Design Thinking at enterprise scale
By: Esther Raice
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Process, User Experience, User Research, UX

The practice of Design Thinking is experiencing a surge in popularity across a huge range of domains — you can find training and loads of online content on how to apply Design Thinking to your business, your career, your life and more. The growing enthusiasm for Design Thinking is, in my opinion, very much justified. Design Thinking can be used to address virtually any kind of problem, and it is done with empathy and a human-centered approach that feels inclusive, collaborative and inspiring.

Businesses have become wise to the fact that Design Thinking excellence is tied to positive market performance and this has led to explosive growth in design thinking practices in business of all sizes in recent years. A growing number of organizations have tried to measure the business value of design and compelling evidence has been offered up by Forrester, McKinsey, IBM and the Design Management Institute, among others.

Design Thinking

The visual representation of Design Thinking has its variations, but the above diagram is recognizable by all Design Thinking enthusiasts. While it looks incredibly simple, and in fact can be effectively practiced by both beginners and experts, deploying the practice in a large organization and setting it up for successes that lead to positive business outcomes is not simple.

There are two major parts to this effort, the first is figuring out how to enable and empower the whole organization to practice Design Thinking together, and the second part is figuring out how to gauge progress and keep people motivated to aim even higher — measuring the maturity and pushing it to the next level. In this post I’ll focus on the latter part… for the first, I’ll just say that our approach has been all about “democratizing Design Thinking” and leave the many details of that exciting transformation for another post.

Our experiments with trying to explicitly measure Design Thinking maturity began about four years ago, and we have gone through multiple iterations which have taken us from a 5-step scale with levels from beginner to master to a point-based scorecard which we piloted at the beginning of this year.

Before embarking on the major revision that led to our current model, we did some research into what kinds of approaches other organizations are using to measure their own Design Maturity, and found any number of maturity scales along the lines of our early attempt and various online surveys. The most evolved, notable and rigorous approach to evaluating and understanding design maturity was InVision’s Design Maturity Model, which is rich in data and insights and is required reading for any company working to level up their design practice to achieve greater business impact.

We took inspiration from this research and leveraged it as we developed our new scorecard, which is a huge leap forward and spans the spectrum of foundational business elements, design behaviors and artifacts and business outcomes. The design thinking maturity scorecard is not a design tool, it is a business tool that describes how to leverage design thinking to achieve business impact. It enables us to gauge teams’ behaviors and collaboration, and serves as a predictive leading indicator to give us visibility into how we’re doing, ahead of lagging indicators like NPS and NSAT.

We’ve settled on a cadence of assessing our maturity three times a year and that work is done by a “three-legged stool” team with representation from engineering, product management and design. In the first checkin of the year, we assess current state as well as set an annual target which we’ll work towards over the course of the year. The gap between the current and target scores spawns initiatives to help teams achieve their target scores, like participatory design with clients, ensuring a validated backlog, stronger cadence of iterative design with a test and learn approach and more.

Our approach to the scorecard development has been one of iteration and continuous improvement based on stakeholder input, we have tweaked it many times and will continue to listen, learn and evolve. Overall, the approach has been working well for us — the increased level of detail in the scorecard has enabled teams to understand what good Design Thinking practices should look like, and and the points based system has empowered them to incrementally increase their scores.

While this approach has worked well for our company’s size, culture and organizational structure, I’m sure there are many other approaches that could be equally or even more successful. Here are some of the guiding principles that we used to help us navigate along the way:

Make it about business outcomes, not design

The practice of Design Thinking and client-centered innovation is in service of business impact, not for the sake of good design alone. Explicitly widening the aperture to include foundational business elements and measurable business outcomes was at first perceived as a bit of an overstep by some of our teams. This triggered productive discussions and subsequent alignment around the reasons for deploying Design Thinking across the organization. Typically, once it becomes clear that the primary goal is business outcomes, the acknowledgement of the need to both collaborate on and track behaviors and outcomes across the whole of the product development lifecycle from inception onwards, the breadth of the tool’s reach is understood and embraced. Additionally, we’ve been able to increase buy-in by actively solicited feedback from product management and engineering team members, and making adjustments based on their input. The result is a growing feeling that the scorecard is an enabling tool for cross-functional product teams, not just for designers.

