Designing the future, 14 days at a time
What would it take to design a future every 14 days? Who needs to be involved and where do we begin?
These are our learnings from managing a project where the scope was broad and the ambiguity high.
The Enterprise team across content and product design, project management, product, and engineering were asked to:
Define an aspirational three-year vision for Atlassian’s Enterprise customers, in line with our three year Enterprise strategy.
One of our great strengths at Atlassian comes from uniting across crafts no matter the challenge — so our initial response was ‘Yes, we’re doing vision work!’ …but in reality, it felt impossible due to the scale, breadth, ambiguity, and pressure to be all things to all people.
As a team, we sought to break the where do we begin barrier, where teams spin their wheels, endlessly debating how broad the scope is, how much there is to research and explore, and having meta-conversations about where the starting point should be.
This is how Enterprise Design kicked off the first phase of our Enterprise vision and what we learned from consecutively shipping five storyboards back-to-back, gaining momentum, maturity, and confidence with each 14-day sprint.
Learning #1: Starting is the hardest
Breaking inertia is possible. We started by writing stories of the future using the what and the who that we knew today.
To get the momentum going we selected a topic the team felt the most knowledgeable about. We leveraged our existing Enterprise Guild top themes research to narrow the focus and aligned these to our four Enterprise Archetypes:
Enterprise archetypes are our top-level Enterprise customer roles in the context of buying, implementing, maintaining, and managing the ongoing use of Atlassian products and services.
We produced a storyboard of the future by mapping research needs and pain points to our storyboard, determining who our protagonist would be and what their context would look like, and using our collective expertise to brainstorm what an ideal customer experience would look like for them.
How would we make their life easier?
How would we design for greater collaboration?
For greater trust?
For greater efficiencies?
The result leveraged the power of storytelling to convey the concept and design to illustrate and narrate the experience from the customer’s point of view.
We learned that by not hesitating during the 14 days and only using what we had at hand, including the many years' worth of existing design research, we could quickly identify key opportunities.
Learning #2: Storytelling is a powerful medium
Storytelling allowed us to facilitate meaningful conversations with our leaders and generate empathy through the customer experience.
The storytelling narrative helped to convey ideas and future possibilities.
Possibilities are what sparks the necessary connections and conversations to make the impossible, possible.
Team members described them as thought experiments which led to ideas like what would an Enterprise app program look like? This generated ideas outside of the smaller triad teams and inspired further creative thinking.
One of our storyboards focused the narrative on AirBnB… giving it a sense of reality.
The basic elements of our narrative always centered around:
- The scenario and context our personas were in
- Who the protagonist was and who the supporting roles around them were
- The context of the challenge or opportunity that they faced
- What their needs, motivations, and drivers were
Keeping it lean and light allowed the story to evolve over the course of the 14 days and leveraging the existing treasure trove of insights from our Technical Account Managers made the stories realistic.
Learning #3: Start with the customer
Don’t focus on the constraints just yet — making time to work on ideas freely is essential in creating customer innovation.
When the team is operating in the strategic space don’t get boxed in by technical constraints and the ‘we’ve tried that before’ mentality. This incubation period is critical to see what sticks from a desirability lens, from the customer’s perspective. The outcome of this process meant the ideas and concepts the team put forward weren’t impossible… sure, they might be harder to implement, but they’re not impossible.
Learning #4: Leverage a cross-craft team to take ideas forward
Cross-craft collaboration was an essential ingredient in ensuring a diverse set of perspectives were included in building the future state stories. As a group we identified key customer experience principles which continued to be the “glue” to unite all the narratives.
The team sought to make the customer experience principles tangible, so team members could relate to them and there was less chance they would have differing interpretations. Our stories showed how a customer experienced seamlessness or centralization, as a critical element in translating vision to possible execution.
Our Enterprise customer experience principles were:
Consistency
Centralization
Proactiveness
Automation
Seamlessness
Simplifying setups
Everything is auditable
These key principles and product concepts were taken forward into the next phase to ensure they were not left as principles or “shelf ware”.
Collectively we produced concept pitches across four broad conceptual spaces which play key roles in the Enterprise ecosystem across Admins, Users, Vendors, and Executives. It’s these conceptual designs and experience “pitches” which connect this early abstract storyboarding outcome to a tangible roadmap that can and should be executed upon.
We hope our learnings inspire your teams to take steps in narrating and visualizing your customer’s future state experiences in a manner that doesn’t cost the earth, nor takes a lot of time, but does create meaningful shifts for your customers.
Thank you to our Enterprise cross-craft team and our leadership team for leaning into this way of working and giving it your all sprint after sprint.
In particular, a special mention to our experience designers who made this project possible: Anthony Stonehouse, Jarryd Clark, Kelly Snow, Anna Koronowicz, Hanna Sazonava, Amy Lin, and Lena Belin.
Illustrations courtesy of Anna Koronowicz, Atlassian Senior Product Designer.
