Design Thinking Training: Bringing Users to the C-Suite
When is the last time your executive team met with their customers or users and watched them use their products or services?
Chances are it has been a while.
Or maybe the Marketing VP has watched focus groups and seen A/B test results but VPs of Operations, Technology, HR, Legal, and other key organizations probably have not. Yet all have the most ability to influence product innovation and design. Every decision they make — whether it is employee engagement, governance, manufacturing, operations, or logistics — impacts the overall customer experience.
So why are they so distant from some of the most important people impacting the organization’s success?
In my 30-plus years of experience with product design teams, the answer is not easy but sometimes boils down to no one has said they need to or given them easy access to the customers. Very few C-Suite executive bonuses depend on the time spent with customers or the amount of UX test sessions they have witnessed. But why not change that now?
Last year we had a great opportunity to train the top executive team at a major home product consumer goods company in Design Thinking. The CEO set up a year-long leadership seminar that was mandatory for the executive team that had them meet each quarter for a week to become more innovative as a group. This team included VPs of IT, Marketing, HR, Legal, and Sales, as well as the heads of their business units and their CFOs. The first week of the series included a 2-day training in Design Thinking and the most powerful thing that happened in those 2 days is we brought consumers to the Executive Training Center and the C-Suite got to witness first hand how people choose their products, how they use their products, how sustainability is a factor in product choice and why the needs of the consumers are rapidly changing in this space. Here is what we did:
Day 1: Empathize, Define and Ideate
We started with an overview of the Design Thinking Process and overall benefits. Harvard Business Review has a great article, Why Design Thinking Works, that details high-level benefits and helped get the group engaged. We also regularly show Don Norman’s intro video on Human Centered Design to groups that are new to explain what watching users can mean to the design process.
Then we jumped right into the first step in the Design Thinking process: Empathize. We brought in 4 consumers who either use or did not use their products and the team interviewed them about their experiences. The group assigned a moderator so the executives all got to experience first hand how to greet and engage people. We heard consumers’ delights and frustrations and how recycling and sustainability influence their decisions. One of the most impactful sessions was with a 5th-grade teacher who not only shared her own personal experience but shared that based on the carbon-footprint curriculum in Science, her students are voicing concerns about not using reusable bags for lunches.
After the consumer interviews the team did Affinity Mapping to align on issues and opportunities and then broke up into small teams to start brainstorming ideas and plans for prototyping. The afternoon was full of planning for the next day which started with prototyping.
Day 2: Prototype, Test and Prune the Tree
The morning of Day 2 was all about building prototypes. The teams learned that prototyping can be a simple method for building a concept and having just enough detail to give consumers an idea of the experience. Keep it simple was our motto. And these teams did great. They had glue guns, sketch pads, scissors, and sticky notes all flying.
One participant, a CFO of a business unit, said “I had no idea we could build an idea to test in 45 minutes! Wow, I wish I learned that in business school!”
As the prototypes were being built, others on each team wrote a test plan for the user sessions because they are now becoming more and more comfortable with first-hand engagement with the consumers. They learned that defining the tasks and setting up ways to observe is the most powerful tool for quick feedback. They used Steve Krug’s document for planning a Usability Test as a guide.
Then the prototypes were done (well done enough!) and the users came in for the test session. Each group tested their prototype with 2 users. As the teams watched each other test the prototypes with consumers, they started to see the magic. In a few minutes, a user can give you feedback with very few words. Their expressions, whether they pick up a prototype or click a button or have a sense of what to expect can tell a lot. And the team can see those signals and probe for me. Several executives commented, “we need to do this kind of testing regularly.”
Which was a perfect segue to the end of Day 2 which is an exercise that helps teams look at barriers to implementing Design Thinking into their organization. The exercise is called Prune the Future from a great book Gamestorming.
After 2 days the C-Suite executives were engaged, excited and renewed in their commitment to build better products for their consumers. The year-long program is almost over and we will hear back from them on how they did with their ideas and concepts. But most importantly, these key decision makers experienced the true voice of the consumer, first hand, in order to influence their thinking and priorities.
So when is the last time your C-Suite executives met with the users or consumers of their products or services? There is no time like the present. Design Thinking workshops can be done remotely, including prototyping and testing.
