE LIKE, TOGETHER

I'm Charmaine Wyland, a strategist, a systems thinker, insights wrangler and creative executor with over two decades of experience marrying user and customer behaviour with commercial or organisation goals in ways that really push things forward. I have an extensive background in design, research, team + project leadership, and de-facto programme management - so, I can either take on a project and run with it or be dropped into a team to collaboratively hash the best ways to handle when your business meets the humans who interact with it.

LET'S WORK TOGETHER

Drop me a line

THE MISSION

To bring collaborative, customer-focused strategic consultation that can actually be implemented by your team for real results… without the big 5 price tag. I help companies tease out the nuance out of their customer research that reveals the BIG opportunities, to suss out where in their customer engagement companies are leaking customers, revenue and brand positioning and provide real ways to fix those issues.

The number of people who can be your customers is not infinite.

Let’s try to get as many as we can and give them a reason to stick around (and spend money with your company!) I want to help companies find the ways to truly stand out in the industry by helping them focus on the customer experience and long term engagement alongside their short term review or engagement goals.

I like to work with companies that treat their customers like people vs not faceless revenue lines on a spreadsheet. In this age of AI where production is getting cheaper and the output often more mediocre, the human connection side of business is becoming a key differentiator - my mission is to help companies harness the ways they can lean into that connection with their customers.

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Service design and operations alignment

Go through ALL of your business’ customer touch points to help highlight areas of opportunity and improvement, help define who in the company owns what, and provide direction on how to bridge the digital with the physical parts of your business.

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Customer / user insights assessements

Go through the data and insights you’ve been using or commision new research to see where there may be new or missded opportunities buried in the nuance.

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Product and experience design

Both leading and providing hands-on design for digital products or larger experience projects, collaborating with all teams involved to put out the best, most engaging product and experience they can within the restraints given.

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Company positioning alignment

Getting every part of your business on the same page by ensuring your branding, messaging, products and services all feel like they're coming from the same company. (P.S. I'm an ace at big rebrand implementations!)

My squiggly career can take your business to the next level.

My previous experience in business strategy, design, UX, and research means I bring a vast toolkit to solve business problems. Whether it’s working with the senior leadership team to reveal opportunities that make have been missed in customer research or helping to lead a product, research and design team to deliver a feature that breathes new life into a brand, my overall objective is to use my experience to figure out what makes customers tick and helps you to deliver better customer engagement and retention.

I typically join or consult with at critical inflection points—rebrands, acquisitions, or strategic pivots. My core value is bridging gaps: between departments that don't communicate, between old-guard subject matter experts and modern design and research practices, between business goals and user needs, between quality output and pragmatic delivery. I'm particularly drawn to working content-rich, human-connection-oriented products and services from news media to companies with physical products or brick-and-mortar customer experiences —places where customer focus and design can solve real problems and create meaningful impact.

Getting into brass tacks - What I'm good at

Analysing complex product, business, commercial and customer needs - working with product, design and research orgs along with commercial and business stakeholders to develop design and research-based solutions that are effective, feasible, (and profitable, as relevant) for B2C and media based products or public services related organisations.

Coordinating and implementing large scale rebrands - coordinating with brand and marketing to pragmatically roll-out rebranded assets and language across channels and platforms through extensive collaboration, estimation and dependency tracking with other departments, like product, loyalty, public relations, physical signage / facilities, social marketing and beyond.

Providing actionable creative vision for teams, for organisations - focusing on opportunities to innovate and up skill / cross skill with other disciplines and departments to ensure your org stays engaged, aligned, people-focused, innovative and competitive.

Partnering and collaborating with business owners, subject matter experts, product management, design, research and tech - to develop a user centred product strategy that informs product roadmaps and identifies areas for discovery and innovation.

Leading, developing and managing for high performance - specialising in product management and multidisciplinary design, content, and research teams.

Coordinating and managing fast paced, multi-iteration and new product projects - as appropriate, doing deep discovery, user research driven projects for website, apps, display and video products.

Evolving Ops and restructuring teams - refining design, research and content Ops and team structure to align with the overall business priorities while also championing ceremonies that balance business needs with customer concerns.

Mentoring future leaders, coaching them to be people-focused in their approach to driving business value.

If you want to know how I lead projects or team, check out my leadership deck.

HOW I LEAD

Companies and clients I've worked with

Sharing thought-leadership on… leadership

In this episode with the wonderful Adam Jennings, I reflect on my serpentine career path, share what it really takes to grow high-performing teams, and offer a masterclass in navigating change with empathy and clarity. We discuss design maturity, rebrands, AI’s impact on design, my proudest work, how I stress-bake my way through deadlines, and why I’ve always been more interested in how people think than what they make.