Service Design Case Study: Improving Interdisciplinary Workflows
Aligning product managers, designers, and developers around shared priorities is hard. Each discipline brings different goals, different processes, and different definitions of what good work looks like.
Case study
Aligning three teams around one workflow
Product managers, designers, and developers each had their own picture of how work got done. Fifteen one-on-one As-Is Scenario Mapping workshops surfaced where collaboration broke down, and a Hills workshop with all 20 participants turned those findings into shared priorities for improving how the teams worked together.
Position
Design Research Intern, IBM
Approach
As-Is Scenario Mapping and Hills workshops
Output
Improved alignment among cross-disciplinary product teams
Explore cross-departmental workflows
Before proposing any changes, I needed to understand how each team actually worked. As-Is Scenario Mapping was a deliberate choice to surface the current state before introducing any new direction.
- Facilitated 15 one-on-one workshops with 5 participants from each of the design, development, and product management teams
- Explored each participant's involvement in the product development process, their collaborations, and the tools they relied on
- Thematically analyzed findings to distill a master map for each team, then consolidated all three into a cross-departmental view
Identify improvement opportunities
With a clear picture of the current state, I worked with participants to validate findings and collaboratively prioritize where change was most needed.
- Reviewed and refined master maps with participants to validate key findings
- Facilitated dot-voting sessions to prioritize critical collaboration processes, major pain points, and key opportunities
Rally collaborator buy-in
Giving people a shared view of the problem and a hand in shaping the solution changed how they related to each other, not just how they worked.
- Led a 2-hour seminar with all 20 participants to present and discuss validated findings
- Facilitated a Hills workshop to collaboratively define priorities for workflow improvements
- Packaged findings and recommendations for organizational leaders
The research reduced silos between teams and uncovered concrete opportunities for workflow improvement. The process itself gave participants space to be self-reflective and co-own a path forward. Empathy and morale across the three teams visibly improved. Full institutionalization of the findings was underway at the time of my departure.