01- A Framework for Design Influence

I entered into a period of inaction and confusion, joining a team that had been formed several months ago. Department could not align on goals, we were hearing murmurs of skepticism around design and that we weren’t creating any outcomes, even though the design team had been hard at work educating the department on design and hosting workshops to make use of already availalbe client data.

As designers, we know that design influence is a process. It takes time. However, department leads may not always appreciate the process and get impatient with the lack of visible “outputs”. How can we start to articulate the stage we’re at and the progress we’re making when it may feel intangible? I wanted to create a way to articulate our progress in growing design influence, show where we were, and set measurable goals for ourselves. I wanted to put some structure in the ambiguity.

I built a ‘roadmap’ of design influence inspired by Tuckman’s model of team development which describes how a team starts with little design influence and perceived value for the organization, and ends with design assimilation (hire me for it 😊). It’s purpose was to visualise the process of growing design influence and provide a easy gut-check of where our team was.

This roadmap was shared with and endorsed by leadership, and I then shared it with the design organization for reapplication.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Growing design influence is a cyclical process, and the journey is not linear. There are unexpected roadblocks that occur and a team can simultaneously be on various stages of design influence. For example, a change in performance metrics could reignite the storming stage/ a team could be including design in high level strategic discussion, but not aligned on design’s project priorities. Therefore this roadmap is useful as a diagnostic indicator of progress, but not very useful for goal setting. This is why I also created an actionable version of this roadmap which focuses on design activities.

02- Goal Setting and Scoping

The ‘Goal Setting’ version of the design influence roadmap focused on specific design activities we could control and measure to move us to the next stage of design influence. I could then later use the roadmap for design influence to gutcheck if our activities actually achieved the intended outcome.

To get us from storming to norming, we committed to:

• Conducting foundational research on the department’s clients, their journey, and needs

• Executing a ‘quick win’ project to demonstrate design value and strengthen allyship

• Co-working on executive decks to build credibility, evangelise design value and impact departmental strategy

After aligning this direction with department leads, I got an idea of their top priorities, wrote project design briefs out and made a recommendation of what to focus on based on an Impact X Effort prioritization workship I facilitated with my team.

Unfortunately the department leads changed their minds and decided we were to focus fully on the foundational research (likely due to executive pressure).

I still knew it was important to show them value quickly, and knowing how long client recruitment could take, decided to break the project into 2 phases - the first phase focused on internal employee interviews addressing a specific and pervasive issue (client attrition) and the second on client interviews.

03- Employee Interviews & Synthesis

I knew we needed to center our employee research on a business question that was timely and relevant to the department in order to have demonstrable value. We chose to focus on late stage client attrition because 1) it posed a large threat to the organization, 2) multiple department leads were running separate but simultaneous projects on it without thoroughly understanding the reasons for attrition, and 3) it provided valuable synergies for our second phase of research.

I conducted eight 45-minute moderated remote interviews with employees, digging into their role and interactions with clients, successful vs. less successful client relationships, then taking them through interactive journey mapping exercise where we identified steps in a client’s journey, touchpoints, key client individuals and employees involved, painpoints in the experience. Lastly, we ended with specific client exits, signals and triggers, the exit process, and their blue-sky ideas for improvement.

I also conducted 3 cross functional connects with marketing, product, and design teams, and we audited 30+ artefacts including emails, sales decks, screenshots. At the end of the day, we were able to form the basis of a service blueprint.

However, we decided to focus on the visible client experience due to time restrictions. This gave us an understanding of how employees saw the user journey and their opinions of best and worst client experiences. It also helped us identify hypotheses of client frustrations and the department’s internal gaps that could be triggering exits, and provided a great basis for further client research.

04- Client Interviews

Our next stage involved speaking with 25 clients to create 2 journey maps and 4 personas. The focus was on delivering insights that were actionable by this department even though multiple departments serviced these clients, so we could avoid duplicating efforts and also best enable our department - who was ultimately paying us!

Our main objective was to better understand the department’s clients and experiences. Our research objectives came from the first phase of research, focusing on decision making (who are the individuals at their client companies who make decisions and how do they make them), needs (particularly digging into client perception and this department’s products), and experience (which interactions are most important to which clients, and if they satisfied with these or frustrated with them. We also wanted to see if these contradicted or confirmed employee perspectives and existing research.

We pivoted multiple times throughout this project, partly because of unexpected partner delays but partly because testing & learning is so important!

