Learning to navigate the big blue ocean
An IBM Patterns Design Camp perspective
The ocean can feel overwhelming. For inexperienced sailors or swimmers, it can feel too vast and too cold. The big waves can make you feel so small, even powerless at times, and the tales that we tell about being lost in it are endless.
In many ways, this is what IBM felt like to me when I first joined.
At this point, I think I should warn you I might take the ocean analogy a bit far, but I hope you stay with me…
Last January, I joined IBM as a user experience designer on business analytics. In my first couple of weeks while onboarding, I learned that IBM has close to 400,000 employees around the globe.
Having never worked anywhere with more than 400 people before then, I couldn’t even grasp what that number means. It felt so abstract! What do all these people do? What are their days like? What exactly does it mean to be in a Slack channel with more than 12,000 members? Can I actually start talking to them now? How many of those people would I ever work with or meet or even talk to?
You can tell I was (well, I still am) an absolute noob to working at a global company. But trying to make sense of where I, my team, or what I’m working on fits within all this was absolutely overwhelming.
After a few weeks, I was able to understand at least where business analytics fits and make sense of a few things around it as well. But every now and then, a piece of news or a message on one of those 1,000-people Slack channels would remind me of the rest of the organization, and I’d find myself lost again in the vast size of it all.
Then, 6 months into my new job, I was heading to Patterns in Austin.
Patterns is an IBM-specific design education program. It’s a 6-week program for early professional designers to introduce them to design thinking, design practices, and culture at IBM. It takes place in IBM’s Austin studio, and designers from different studios and business units around the world can participate.
My class in summer 2019 had 56 designers from more than 15 studios around the world and different parts of the company. We were suddenly in the same room being introduced to each other and IBM design.
One of the goals of the program is to learn about the Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT) framework and how to apply it while solving complex business problems in order to stay focused on user outcomes and to continue to reinvent within diverse teams through continuously observing, reflecting, and making.
As new hires, we were also intensively — at times too intensively— introduced to the different parts of IBM and all the variety of products, technologies, and services that are created in it. We had formal sessions where speakers, — designers and non-designers— from different business units were invited to share their work and tell us about their product or service they work on.
An additional value for me was the conversations I had with fellow Patternites. By the end of the program, I had learned a great deal about different teams, what they work on, the challenges they face in their day-to-day, and their achievements and victories.
Those conversations were the best way to make a bit more sense of the news pieces that pop on my homepage or the Slack message that I read on the research channel the other day.
At Patterns, I learned about what it’s like to work on Systems in Poughkeepsie, NY and what the mainframes actually look like. I got to know people from the cloud team in Böblingen, Germany and heard about some differences in the way the Beijing team operates. I learned about IXers’ challenges with an agency model within IBM, and about the different clients they work with around the world. And I met some of the leaders of design at IBM who work on the design practice and make sure that designers have the tools and space they need to do their best work.
Over these 6 weeks, I was able to start piecing together the different parts of this huge organization and see it as the dynamic and surprisingly active company it really is.
For most of the program, we worked on incubator projects that were sponsored by a variety of IBM teams. We were all assigned to projects that were not from our regular business units, and we worked with a team of designers from different studios.
This was very exciting for me as it offered a deeper dive and exploration into a domain that I would have otherwise never learned about in my home team while having the space to learn more about its challenges and apply design thinking to address them. After all, no one should try to boil the ocean.
I’m not claiming that I now have a clear and full understanding of all corners of the ocean or what the hundreds of thousands IBMers do every day, but it feels less overwhelming and less abstract.
And now, back on my home team and weeks after Patterns has ended, more of the pieces of information and the Slack messages make sense, more names seem familiar, and I at least recognize the teams. The ocean doesn’t feel as dark or mysterious as it did before. And I know that around the globe, design teams are working on their business problems, engaging users, and doing their best to apply design thinking to their process.
I loved so many things about Patterns, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be part of it, especially at this point in my life and my career. Above all, I’m so happy about how it helped me find my way through the ocean and helped me feel that I’m an essential part of a bigger team.
Laila Goubran is a UX Designer at IBM based in Ottawa, Canada. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
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