Overview
I was tasked to co-develop a process that could be utilized cross-functionally in order to facilitate design thinking at a Fortune 100 company. The design team had recently transitioned to an Agile workflow, and wanted to adopt design thinking principles into their product development process.
Challenge
The challenge was to define a process that allowed for flexibility and speed while also promoting data-driven, customer-focused problem statements in order to drive product development.
Role
I co-facilitated a small group of design leads and product owners through activities to define the overarching process. I socialized the results with product and design partners. I implemented the process along with a project manager, and continued to refine the steps in order to promote desirable results.
Tools
Design thinking methodology, Aha!, JIRA, Keynote, Facilitation
Pain Points
Design thinking workshops had happened sporadically at the company before. However, they were not consistently adopted by the product organization. Management in product and design had wanted to standardize a process that account for some pain points in the workshop process to date.
Proper participants
Teams had not been aligned on who to involve in the workshops that had been conducted in the past. Stakeholder definition was inconsistent and undefined outside of habit.
Research
It was often unclear how data inputs would be provided to inform the workshop discussion. There were also questions about how research requests would be handled after a workshop was concluded.
Inconsistent expectations
Product and design partners were not always clear what outcomes to expect from the workshops.
Time to pre-plan
Lack of clarity around outcomes fueled rapid requests without sufficient time to gather appropriate data to inform the discussion
Solutioning
Participants in workshops would often enter into the solution or technical phase without first building an understanding of the customer problem
Stanford d.school model for design thinking
Establish Cross-Functional Team
A small team consisting of three product managers, a UX design lead and myself were brought together to discuss a process that could be used consistently across projects and would support aligned expectations.
I co-facilitated process to use design thinking to establish the design thinking process. We fleshed out the pain points with data we obtained from our product and design partners. I took that data, and created a proposed solution. We gathered feedback, and continued to develop the process through a handful of applications.
Our goal was to have something we could move forward with quickly, and also allow space for it to continue to develop in practice.
Proposal
We were given parameters to have the workshop process focus exclusively on the problem definition space. We aimed to establish a process that would utilize customer data to build empathy with customer problems, and also bring together a diverse set of partners to gain a clear understanding of the problem area so solution work could move quickly.
We delineated clear roles and responsibilities to allow for efficient execution, and laid out the ultimate vision for the problem.
Proposed workshop process
Evaluation
Once the process was launched, we quickly noticed some gaps. First, while we had outlined the goals and outcomes of the workshops themselves, there was still some confusion about when a workshop was necessary.
We also needed to build in efficiencies during the intake process so that project managers were kept aware and so we could avoid projects being slipped into design phase through a backdoor channel.
Lastly, we needed to determine a research workflow that would allow for discovery research to take place outside of the work that was already engaged within the sprint cadence.
Detailed outline of proposed process
Iteration
I worked closely with the design project manager to determine a broader workflow that the design thinking workshop process would sit within. This accounted for the various types of projects that would come to design (those with clear problem statements already defined and those that need to explore the problem space more deeply).
We accounted for the various pathways that work comes to design, and also educated partners in the product organization further about the design thinking process itself.
Outcome
We ultimately established a design workflow that took into account the newly developed workflow of the product organization. We established a system that reserved space for design thinking while also allowing space for experimentation.