05- Managing the team

As team lead, I was responsible for scoping, leading and supporting my teammates through the project and providing the overall structure and major milestones for the team. At a high level, this consisted of:

• Project Plan - every project I lead is documented in a project plan, so that key decisions and processes can be understood and replicated if necessary. These also make alignment sessions and preventing scope creep much easier.

• Design reviews - with our project mentor and other designers in the company to make sure we were up-to-date with best practices and processes and could get feedback on our outputs.

• Team work sessions - our team met 3x a week to set priorities, unblock, and give feedback, and once we started interviewing clients met every day for an hour of dedicated synthesis time. This helped us to synthesise as we went along as opposed to waiting to the end since we were dealing with significant recruiting delays.

• Client recruitment - a combination of cold emailing 150+ clients (to improve the objectivity of our sample) and partnering with the sales team. Approach was revised several times collaboratively with department leads and sales team.

• Interview discussion guide - developed based on hypotheses and unanswered questions from phase 1, previous consulting work done, and existing company research. Aligned with department leads and sales team prior to usage. Revised several times.

• Kickoff workshop - aligned project objectives with the team and provided interview guide for feedback

• Notetaking templates - set up mural notetaking and synthesis boards and did a dry run with the team of 2 notetakers ahead of interviews. Revised several times.

• Framework for personas and journey map - created an output brief which included our outputs, their objectives, what information needed to be highlighted, what else needed to be included, and a design challenge, which our UI designer then iterated on. From there, the other Sr Service Designer and I worked on the content. We revised both the framework and content several times.

06- Creating Personas

The challenge we faced when creating personas was there were many bodies of work for this department that loosely touched personas from previous consulting projects and other departments. Not only were there inconsistencies in the way clients were segmented, but also in the data that went into the creation of these “personas”.

Our first task was making sense of the current research, and figuring out what type of value we should provide that would be additive to what already exists.

There were a couple ways we approached segmenting the data for analysis:

• By individuals: Since it was a B2B bank, most of their existing research looked at clients as companies. However, we wanted to understand who the individuals at the clients were and whether or not the needs, experience, and satisfaction differed- for example, would a CFO who supposedly has more decision-making influence receive better service than a controller who interacts with the company more frequently? Furthermore how did the individual’s role, prior experience, or priorities affect their needs?

• By industry or products: The bank’s service teams were segmented by industry and products. How different did this make the client experience?

• By company stage/ size: Did a company’s priorities and needs change depending on where they were in their funding cycles? What about their perception?

⚠️⚠️⚠️ We decided to approach the persona using several areas of zoom so we could both build empathy for the individual as well as get to adequate depth where the a project team could use this information to deliver better service.

Synthesis was approached by looking at their core tensions, core needs, jobs to be done, how they would like their core needs met, and whether or not the bank met their needs (see below). I used red rectangles to show where there were differences across individuals/ companies/ etc.

Personas At a Glance

We prototyped several different ways of synthesising the data and kept asking ourself, does this achieve the objectives we set out? What value can this bring the team? Are there sections missing? If there are disrepancies, why are they there? Should we include a note of those caveats or disrepancies, and if so how?

We landed on four individual personas segmented by role and industry. This way, we could demonstrate the differences in needs between roles (CFO, VP Finance, accounting manager, controller) within companies belonging to a certain industry or size/stage. We chose to highlight the role that most frequently interacts and owns the relationship with our bank. Where needs differed, we made a note of it.

The first page provided context on the persona, their role, and core department needs. The second went into the next level of zoom, outlining how the persona would like their core department needs met. Colour was used to show whether these needs were being met, and more detail was provided on key pain points to focus on, exit risks, as well as how these needs might change as the company grew. The last page provided our summarized top business opportunity and highest impact opportunities for this persona, as well as a prioritized list of tactical recommendations.

07 - Creating Journey Maps

The last step was creating our journey maps. We built a new framework off of our client interviews, then updated based on the journey map and artefact audits of Phase 1 and demos of the online experience that gave us first-hand data and helped contextualise findings.

We decided to make two journey maps based on the department’s product suite, because we noticed this was where the client journey actually differed. Industry and client size didn’t really play much of a differentiating role.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Overall the journey map was meant to provide a bird’s eye view of all the company and persona experiences associated with a certain product. It’s a wayfinding tool for the department leads to to quickly see which areas of the experience need to be prioritized, for whom, and how.

The process roughly went like this:

• Organised information collected on the journey map from interviews by company industry

• Looked for any patterns or discrepancies in the important, positive, and negative steps

• Updated journey map to include client quotes, sentiments, any disrepancies in them, and exit risks and pain points

• Also added information on JTBD and needs

• Reviewed past research and used icons to signify if it confirmed or contradicted past research

• Prioritised opportunity areas across the whole journey into S/M/L business impact

• Final gut check with other persona work done by different departments and firms.

