Retrospective №1

About My UX Research Summer Internship at HPE

But First, a Goodbye

A view of the HPE Campus in Ft. Collins, CO.

And just like that, it’s over. The whole internship experience, prologue through epilogue, cover to dusty cover. Weeks of searching, applying, fretting — then comes the day you get in, the day you announce, the day you go. A series of days, then weeks, then months. Before you know it, it’s over and done with, and it’s back home to Indiana (or wherever you came from), and your apartment, your cat, your bed.

You plan to write something about your internship, of course — a retrospective, of sorts: a high adventure, full of derring-do. You just need a day or two to rest. Just a day or two to put your feet up, to shut your eyes, and to reminisce about the mountains and the people and the music as they fade away into the west. It’s the end of summer, 2019.

Well, that day or two came and went.

Then a week or two, then a month or two, then a whole season and a half. Classes started, commenced, got complicated, and now are drawing down into the bottlenecks which inevitably precede their endings. Yet, somehow, still not a peep out of me about my internship — not an article, or a slideshow, or a video log. That’s not because it didn’t matter, of course, nor is it because I didn’t have a good time. (It did matter, and I had a great time.)

Instead, it’s because for the first time in a long time, I’m at a loss for words. Three months later, and still all I can say is thank you. Thank you to my HPE managers, Dana and Amy (and my sort of manager, sort of life-sensei Greg) for pushing and believing in me in equal measure. Thank you to my colleagues — Jens and Lauren and Brittany and Matt, for engaging in all of my hairbrained ideas (including this one). Thank you to my fellow interns, James and Carson, for commiserating and brainstorming and always being up for anything, even (and especially) when you were tired.

HPE has heart.

And thank you, finally, to all the folks at HPE Ft. Collins, for the joy and warmth you bring to work every single day. Thank you for the toy trains that chug along tracks around the edges of your cubicles. Thank you for the office jungles, with the rubber tree plants and plastic toucans, and thank you for the little unofficial snack bars you put together so people could buy a 50c burrito if they’ve got the coin, which I never did.

Thank you for the passionate conversations in darkened board rooms, for the frustration that can only come from care. Thank you for wearing capes (literally and figuratively), for sharing your food, and for loving Star Wars. Thank you for being the kind of place with the kind of people who would cover a second-story window with rows of multicolored sticky notes, filled with words of appreciation for people I’ve never met.

I’ll never forget the sun shining through your words of love.

Introducing the Retrospective

So here’s the thing.

As a UX Research intern at HPE, I had the privilege of working on the inside of what we can reasonably imagine to be a big, multibillion-dollar, Fortune 100 sized watch. My daily routine saw a myriad of activities: from taking classes on advanced ethnographic methods, to helping my supervisors plan out and set up team workflows for the Chief Design Office, to helping curate and assemble content for a UX Research Workbooks that was shared in workshops at HPE Discover 2019 in Las Vegas. I was constantly busy. This is a good — no, great — thing to be.

Yet while all of these things were fun and important, they were cogs and coils in the big green watch that was HPE. To try and capture a sliver of the bigger picture, however, I’m working on something a little bit different than a run of the mill article. What I have in mind is long form document that explores (in detail) my internship experience: the projects I worked on, the challenges I faced, and how I (with the help of my awesome teammates and supervisors) overcame those challenges.

In which Dana and I run a workshop in support of the Persona Kit. (No, you can’t read anything juicy, so don’t try.)

I’m calling this document a Retrospective.

While I’ll be uploading the content in bite-sized installments here on Medium over the next couple weeks, the final Retrospective document will live over on my portfolio page this December. Be sure to check it out.

In this Retrospective series, I plan to primarily explore (in detail) two projects that I worked on over the course of the summer.

The first project was a large-scale competitive analysis, in which I gained valuable experience in leading a team of UXers and presenting our findings to executive leadership.

The second project I’ll explore was a mixed-method persona alternative we called “The Persona Kit,” in which I gained experience planning, running, and interpreting interdisciplinary workshops.

As for what those adventures entailed, I’ll leave you all in suspense for now. For now, here are the five biggest lessons I learned from my time at HPE this summer.

1. All Hail The Rolfe Reflection Model
2. Surprise! Do Goals vs. Be Goals Really Do Matter, Even/Especially in a Business Environment
3. Quantify the Qualitative, Qualify the Quantitative
4. Always Call Things What They Are
5. To Make Something Good, Make It Well

And that’s it for now. Keep an eye here on Medium for my Retrospective series. I’ll be rolling it out over the next couple of weeks.

Before We Go

My view every morning.

One final word to my co-workers and managers at HPE.

An intern’s perspective is an interesting thing.

We pass through companies like shooting stars. We get a chance to see almost everything, to touch most things, to affect some things, and then — just like that — we’re gone.

Sometimes we return, sometimes we don’t. The chips are still falling where they will at Hewlett Packard Enterprise as the company redefines itself under Antonio Neri’s staggering vision of an Everything-As-A-Service (Xaas) pivot. Whether it’s in the cards for me to return after graduation only time (and budgets) will tell. What I can say for certain, as I roll into the end of my first semester back at school, is that I can confidently say I wouldn’t want to have been anywhere else this summer.

Sure, the folks in Ft. Collins might not have the newest building, the biggest name on the scene, or the most varied cafeteria (though I maintain that the cheeseburger with egg and bacon is one of the best meals you can get in town).

What they do have, however, is an earnestness on display both throughout their history and their present, whether in the deep roots shared by Ft. Collins and HPE, or the various contemporary initiatives designed to get people involved in their community, such as Accelerating Impact, or the fact that all HPE employees are given 60 hours of company time to dedicate to whatever charity or volunteer work they see fit.

In a sentence: HPE has heart.

To them, I am deeply grateful.

Stay tuned. More to come.

From left to right: Amy Reitz, me, Dana Lynn. The best supervisors and mentors you could ask for.