A few ideas I’m proud to have made tangible
End-to-End Research to Digital Prototypes
Service Design
The service designer’s broad capabilities are especially important when teams have limited resources. I conducted user research planning in Google, contextual inquiry remotely and in the field, digital prototyping with Sketch, and user testing with Invision.
This was a truly collaborative project. The project involved building a prototype AI tool for our B2B Enterprise SaaS partners — a co-creation exercise with our own designers, developers, and AI scientists with equals on their side. The insights I uncovered and artifacts I created (see above) were instrumental in aligning the different workstreams, and made feedback & iteration all the more impactful.
Building an process optimizer tool requires a deep understanding of the user and buyer’s context. Does your solution actually solve a problem? Will the switching costs from current processes be too high? These end-to-end design maps and blueprints acted as central artifacts to improve alignment across stakeholders (who were consulted in its creation) and allowed us to isolate zones for prioritization (which were identified through in-depth interviews and process document review).
Understanding the User Experience of an AI Powered Retail Optimizer
User Journey & Experience Mapping
I generated these current and future state journey maps using Mural.co, a browser-based, digital whiteboard.
Judging at the Rotman Design Challenge — Innovation Case Competition
Building a comprehensive, yet adaptable client engagement plan requires a deep understanding of the technical requirements, coupled with broad experience of how different companies are structured and operate. I was able to leverage both my Engineering background, Consulting experience, and Design approach to integrate our company’s internal technical expertise into a plan that our account executives can sell, our advisory group can deliver to our Enterprise SaaS clients, and produce useful information that our development teams can build on.
Developing a Methodology to Assess Organizational AI Readiness
Machine Learning Data Audit Model
I designed this plan to reveal key objectives and outcomes of an end-to-end engagement — from discovery to ideation to validation and development — every team (sales, advisory, product, and engineering) can understand their role and responsibilities at each stage.
Collecting Insights for an Organizational AI Maturity Whitepaper
Workshop Design & Facilitation
The process I designed and executed comprised of multiple remote and in-person workshops, independent research streams, and the usage of shared documents for asynchronous co-creation.
Defining a point of view for our company required leveraging the knowledge, experience, and insights from our diverse talent. While the general framing (bones) of the thought leadership piece may come from a single department head, the detailed content (flesh) needs to be aggregated from internal and external research, then synthesized into a coherent message. Facilitating this data gathering and amalgamation required organizational empathy and systems thinking. The final product can be found here.
Presenting at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium
Developing a Company-Wide Collaboration Program
Cross-Functional Team Culture
This project satisfied several of my passions, including getting to know the motivations of my colleagues, creating opportunities to share knowledge, and building systems for innovation to emerge from the mixing of diverse expertise.
I launched this internal initiative as a member of the Culture Guild to develop a scalable set of practical rules, tools, and nudges that will enable better cross-disciplinary collaboration, with emphasis on avoiding “interventions” that make it a big deal (i.e. requires significant effort to overcome the status quo), and creating and nurturing conditions & structures; rather than enforcing explicit behaviour change.
Working with a national healthcare organization, I was responsible for all aspects of the 8-month project — Coordinating and directing parallel workstreams; consulting on and facilitating various research, synthesis, and decision making activities; and managing the schedule and budget of the entire engagement.
Managing a Strategy & Organizational Transformation Project
Project & Client Management
My philosophy for project management focuses on creating the conditions for individual success, and one of the most effective tools is the “project kick-off”. By building strong team bonds, future obstacles are more likely to be overcome.
Building a disciplined cross-functional research capability
Research Planning and Education
Everyone has a role in understanding the customer. When developing research plans, I take time to co-create with internal partners to build alignment and consistency, and also use this opportunity to provide ad-hoc training on design mindsets and methodologies.
A company’s service offerings are truly customer centric when employees and partners are equally aligned. A service designer and ux researcher’s job is not limited to execution of ux/design research, but includes education and advocacy of the research craft across product, design, marketing, sales, operations, and strategy. The above plan was co-created with my advisory team for an opportunity discovery engagement with a national financial services company.
Presenting at the SAP Design Talks series on AI
Presenting the End-to-End Plan for an AI Development Project
Product Design Narrative
Using our client as the central character, I leveraged Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey template to design a compelling exposition of our project. This built empathy for both our customer and the engineering team working on the product.
It’s difficult to keep track of all that’s going on in a rapidly scaling company, even when there are significant projects that the future depends on. All-hands meetings are a time to share the big milestones, but text and metrics rarely make for a compelling story. I like to take a dramatic approach to communicating with key stakeholders. Humans respond to stories, and even software design projects can have character development and plot twists.
Modern software companies have perfected the art of hyper-segmentation. However, there is still ample reason for the people in your company to understanding the needs and pains of whom they ultimately serve. While it’s useful to know what you’re building, I also like to emphasize differences so you know what is not essential. The road to simpler decision making is only seeing the choices that matter.
Capturing the Unique Qualities of Individuals in the AI Enterprise SaaS Market
Customer Personas and Scenarios
Working with enterprise clients in an emerging space meant no standardization of who the “user” or “buyer” would be for our SaaS products. Based on our inbound and outreach efforts so far, I was able to generate profiles of archetypes we might encounter, which enabled Sales and Product teams to better prepare for each engagement.
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