Building a culture of design thinking through trial and error
This is a story about a design workshop I planned and how it failed. To tell this story, let me first provide some context.
Since 2021, I’ve been working on a new product called Babbel Live. Live offers online, small-group language classes to thousands of learners around the world. When I joined the team, we had just launched the MVP and everyone was working in silos, trying to keep up with the endless flow of challenges that new products face.
We needed to take a step back, share learnings from each of our areas of ownership, and define a longer term vision for the product together. We had succeeded in recreating a traditional classroom experience online, but how could we innovate on that experience to offer something truly unique? What might the Live experience look like in 6 months, 1 year, or 3 years?
Planning the workshop
From previous experience, I knew design thinking could be a way to break out of our silos and empathize with one another’s challenges. The non-linear, iterative process has often helped me challenge assumptions and uncover problems that are not initially apparent.
To kick this off, I decided to plan a workshop to innovate on the Live classroom experience. Our team works remotely, so I split the workshop into two parts, hoping to avoid Zoom fatigue. The first part was focused on problem definition and the second part on solution ideation. I designed everything in Miro, a virtual white-boarding tool, and recruited seven participants from across the Live team. I also found a facilitator so I’d be able to participate in the workshop myself. Everything seemed good to go.
Running the workshop
We joined the call on a Friday afternoon and together with the facilitator, I shared the purpose and the agenda, did a quick warm-up activity, and then introduced the design thinking methodology. We were running a few minutes behind schedule, but nothing too bad.
That was until we moved to the interactive part. I planned an empathy building activity where everyone imagined themselves joining a Live class from beginning to end and wrote down what went well and what didn’t. By the end of this, we were running significantly behind schedule, so we didn’t have much time to share and discuss.
Instead, we moved to the next activity, sending everyone into breakout rooms to work in pairs. When we reconvened, I could see people were confused and starting to check out. I wasn’t sure how to help and worried about getting through the rest of the workshop.
Ultimately, we pushed through to the end. Stress was high, people were frustrated, and one person even dropped off the call. The entire workshop felt rushed and shallow, barely scratching the surface of the problems our users were facing. Some people had contributed to the conversations, others had barely contributed at all.
Identifying the problems
On Monday, I met with my manager and shared what happened. I expected disappointment, but instead I got empathy. She shared a similar experience, we talked though the challenges, and she encouraged me to continue with part two of the workshop. With the burden feeling lighter, I was able to focus on the problems:
- The scope of the workshop was too open and ambitious. When collaborating remotely, discussions take twice as long. I needed to take some inspiration from our Live teachers, who guide conversations in the classroom, balance speaking time among students, and limit the scope of the overall topic.
- Many participants I invited hadn’t been in a design workshop before. They weren’t used to this way of collaborating or thinking. They needed more context and guidance before jumping straight into design exercises like writing “how might we” statements.
- The facilitator didn’t have the autonomy to adapt the workshop as we went because she didn’t fully understand what I wanted to achieve. By planning it together with her, we could have aligned on the outcomes and anticipated potential challenges.
- This one should have been obvious, but don’t lead a workshop on a Friday afternoon :)
Implementing the solutions
Having already planned the second part on my own, I decided to facilitate it myself. I also went through and de-scoped the workshop, doubling time for activities and marking certain ones as optional depending on time. During the workshop, I guided the conversations, calling on specific people to balance the speaking time. I took notes on-screen as we went, giving time for people to digest what was being said.
The difference was clear: people were more engaged and even seemed to be having fun. Conversations still went over time but they were insightful and extremely valuable. Ultimately, we ended up with 16 different ideas, one of which we brought to testing. Best of all, days after the workshop, I heard from others in the team, asking when I’d be doing another workshop and if they could join.
Scaling the approach
The success of the second part of the workshop gave me the confidence to lead one of my biggest workshops. To kick off a new direction for the Live product, I planned a 5-day design sprint. In total, 24 people participated from across the company and 10 of us comprised the main sprint group, working together in-person at our Berlin office. I followed a model used by Google Ventures and outlined in the Sprint book, with a few tweaks to adapt to our specific team setup.
One of these tweaks included digitizing our entire process in real-time, asking for daily feedback and voting from the larger team and stakeholder group. Because the project touched almost every part of Babbel, this allowed everyone to have insight and impact on the final result, without slowing down the sprint itself.
In the end, we built prototypes for both teachers and learners and ran 8 user interviews in one day. It was an intense process, from planning, to execution, to follow-up, but ultimately, it allowed us to compress about 3 months of discovery work into just one week. It was a week full of difficult conversations, misunderstandings, and surprising insights, but in the end, we aligned across six different teams, putting us on track to enter an entirely new market for Babbel Live.
Takeaways
For me, however, this wasn’t the most rewarding success. The best part for me was that, at the end of the week, we were all closer on a personal level. We had been through the highs and the lows together, struggling to fix last-minute issues in our prototypes Thursday night, to celebrating together after our last user test on Friday.
It’s these kinds of connections with colleagues that make collaboration easy and allow us to build a culture of design thinking in the team. It’s these kinds of connections that get you to show up on a Monday morning and that get you through the frustrating and boring moments. It’s these kinds of connections that allow us to think creatively and solve the most complex problems in the simplest ways, helping learners and teachers achieve their goals with Babbel.
