Story:
How a Shopping Cart Transformed the Way We Work: “User Centric & Employee Driven”

Transforming the entire company into design thinkers was a formidable task, and one that requires continuous effort.  We aren’t there yet, but we have made significant progress.  Here’s a snapshot into what we’ve done so far:

We Overhauled Our Product Planning Process (Summer 2010)

With the executive team fully committed, we began by applying design thinking principles to our annual planning and product road mapping process.  Our Chief Operating Officer (COO) drafted a simple set of 12 statements written in the form of a challenge, rather than a product or solution to build.  He posted all 12 challenge statements on our internal social networking platform (Yammer) for all employees to review and provide feedback.  Once finalized, budgets and resource plans were developed around each challenge.  Approximately 40% of company employees were assigned to a challenge (about 180 people).   Rather than developing profit and loss forecasts for each challenge, the teams instead were tasked with developing a challenge brief that outlined questions they wanted to explore about their challenge and any constraints that must be considered given existing business commitments.  From a road map perspective, we have been accustomed to making big, long bets on new product ideas, but with design thinking we have started operating with 3-month roadmaps for our various product teams.  That gives teams four 3-week release cycles to demonstrate progress and show if their product is desirable, viable and feasible.  A decision is made every three months about whether to change course or continue.  Challenge briefs are submitted prior the challenge’s kickoff, and the teams’ roadmaps are submitted quarterly.

We Trained the Entire Company on Design Thinking Principles (Q3-Q4 2010)

We took a multi-step approach to training the entire company on design thinking during the second half of 2010.   We enlisted the help of Jeff Patton & Associates and Matthew May to help us design and deliver training. 

1. First, we trained a group of about 40 challenge team representatives.  Two or three people per team were selected based on their roles (i.e. product/project manager), as well as their leadership abilities.  These “challenge leaders” participated in a three-day immersive boot camp where they learned the basic techniques in real-time by applying them to a real-world Edmunds business problem.  Additional emphasis was placed on this session to “train the trainer”, providing participants with ideas for how to share/present these concepts to their team.  This training occurred in September, 2010.
2. Next we invited all employees to a series of 90-minute design thinking overview workshops which aimed to teach key principles of the process to everyone through active participation.  Concepts like “your first idea isn’t always your best idea” were presented through quick hands-on exercises.  This helped create a common vocabulary about the process and its tools across the company.  This training occurred on the heels of the “challenge leader” training.
3. Lastly, we educated the executive team on the design thinking framework to ensure they were in a position to coach and support employees during this adoption.  This training occurred immediately following the all-employee sessions.
4. Throughout the remainder of 2010 and into 2011 – we offered more immersive full day design thinking training sessions for any employee interested and for new employees joining the company.  We also brought in a company called Action Learning Associates to provide team building experiences for each challenge team.  As part of this activity, challenge team members took a Myers Briggs Personality Type profile and discussed how to assimilate different personality profiles to ‘form’ as a new team.

We Created Personas to Focus Solutions on Our Customers (Q4 2010)

We started to implement design thinking by building personas.  Although personas are not new or exclusive to design thinking and have been used by leading companies for at least a couple of decades in product design, they provided the framework for driving user centric design.  After interviewing a large number of people, with no emphasis on finding existing users of our web site, we created six corporate personas.  Each challenge team picked a primary and secondary persona to focus on when creating their product.  It is important to call out that personas are not statistical or demographic representations of users.  Teams used the personas to represent things like behaviors, attitudes, and goals, and then used this input to guide new navigation, features and design elements in the solutions they would build. 

We Tried it Together (January 2011)

In January, 2011 all 12 challenge teams moved in lockstep through our version of a design thinking framework.  The framework provided teams with a set of tools intended to first empathize with the user by selecting a persona, interviewing users to understand their problems, and creating experience maps based on the interview data.  Only after we had a strong understanding of our users’ problems did we move on to the next set of tools, which focused on creating lots of ideas and testing how those ideas might solve the problems.

Each team followed a detailed schedule of activities in January.  It was a lot of work to coordinate interviews and usability testing sessions with customers for 12 teams in a 3-week window, but it was worth it.  Teams developed prototypes to test their best ideas with real users and employees.  Early on, the prototypes were extremely “low-fi”, and as they worked their way through usability tests, the teams began to experiment with more sophisticated prototyping tools.  By using prototypes, teams are able to gather feedback at the earliest possible point in the process, and the net result is that we can validate ideas more quickly, and we end up writing much less code as result.  And we haven’t abandoned our traditional means of input like A/B testing, as 14M Unique visitors a month provide the ultimate test for products that make it onto the web site.

At the end of this 3-week “discovery” phase, we hosted an all-company tradeshow (1 hour, science fair style) in our lobby for teams to showcase their prototypes for employee feedback.  We even let employees vote for their favorite.  It was quite a sight to watch a system administrator sell the Chairman on his team’s new prototype!   This event was such a success that we now host company tradeshows every 6-9 weeks as a way to improve awareness and increase transparency across the company. 

We Continue to Learn and Refine

In May 2011, we surveyed employees to identify where we could improve and refine our process.  Based on their feedback, we brought our expert consultants back during a 3-week period to provide more focused training sessions on topics like user research and goal writing.  During these sessions, we also emphasized team autonomy and empowerment to choose new design thinking tools and techniques (beyond what had been taught in January) to accomplish their goals, so long as they abided by the key principles.

It’s Proliferating

We have introduced Design Thinking across all internal and external product areas and haven’t limited this practice to the consumer facing web site.  Business systems and infrastructure teams have really benefited.  For example, the infrastructure team had been floundering in demonstrating value from their 2-year long cloud initiative, and after using design thinking to find the real problems of their users (not fancy dashboards) they were able to quickly deliver the API interface that their development and test customers really wanted.

Departments have also begun adopting the design thinking framework by developing their own challenges and putting the tools in action.  Our Editorial department recently applied the process to rethink how they create content for the unique needs of our personas.  Our HR department has also applied design thinking to address the growing desire for a more refined career development program.  Lastly, individuals from various departments are leveraging individual techniques such as experience mapping to help facilitate meetings and uncover insights from their own teams. 

At a minimum our site is now being shaped more by the visitors that use it, but it also feels like we have better positioned ourselves for a breakthrough.  We have created a culture where failure is accepted, and even celebrated if we learn from it.  Disruptive ideas have a tendency to get killed pretty early and often, but with design thinking in play, the chances of something really transformative getting prototyped and tested are definitely more likely.