Key Facts
• The client worked in a very complicated and highly regulated space - healthcare staffing.
• The product teams were being pulled in multiple directions by various politics and competing priorities from a lack of cohesive strategy.
• Using design exercises I was able to bring the group together, set a clear goal and focus, and being executing in that direction, leading to a significant reduction in open shifts and overtime/agency costs for customers
The Problem
As with so many projects, the politics were the most difficult part. The sales team was seeing slumping numbers from unimpressed prospects wanting more advanced functionality. The implementation team was stretched thin trying to set up and train new users, mostly non-technical, on all of the complexities and oddities of the software. All the while, engineering was faced with a crumbling architecture that became harder to support with every new feature.
Things had reached a boiling point where stakeholders no longer talked to each other, and when they did the tone was aggressive and adversarial. They needed someone to come in and help them tell, and hear, each others stories.
The Showdown
My first step was to get stakeholders from each group into a room and have everyone talk it out. To facilitate the discussion, instead of letting it turn into a shouting match, I used a whiteboard and post-its so everyone could write down their concerns and problems. The key was to make sure everyone was heard and could put things on the board and discuss them. By visualizing them this way and making space for people to openly and honestly share, they were able to see why other's concerns were valid factors that the strategy needed to address. Sales could finally understand that engineering wasn't just trying to shut them down, and engineering could start to see why certain features were more impactful to business goals than others.
From there we were able to all agree to metrics that the business could use to define success of the strategy:
• Percentage of a schedule that was filled versus open
• Excess costs to the customer in overtime and agency wages
• How quickly a worker could be found to fill an open shift
Using this shared language, I then narrowed the group down to those that specifically work with customers on the product to focus in on the core issues. While everyone had their own perfect solutions they had dreamed up, I wanted to pose a seemingly simple question instead: "How do I make a schedule?" This forced them to open up to telling the customer's stories and roadblocks they experienced, without getting bogged down in too much detail about how they would fix it.
From Strategy to Design
I then took this artifact and continued to amend it as I had more conversations with customers and users, until I felt we had a complete story of the process and how we could best fit our technology into it. With that broken down, and a wide range of stakeholders on board, I moved to the next step: collaborative design.
Unlike design-by-committee, this approach was meant to allow anyone to give input while keeping the design team in control. I found a very public space in the office and set up large sheets of paper on the wall, each representing a different part of the process we had all establisehd together. Next to the paper were pads of post-its and pens. As the product team ideated and sketched solutions, I would post them to the appropriate sections of the wall, and leave comments or draw arrows to show the workflow. Stakeholders would have regular meetings at the wall where we could formally discuss the concepts, but anyone walking by was free to post ideas and leave comments.
This allowed me to maintain the stakeholder buy in that was so critical, while keeping me free to iterate and experiment very quickly. I could produce a number of sketches with near instant feedback.
Results
While I ultimately parted ways with the client before the bulk of the strategy was implemented, I was able to begin laying the groundwork of new features with the engineering teams. These features shipped to great response from the customers, and significantly reduced the number of open shifts and overtime/agency hours for customers.