Designcamp for Product teams
How could we teach and motivate product teams to adopt a new way of working, where user needs guided the team’s efforts? We turned product teams from slow moving design-skeptics to continuously delivering design evangelists.
“Take the design leg out of the box and carefully insert into the product team”
-
For every designer at IBM there were over 200 engineers. Of the vanishingly small number of designers on product teams, the vast majority of those were “Documentation Designers.” Consequently, IBM was shipping less, and had negative organic user growth. To combat this IBM had invested in a new initiative to create a sustainable culture of design. We had one shot to turn IBM’s Engineering led product teams from design-skeptics to Design evangelists.
-
The existing product management process was a byzantine series of checkpoints and technical reviews. Engineering had functional control of what was released. Design, if it was part of the process at all, was the very last step. How could we make user-needs the guiding force of our product teams, not technology or bureaucracy?
IBM is the oldest tech company in the world, and its product teams have seen dozens of leadership fads come and go. How can we persuade them that Design was here to stay. How could we overcome this significant motivation gap?
-
An intensive, five-day program where interdisciplinary teams infuse their projects with deep empathy for their users while learning design thinking in a collaborative, hands-on environment.
That was the “easy” part. The hard part was to put so much energy and attention to detail into every facet of the experience, that everyone involved would tell their colleagues that this was nothing like anything they had ever seen at IBM.
Given the need to build skills in context, and to have real-world outcomes that showcase the efficacy of these new behaviors quickly, we determined that an immersive workshop would be the centerpiece of the learning experience. Given time constraints of the learners, the urgency of the initiative, we had learners come as a team and work practicing new skills on their existing product, which we had designated “Signature Products.”
The reason we taught 101-level visual design when 2/3rds of the learners would never do it themselves was not obvious: A central learning objective was that Product Engineers and Managers would hire designers. To do that we needed to close the knowledge gap around just how difficult good design is.
While the 5 day workshop was the centerpiece, we assigned each team a Design Coach, who would help them prepare for this week, and practice skills like user research that couldn’t easily be practiced in a closed workshop setting.
The entire experience; invitation email, pre-camp concierge service, learning environment design, and even evening activities, was executed to exacting standards the reinforce that these product teams were central to affecting a cultural and business turn around at IBM.
The post-camp experience included reinforcing meetings, spaced to match the context that the learners would be working, and the provide just-in-time support.
Impact
Project teams doubled their design and execution speed.
After word of the first two Designcamps spread, the waiting list of people requesting to attend this class grew to be over 6 months long. We had an NPS well over 90.
Demand for designers skyrocketed, and we were able to successfully deploy hundreds of newly hired designers in the next two years.
This flagship program became the template for design thinking education for IBM’s selling and consulting practices.
90+
NPS
