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IBM - Rapid growth leads to a design revolution
My Role
Vice President, User Experience & User Research
August 2013 - July 2019
Background
IBM has a long history of design. But in 2014, when I came into IBM through an acquisition, IBM’s history of design was… history. The business unit I headed up design for, IBM Watson Customer Engagement, was no exception. The organization was growing quickly through inorganic acquisitions and I found myself managing a design, front-end development and documentation for a portfolio of 27 products. Each product had its own look and feel, behaved differently, and had its own decaying UI codebase. My business unit had to do better to successfully integrate the acquired companies and compete against an aggressively consolidating market. It was a race against the clock, and we had to innovate on everything to be successful - people, process and products.
The goal was massive - code products faster with higher quality, improve the shared understanding of the market and their needs, meet the business cases for a $1bil acquired product portfolio, and gain marketshare.
Solution
- While Design Thinking has been evolving for decades, IBM established a corporate-wide design program across R&D. I was deeply involved in the corporate-wide revolution, and led the transformation within my business unit to scale design thinking to an enterprise scale.
- Design and code faster - In order for the organization to evolve the products to work together, the R&D teams needed to build faster and ensure that the users were able to discover and use the products seamlessly and successfully.
- An emphasis on understanding and focusing on user outcomes, embracing empathy and conducting user research to address real-world user problems.
Outcome
- The ARR for my product portfolio grew from $1bil to $1.9bil in 4 years
- Design Thinking is now a household word, and many of the processes IBM and my team pioneered are used today in R&D departments across the world.
- I personally ran over 30 week-long Design Thinking sessions with teams to identify product gaps and usability improvements needed within my product portfolio. The product portfolio improvements maintained leadership in most eCommerce and marketing analyst reports, even throughout the acquisition process.
- My design and front-end development teams created Carbon, the award-winning Carbon design system. Implementation decreased R&D costs by 47%, and is now available as an open-source library, used by tens of thousands of organizations across the world
Other items worth mentioning
- Tooling upgrade: Created a design system to be able to enable teams to build faster.
- User research became essential to the organization.
- Improved customer support by integrating documentation and support solutions into the product flow.
- Incorporated Watson AI into the product offerings in 2016, creating meaningful competitive differentiation.
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