Project phoenix and the art of collaboration — Part I
It started with a provocation
We all must be obsessed with continually delighting our clients. At every interaction, we must strive to offer them the best experience and value. The only way to lead in today’s ever-changing marketplace is to constantly innovate according to what our clients want and need.
- Arvind Krishna, first day as IBM CEO, April 6, 2020
This provocation sparked an idea that turned into a proposal for the IBM Design Patterns Program.
IBM.com is our corporate flagship website and main channel for our customers across the entire portfolio and through all stages of their journeys. It is a place where our customers come to conduct all pre- and some level of post-purchase activities. It also serves as the main digital channel for sharing corporate information and news.
The Digital Growth & Commerce design team drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, by creating the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while delivering enterprise-wide business results. Given this project encompasses the entire IBM.com platform, it will cover the various industries for all of IBM’s portfolio — B2B products and services.
As part of the Digital Growth & Commerce mission, our primary users are distributed teams of content publishers, who use our digital platforms to create and author website content to IBM.com. These globally distributed teams need tools and frameworks that allow them to design and build their own IBM.com experiences effectively and efficiently. These tools and frameworks are essential in maintaining an alignment to the larger scope of IBM.com as a whole, so that the resulting experiences are consistent and coherent.
IBM.com is a collection of individual, bespoke journeys, serving multiple business units and internal teams. By creating an experience model, which includes aspects that encompass a broad range of dimensions such as journey, interaction models, stylistic perspectives and brand consideration, we will enable our distributed publishing teams to maintain an understanding of and alignment to the larger scope of IBM.com. The result is an IBM.com that is not only consistent and coherent, but increasingly performant across all of our highly prioritized journeys.
Enter the IBM Design Patterns Program
Remote collaboration can be daunting. Whether it’s across multiple groups of stakeholders or a smaller subset, strategic program coordination, communication, and alignment best practices need to be established. Though remote work is familiar to IBMers given we are distributed across studios around the globe, we are continually reassessing and reinventing ways of working collaboratively.
Now more than ever, communicating effectively and navigating IBM’s large, complex enterprise-wide ecosystem continues to be essential to our daily work. Project Phoenix formed as part of the IBM Design Patterns Program. This program is an accelerated incubator that gives early career professionals the ability to jump feet-first, with some support, into a real project for a stakeholder group at IBM. Patternites leave the program with a foundation in IBM Enterprise Design Thinking principles, a new-found confidence in their abilities, and a network they can rely on as they grow in their careers.
The team included five sponsoring team members, five sponsor users, and 10 stakeholders located in the United States. The six Patterns team members were also scattered across time zones, with locations outside of the United States as well. While managing multiple schedules across several time zones, we were able to gather essential insights and consensus through several best practices outlined below, which informed this incubator project’s transformational journey and outcomes.
Key practices that the DGC Sponsoring Team implemented to ensure the collaboration between the Patterns design team, sponsor adopters, and stakeholders could be as effective as possible included:
- Introduction. Provided proper access to learn more about the sponsor users and stakeholders beforehand. This guidance assisted the Patterns team in being able to ask the right research questions.
- Preparation. Provided project summary materials and domain context readily available, so the sponsor adopters and stakeholders could learn who the target users are and what user pain points they are solving for. A list of the questions were prepared by the sponsoring team to help kick off the interviews.
- Communication. Provided consistent communication between everyone involved as a priority. From daily Slack check-ins to question, and discussion follow-ups, to shared links for resources and recording for playbacks.
- Transparency. Provided proper feedback and clear expectations. It can be challenging to arrive to a solution that meets the users’ needs and solves the correct problem if the team is not aligned. Throughout, the sponsoring team led with honesty and transparency while creating a safe space for everyone to communicate so we could align on direction.
Discovering “The Newcomer”
From the beginning of our project, Team Phoenix was tasked with a problem statement that felt equal parts vague and broad. With just a five week window to absorb, research, and produce a high-fidelity solution, we were presented with the challenge of designing “a delightful B2B website while maintaining consistency and coherence in 40 million pages owned by various business units and teams across the globe, each with slightly different contexts and objectives, while also serve the corporate level missions.”
Even digesting the scope of this project took time. How could we deliver a unified design solution for end users and business units alike with 40 million pages already laid out? The countless angles of potential approach were daunting, and our methods shifted almost constantly throughout the project.
After collaborating with our Incubator team and absorbing the spectrum of potential solutions, we found ourselves focusedon designing new “Experience Models” for end-users that could both maintain consistency for any page found on IBM.comand serve IBM adopters creating webpages.
