My Journey in Telenor Design Expert Program
Discovering Design
I was a fresh graduate when I joined Telenor in 2017. Though I had the motivation and creative energy like any new university graduate has, little did I know about design. Infact, I thought “design” was just related with designing t-shirts and decorating your home.
Fast forward later, due to the impact of some stellar Telenor titans, I was introduced to the world of design. And it unlocked my brain horizons in so many ways! I was fascinated by the power of design — specifically the power that design holds in creating contexts and environments which helps users in making decisions. This introduction to design felt like Matrix movie where you can stimulate environments and make it easy for your users to use your system.
I quickly realized that to boost my career, I needed to do an investment on design because design plays a fundamental role in worldwide innovation and transformation. I realized I had to respect this field. By respect I mean to properly study about it, to observe design in products and services, take online courses, read articles, find design communities, read more, observe more — all of this with the target of “learning by doing.”
But the problem was, with your routine job and all that comes with it, you rarely get time to explore other areas. Of course telenor’s #40HourChallenge helped me big time in nailing the concepts of design thinking and service design, but there was something missing. Something practical was missing.
Design Expert Journey
This is where Telenor Design Expert Journey program came. This program was aimed to create the next generation of design champions inside Telenor. This was what I needed. And even though I was working in network engineering team and was not an expert in design, surprisingly, I was handpicked by Telenor’s head of design Fredrik Schiede. This was awesome! I think my quest, curiosity and habit of asking questions got me that seat. This expert journey, made in collaboration between design and learning and development team, had the objective of instilling design mindset in the participants and to create design ambassadors for Telenor.
So It Began..
- The journey started with the candidates getting enrolled in Design Sprint Nano Degree Program from Udacity. Desing sprint is a battle-tested step by step system for solving big problems in 5 days. On Monday, you start with a challenge and by Friday you get a high fidelity tested prototype.This course was taught by AJ&Smart’s co founder Jonathan Courtney.
- This was followed by a webinar and assignment on Problem Statements. This was perhaps the most significant block throughout the journey. Problem statement helps us to stay away from the solutions button and ensures that we are solving the right problem. The whole design process starts with this.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstien
- The journey thencontinued with a series of assignments, readings and webinars on User Research and Storytelling. Our ultimate challenge was to identify a problem in our daily work that can benefit from running a Google Design sprint. This challenge involved various underlying tasks such as interviewing users , finding their needs, defining the problem and then running a design sprint on it.
Bootcamp
So after all of the chaos, training, webinars and what not, we finally arrived at the design bootcamp held in Bangkok. There were 25 of us, representing all business units of Telenor. Safe to say that an air of excitement and inspiration enveloped all of us during our 3 day bootcamp.
We had talks and sessions by subject experts:
- Cristina Rynning (VP Expert Education, Telenor) gave a talk on importance of design.
- Fredrik Scheide (VP Design and Engineering, Telenor)mesmerized us with cognitive neurology and scientific side of design.
- Franz Joziasse (General Director, Park and Grow) gave a workshop on turning design into a profitable business vertical.
- Hanne Lindabaek (Founder, Ergo Ego) coached on the art of public speaking.
The grand finale was our presentations.
My problem statement was:
Objective: “low literacy rate users who want to communicate with voice messages”.
Need: “to stay connected with their friends and families find it hard to use mainstream communication tools”.
Reason: “because of their product focus around texting and reading.”
I literally had tears in my eyes when I received an outstanding response from everyone in the room! There were high praise on my problem solving approach + my presentation skills. This was perhaps the greatest moment of my career because I invested a lot of my energy and time on design, and to hear such an overwhelming feedback from experts was quite overwhelming. I still get goosebumps while reflecting upon it.
Impact
This crazy journey has instilled a problem oriented way of thinking in my work style. Previously, I was so habitual of just jumping to solutions. Now I always ask “WHY” are we doing this and “HOW” can we do it in a better way. The consequence of this has been a profitable growth in ACTIVATE program that I lead in Telenor Pakistan. I have also become an ambassador of design. I now frequently give talks on design and highlight the magic and power that this fields holds.
And, most importantly, this design expert journey has made me addicted to reading books!
Final Words
What I will say is that is that people around us are changing. Our customers have become more entitled now to the level of quality they expect in our products and services. And design is at the heart of all these changes. So there’s a safe bet in upskilling in design right now. Now is the time to burn that midnight oil.
#DesignWorks #DesignBetter