Journey Map: At a Glance

Top half Objective: Provide context on the client experience

• Client Actions: steps in the client experience/ journey

• Client Sentiments: how clients feel during this step

• Exit risks & pain points: problem areas in the experience

• Client Roles Involved: which individual and client is involved (what industry and role) and when

Bottom half Objective: Provide guidance on problem solving

• Jobs to Be Done/ Needs: describes what the client is expecting at each step, and prioritises issue areas into L/M/H business impact if remedied

• Recommendations: offers some ideas on how to address them

• Touchpoints & Employees Involved: provides additional context as to how their are experience the step and which employee is involved

08- Sharing the Learnings

We split the final readout into two sessions - one with the department leads to get their alignment and feedback, and the second with the whole department to start socialising results and building client empathy.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Because each of the deparment leads headed their own teams (ie. sales, product, customer service, etc), we were wary of our readout causing department leads to “point fingers” at each other. It was very important for us to continue BUILDING TRUST, not tearing it down. We therefore treaded very carefully, getting feedback from other design leaders on how to frame our presentation, and taking individual department leads through key findings to test the waters before presenting our readout to the whole deparment committee.

This was very successful in building rapport and at our readout, the department leads were extremely excited about the observations, data and storytelling that this phase brought them, and several offered their direct time and resources for the next phase.

The objective of the final readout was to provide the department with an overview of the project, the objectives of the outputs created, and most importantly equip them to use these outputs to make strategic decisions. We also took them through the in-depth findings of the journey map to help them empathise with their clients and see the major outages in the experience.

09- Retros & Revisions

Testing and learning was a huge part of our process. I ran team retros to encourage feedback and continual learning. We met at least once a week to reflect on our process, what’s working, what wasn’t, and what we wanted to do moving forward. We made several revisions throughout to our process, frameworks, and content as per retro findings. Here’s a brief look into our learnings and what we revised.

What we did:

• Adjusted our interview guide to add more behavioural and broad scope questions to gain more insight into the person (Ie. Tell me what your top priorities are, your motivations, what keeps you up at night).

• We adjusted our notetaking process, and had one person take linear notes while the other synthesised these notes live. This helped us get a headstart on the synthesis stage.

• We toyed with the idea of removing synthesis meetings but the team agreed this was extremely helpful. Instead, I sent a daily time block in people’s calendars to set aside personal synthesis time. We also split up analysis so each person would be responsible for dropping one individual’s notes onto the synthesis board and facilitating the conversation on a certain area of the board (ie. I’m responsible for coding and grouping stickies from interview D into the relevant synthesis board, and for summarising key areas of discussion that relate to the decision making section of the synthesis board, which may include stickes from interviews A,B,C, and D). This gave us a good overview of other people’s thought process while freeing up capacity to do second level synthesis
  

10- Establishing Rapport with the Department

As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest challenge was building rapport and demonstrating the value of design to a department who had never interacted with designers. Some of the tactics we employed were:

• Weekly department check-ins - we started with these to create space for department leads to get updates from us, ask questions, or comment on our work. However, after noticing an issue with attendance and communication, we introduced other measures that greatly improved engagement.

• Weekly status update email - updates on our progress, key observations, organization strengths, opportunities, and risks we were seeing that week from our research. We found the email format worked much better than presenting updates at check-ins.

• Individual 1:1 with department leads - show them work-in-progress and gather their alignment and feedback prior to larger meetings, which helped with execution and credibility.

• Pre reads - sending pre reading ahead of time helped department leads focus and retain information.

• Providing ad-hoc guidance to department projects - we helped one of the department leads improve sales capabilities of a multi-million dollar product launch by hosting several employee focus groups and deploying a feedback survey. We kept capacity open for low-hanging-fruit like this that were relatively low effort for us but high impact for the organization

Overall, we learned that this department liked to be kept informed, and erring on the side of overcommunication worked much better for us than trying to keep updates or requests to once a week. By the end of the project, we were well past the norming stage - we were being invited to give updates and share our work with executive leadership and other teams and constantly receiving new project requests.

Our work ultimately gave the team a strategic client-centric way to prioritise initiatives on their 5 year scaling plan and identify key opportunites to reduce client attrition (which was a multi-hundred million dollar issue). We also helped increase our department’s empathy of the difference between clients, their needs, and their experience, nudging them closer to a fully client-centric organization.