2. Ensure cross-functional endorsement and participation at all levels

Design teams struggle with being perceived as the sole enforcers of good design practices, which can cause frustration and resentment. Given that the practice is in service of the whole business, we have worked with business and engineering leadership to ensure we have a three-legged stool team in place at all levels in the organization and that the importance of practicing Design Thinking collaboratively across all functions is a message that gets passed down from business leaders to all product teams. In a large organization like ours, consistent and unified messaging is key to driving meaningful, collaborative behaviors across functions. Having a shared purpose and shared means of measuring progress help to prevent the silo effect.

3. Clearly articulate what an effective design practice looks like

One of the challenges we uncovered with the previous approach was that there was a lack of understanding about the criteria for each level of the maturity model; explanations were not sticky and teams had to relearn what things meant every time they came together for a check-in session. This sometimes resulted in teams getting stuck at one level and not really knowing how to move beyond it. Once stuck, the maturity score became a sore point and was significantly less effective in promoting further Design Thinking behaviors. Pivoting from a scale model to a points-based model created flexibility and the possibility of taking different paths to make progress. Providing more explicit definitions, criteria and examples in each of the categories helped teams better understand where they were and what their opportunities for improvement were; when they could see a clear path forward they became more inspired to push to the next level.

4. Make targets specific and actionable

The process put into place around design maturity measurement includes thrice-annual check-ins with the three-legged stool team. At the beginning of the year the team will both gauge where they are currently and set a maturity target for the year. They’ll look closely at the areas where they are scoring well and what the gaps are, and decide what items they can add to their repertoire to increase their maturity in that year. These decisions spawn new cross-functional initiatives like increased user research or participatory design. As the year progresses, the team revisits their progress twice more and determines if they are taking the right amount of action, and modify their annual target as they see fit. This approach provides a good balance of structure and flexibility so that expectations and plans are clearly set for the year and have follow up, and can also be revised as the year unfolds and things change.

5. Give the outcomes visibility across the whole organization

We have evolved Design dashboards over the last four years, which include the Design Thinking scorecard results as well as other key metrics such as research studies, research participants, cross-functional design thinking workshops and more. Our target metrics include what we call “business wins,” which are compelling stories that illustrate the connections between the design team’s work and successful business outcomes. In addition to a Design Thinking dashboard, we have complementary Design System and Storytelling dashboards which round out our thrice-annual reporting on design strategy.We look for alignment between our internal maturity metrics and external KPIs like Net Promotor Score and Client Satisfaction Scores.

These dashboards have visibility at all levels of the business, and elements of them are presented on a quarterly basis to our senior management team and to our CEO, Marc Lautenbach. When senior management takes that level of interest and asks hard questions around the whys, whats and hows of our design practices, the message of how crucial this is to our business success and how important it is for our teams to work collaboratively to realize those successes comes across loud and clear.

6. Practice design thinking :-)

We like to practice what we preach, so as we initiated this bold revision we did some looking and understanding to see what was working for product teams and what wasn’t. As we developed some concepts, we prototyped and tested until we found a formula that worked well and seemed to drive the behavior changes we were looking for. We worked closely with our super-talented GUX (Global User Experience) organization, as well as test-drove the scorecard with a sampling of 3-legged stool teams and iterated based on their input. While many people have contributed to the scorecard, none have done more to advance this approach than Eric Robinson, who has been an amazing partner on this project from ideation through deployment.

7. Be persistent

Making this kind of initiative successful at enterprise scale requires that we are committed to it for the long haul. It’s a lot of work, discussion, persuasion, trial & error — all of which takes a large amount of dedication and patience to get working smoothly. Use chunking to make the work more approachable and remember that you need big effort for even bigger payback.