Shortly after this conclusion, however, we were able to interview several adopters who would be using said Experience Models. They emphasized the importance of creating consumable documentation for asset adoption, and in turn, expanded the solution range for our project. This insight, which was ultimately supported by the 10 stakeholders we also interviewed, shifted our focus from an end-user-specific issue, to building a solution tailored to the adopter. We began to see the inconsistent product page experience as a symptom, rather than the root problem itself.
Eventually, we decided to focus on the web creator as our primary user. We settled on a solution that would revolve around producing unified design guides to those web creators in hopes of creating a more consistent creation process. Instead of building the models themselves, we honed in on designing for the adoption of the models. With any success in this region, we could naturally adopt a more cohesive end-user experience over time.
This approach was highly catered to “the newcomer” at IBM, a persona our team could strongly identify with as we were all recently new to IBM and its complex design ecosystem. Our solution centered on a web-portal that produced a guided experience for individuals new to page design. In defining our strategy, we recognized a need to connect with a niche element of every IBMer.
An empathetic mindset
Empathy ultimately became the anchor of our project. With “the newcomer” solidified as our persona archetype and our project solution speculatively catering to a narrow demographic, we created a potentially polarizing or even foreign narrative to long-standing IBMers. That said, if we were to make our solution for “the newcomer” both convincing and all-encompassing, we needed to connect with every IBMer that has felt confusion or frustration when learning the ropes of an undeniably complex system. Rooting ourselves in an empathetic tone became not only an aspect of our approach, but a critical component of Phoenix’s potential success.
And considering both the scale and consistent evolution of a company like IBM, even experienced employees are more than likely to cycle through “the newcomer” phase more than once in their careers. We knew our solution, if properly conveyed, could open new doors of discussion in solving this complicated problem.
Storytelling was an integral part of our final playback. Throughout the pivots and constant evolution of our prototype, our entire workflow consistently connected back to empathy. Naturally, that empathy was most evident in a story, so we took our persona, Amanda, and gave her a believable (and empathetic) storyline.
A conclusive story
By the time we reached our Final Playback, Amanda’s story had been interwoven throughout the entire presentation. She was a key aspect in both revisiting of our problem space, and the application of the final deliverable.
To begin, Amanda is given a project scenario that clearly displayed the as-is concerns we were working to solve. Her assignment prompts her to rework the home webpage design of IBM Cloud to be compliant to IBM’s design system, Carbon,which, on its own may seem simple enough. The avenues of internal design combined with an overarching lack of guidance, however, leave her feeling messy and directionless. Her initial project ultimately ends on a sour note.
Following Amanda’s initial project run, we introduced our finalized solution: a concept website created as an authoritative directory to IBM’s ecosystem of design resources. Flashback to the beginning of her project, and Amanda’s teammates now introduce her to our New to Design website as a starting point. The resource acts as a stepping stone, rather than a rabbit hole, and she is able to design using the correct templates, patterns, and icons. Amanda’s finishes her first project quicker, more efficiently, and more confidently than her as-is scenario would have allowed.
Establishing a new need
Altogether, we interviewed 15 people for this project. With so many different inputs and perspectives, this led to a lot of synthesis and analysis work on our end.
In order to narrow down a single area to target our focus, we turned to our research insights. Looking at some quotes from our stakeholders and users, we determined that working to solve for the design ecosystem would be most effective for building a foundation for consistency.
Our design systems teams need to take a step back together, and look at how we can fix the big picture.
-Design System Manager
Ideally, anyone at IBM knows exactly how pieces interact with the existing design language frameworks.
-Design Strategy Lead
The next step was to gain the support from our Sponsoring team and align on a new needs statement. They agreed that this research was pointing us in a new direction, and it would make sense to conquer a problem that targets the root cause versus the symptom. From here we were able to establish our new needs statement:
An IBM.com webpage designer needs a way to identify and understand available design resources so that they can clarify what pieces are relevant to them and feel confident about their use.
Check out Part II of this post where we rollup our sleeves and dig deeper into the process, solution, and learnings from the overall experience.
Special thanks to the co-authors of this post including, Nigel Prentice, Wonil Suh, Jenny Sanchez, Oscar Dumlao, Mauricio Monroy Andrade, Delaney Rundell, Olivia Bowman, Stephanie Boyls, and William Ryan.
Jenny Price is the DesignOps Lead for the Digital Growth & Commerce Team at IBM Studios Astor based in the heart of New York City with team members co-located in Austin, Raleigh, Boston, and Bratislava .
The Digital Growth & Commerce design team drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, and creates the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while driving business results. The Digital Growth & Commerce Team and F&O Support Experiences are led by Nigel Prentice, Design Director.
Please visit www.ibm.com/design for more information on Design at IBM.
The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
