‘Join the Change!’ with Fortum Design!

Today is the day! I’m so excited to write the opening post on our brand new Fortum Design blog! When I started at Fortum couple of years back I could not have imagined where we’d be today: spreading the Fortum Design principles not only in our own organisation, but also with you!

Before jumping to all the cool stuff we’ve been working on, I want to start our blog by introducing our team and sharing the short story of why and how Fortum Design team was founded; how we grew from a simple program deliverable to the self-organised team of designers and amazing colleagues I’m so proud of today.

Once upon the time…

Why was the design function needed at Fortum?

In 2016 we could clearly see that the utility industry was facing disruption. The waves of global megatrends such as climate change, urbanisation, digitalisation, and the increase of active customers could also be felt in the energy business. Digitalisation has created a completely new energy world where customer needs and new digital services are in the core of business development. Understanding the end-to-end customer experience has become the key in moving from building products to creating services. To address this challenge, the Customer Journey Program was introduced in Fortum Markets, and customer and service design methods were used as the starting point for service creation.

We needed new skills in the company; designers with empathy and the right methods to discover customers’ needs and create digital solutions.

For Fortum to change its way of working, we needed new skills in the company; designers with empathy and the right methods to discover customers’ needs and create digital solutions. Initially all our design competence came from external design agencies. However, to have a long-lasting change in the organisation we needed internal capabilities. That’s why I was hired.

I joined Fortum in the beginning of 2017 after a months-long recruitment process (yes, the reality of large organisations — everything takes time). It was by accident that I ended up applying to a role of Head of CX Design in a utility company that, without me knowing, also provided the electricity at my own home (my husband takes care of the boring electricity agreements and bills for us)! However, you could say this was almost meant to be: I found a strong resonance in Fortum’s story and its mission towards cleaner world and felt this opportunity to be “an energetic call from the universe”, as the yoga-enthused part of myself would say.

We were determined to have internal design leads for most of our services to both keep and grow our design knowledge in-house.

Key principles for designer recruitment

One of my first key tasks was to set-up the internal design function in our Consumer Solutions division and handle the recruitment for the team. We were set to be a Nordic team with design labs in Finland (Espoo), Sweden (Stockholm), and Norway (Sarpsborg) — basically in all our key consumer market areas. This would allow us to collaboratively promote customer-centricity and design thinking in our key locations. We were determined to have internal design leads for most of our services to both keep and grow our design knowledge in-house.

When setting the recruitment plan for designers, I had four principles:

• Capture the full spectrum of design skills in a functional team that can operate on all the levels of design (strategic, tactical and operational). Thus my ideal small design team included right from the beginning competencies such as user research, service design, UX design, prototyping capabilities, as well as visual design.
• Start by building a core team of senior designers. As I did not have the luxury to recruit a big team, I needed to make sure that all the designers I did get would be lead-level and able to carry their work independently. Once we’d have senior-level team in place we could look into adding helping hands with junior designers.
• Aim for a minimum of two designers per location to create a feeling of unity in all design labs. I’d argued that most designers are social by nature and having peers to bounce ideas with is helpful for both the way of working as well as the quality of work.
• Plan the design team’s set-up in a centralised partnership model, similar to Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner’s ideas in their book “Org Design for Design Orgs”. This ensures both the consistency of our design as well as the belongingness into a group of like-minded individuals, while also helping us to work efficiently as individuals in cross-functional teams partnering with business.

Where are we now?

It’s been two years since our beginning and we’re still almost the exact same group of people with only a couple of minor changes. Our team’s overall contentment and stickiness have proved to be high even through times of big changes. I believe this is because we have been working as a tight group of designers and ensured that we have enough time for sharing and caring. Almost like being a small design agency within a larger company.

Our stakeholder satisfaction has been very high throughout these years!

As a team, we are facing the nice positive challenge of having more demand than what we can handle. Our members have integrated very well into their cross-functional project teams in which they are seen as appreciated contributors. Our stakeholder satisfaction has been very high throughout these years; if measured through NPS, for example, we’re reaching figures such as 80! We also have the luxury to work with many interesting design challenges on different fronts: both on strategic, tactical, and operational levels; both hands-on and by guiding external design consultants; and both within our own division as well as on the corporate level as a whole. We’re excited to share examples of these projects with you in this blog in the future.

At the moment it really does feel like only the sky is the limit, and we are only getting started!

I’m inviting you to follow our future journeys in this blog, get to know the design team I’m so proud of, as well as see all the cool stuff we’re working on towards the sustainable future! I hope you enjoy and are ready to ‘Join the change’!