Enhancing Stakeholder Partnerships to Provide Resources to WOC in Tech
Femmecubator’s Women Excel Program is a mentorship opportunity for women of color switching to a career in tech. Mentees are given a chance to gain real world experience as up and coming Junior Developers and Junior UX Designers.
During the program, Designers were able to immerse themselves in the product development process through weekly workshops and lab work.
Project Overview:
Mentees in the Sun Squad focused on Impact Path B: Beyond the Femmecubator Women Excel Program. Participants were tasked with tapping into new opportunities to reach users identified in the stakeholder map, beyond the mentors and mentees’ experiences. Their work was outlined in three sections:
- Discover: other user types, partners in the nonprofit, educational spaces
- Define: An expanded business model, short and long term opportunities for recent bootcamp grads
- Explore: Expanding the app experience to address/attract DEI initiatives
Sun Squad Team:
- Priyanka Thomas
- Linh Su Protzel
- Ebony Johnson
Tools:
- Miro
- Figma
- Illustrator
Time:
March 2021 — May 2021
Research & Synthesis:
Sun Squad began their research by collecting data from user surveys. Their focus group was largely bootcamp graduates and some self taught UX design and web development students. A number of participants expressed their disappointment in post boot camp experiences.
Upon discovering some of the user pain points, Sun Squad initially focused on career prep services Femmecubator could provide directly to bootcamps. Their first Point of View Statement was:
Forming new partnerships can allow us (Femmecubator) to provide career prep to bootcamps and establish potential funding streams for our social enterprise.
Service Design Plan
The team focused their efforts on service design improvements that could be implemented in the Femmecubator business model. Their plan involved:
- Conducting qualitative research on tech organizations that support women with career services by leveraging partnerships (i.e. UXHer, Elpha, Tech Ladies, Baddies in Tech)
- Creating a customer journey map
- Constructing service blueprints detailing the interactions stakeholders will have with Femmecubator services
Client Meeting
The team spoke to the founder of Femmecubator to gain more insight on what was desired from a business perspective. The takeaways provided were:
- Find ways to utilize stakeholders and their resources.
- Create something easy with a low barrier to entry to partner with Femmecubator.
- Provide stakeholders with the resources needed to hold successful events, workshops, etc.
Clarifying Users
Mentees spent time clarifying the user in order to best determine what additional services Femmecubator could offer. One of the notes from the client meeting mentioned the desire to expand services for designers and developers who may not have any experience. Based on the feedback in their research and business goals, the Sun Squad decided to focus on a service for newly established designers and developers.
User Journey Map
After clarifying the user, the team spent time mapping out the touch points and emotions bootcamp grads experience searching for opportunities in tech. This activity allowed the team to think about additional services that would attract participants in their career journey. The user journey map features the user actions, pain points and possible solutions when participating in post grad opportunities.
Competitive Analysis and POV Statement
The Sun Squad performed a competitive analysis to research how similar organizations uplift and assist women of color in their tech careers. The team focused on cost, mentorship, events and more.
The team decided providing collaborative tech experiences would be an excellent value point Femmecubator could offer users. Their Point of View statement thus became: Femmecubator wants to reach new stakeholders and tap into opportunities to leverage partnerships in order to provide collaborative tech opportunities for women in tech with 0–2 years of experience.
They defined a collaborative tech experience as: Any opportunity in which developers and UX designers can interact and influence one another in their respective roles within the design process.
Tech Girl Talk
The service solution the team developed was Tech Girl Talk. Expanding from Femmecubator’s Women Excel Program and working to build a larger community, the team advertises Tech Girl Talk (TGT) as an opportunity for partners to help build the careers of WOC in tech via volunteerism. They explain the following:
Our current mentorship program caters to UXers and developers who have a junior level of experience. Tech Girl Talks, on the other hand, is an outlet where we can make less experienced WOC designers and developers feel welcomed and included in our community, while gaining collaborative tech experience.
Hosting a Tech Girl Talk is one way that you can partner with us to build and support a community that is passionate about serving women in tech.
Service Design Blueprint
Nielsen Norman Group defines a service blueprint as “a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.” Illustrating the touchpoints of Tech Girl Talk, the Sun Squad created the following:
Prototype
The team then created a prototype for partners/volunteers to sign up to host a Tech Girl Talk:
Tool Kit
To further assist with the partnership experience, the Sun Squad also created a tool kit for Tech Girl Talk. They hope it can act as an informational guide that can be referred to when hosting different types of workshops or sprints. The tool kit highlights Femmecubator’s mission, the importance of collaborative tech experiences, how to host different events, additional resources that could be useful for volunteers and more.
Usability Test
The team was able to test their prototype and tool kit with a potential Femmecubator partner. The takeaways from their test were as follows:
Likes:
- “I like that this gives a lot of background.”
- Like that this tool kit gives people options
- Like the resources section
The pain points were divided between the volunteer, individual/s hosting the event, and the stakeholder or organizer, in this case, a partner organization recruiting volunteers:
Pain Points
Volunteer pain points:
- Don’t want to volunteer with the same orgs with the same opportunities over and over
- Many volunteers are engineers; engineers are often quiet and feel unqualified to provide feedback at something like a career panel; they are excited by group activities, not necessarily social impact
Stakeholder pain points:
- It was not clear that this tool kit was for stakeholders rather than volunteers
- Repeatedly expressed the time and effort put into crafting emails to inform volunteers of opportunities
- Has to google terms like “sprints” and other terms that are brought up by engineering volunteers to better understand volunteer tech opportunities
Actionable Takaways [for Toolkit]:
- Be more explicit about group activities, as well as two mentors on small group opportunities
- This tool kit will most likely be shared from stakeholders to volunteers in the form of a short email, and then the entire tool kit for more information once committed
- Craft an email/slack message template to concisely share opportunities (for stakeholder to send out to volunteers)
Implementation:
Following the test, the team was able to:
- Color code pages in the toolkit to distinguish between volunteers and stakeholders (as seen above in the lower right hand corner of each page)
- Include an email template stakeholders can share with direct volunteers
- Definitions for sprints, workshops and career prep (example below)
Next Steps for Femmecubator
The Sun Squad provided the following next steps for Femmecubator to build and launch the Tech Girl Talk service:
- Design the mentee side (TGT event board, register form, etc.)
- Further usability tests
- Myers Briggs identification/recommendation for tool kit activities
- Rewrite tool kit with brand voice
- Post-workshop surveys and services
