2020 - today
Design Thinking internal program
Design and coordination of a company wide program for increasing design maturity of cross functional teams.
About Mural
I joined Mural in 2019, when the company had less than eighty employees and, since then, the company has grown to six hundred people. This project was developed in 2022, with me working as a Lead Product Designer in the Canvas Core team, which is responsible for all main interactions in the canvas.
How we work
As a Lead Designer, I’m responsible for leading UX & UI decisions across the Visual Thinking pillar, where my team belongs to. I use Design Thinking as a framework for my design process, keeping the user always in the center but considering business needs and technical capacities.
Role in this project
Sr. Product Designer (2020 - 2021). Interaction design, Visual design, Prototyping, Testing, Information Architecture, implementation follow up, Design QA
Overview of the project
The goal of this project was to improve users’ experience when creating diagrams in the canvas and to fill the gaps we had when being compared with other products.
Background
Since I joined Mural in June 2019, the company has been committed to human centered processes, and to keeping the focus on the user and their goals. We try to follow what we call a healthy design process which is mostly based on Design Thinking methodology, but with some tweaks. We call it “the Mural way” (let’s not forget it’s an engineer hard environment, Star Wars references all are around the place). The company doesn't only sell a collaborative whiteboard, but also helps distributed teams around the world to innovate, by adopting collaborative work and Design Thinking as a mindset. That said, every employee must, at least, know the basics of that methodology.
Nine months after having joined the company, the pandemic hit (while I was in Mexico, story for another time). At that moment, Mural had 120 employees. By September 2020 that number had risen to 400 people, and new people came with their own ideas of how processes should be. So one day, I was speaking with my former manager, Celeste Olivieri, about this situation and we started brainstorming potential solutions for this problem. First, we defined the problem: Everyone at Mural needs to know the basics of Design Thinking. Why? Because Design Thinking is part of Mural’s DNA, part of the company's culture,it's how we innovate, and part of our mission is to serve customers with the resources to use Design Thinking as a methodology and a mindset themselves. So, everyone needs to know, AT LEAST, the basics of Design Thinking.
With the problem already defined, we asked ourselves: How may we introduce everyone to Design Thinking in a fun way but without taking much time? After some brainstorming time, it felt obvious that Mural had to provide a Design Thinking course for employees. So, after I received Cele's green light, I started writing the content.
The course needed certain characteristics:
It had to be short, with a maximum duration of 2.5 hours.
It needed to cover the basics of design thinking and some notions about User Experience, but it shouldn't feel overwhelming for people with no design background.
It had to be generic enough to include all different roles within the company, but specific enough to transmit the way Mural adapts design thinking.
It had to be fun.
It had to be effective: the outcome should be that participants really feel how powerful it is to apply Design Thinking to design and development processes.
I believed that the best way for people to truly understand the value of Design Thinking was to experience the whole cycle themselves. So, I wrote a 2.5-hour course that consisted of pairing people and having each of them improve a certain experience for the other person. They had to go through the 5 stages of Design Thinking within this time frame. To facilitate this, we used Mural for presenting and taking notes.
Once I had the first version of the course (an MVP), I recruited 6 engineering leads, sent them the materials in a taxi (because of the pandemic), and we ran a test drive with them)
After the session, I sent participants a survey, and I received pretty good feedback along with some key learnings from that first experience, such as:
Before starting, we need to remind people that they are going to work in pairs so that if they leave the meeting, their partner can’t continue working.
Let participants know in advance that the workshop requires talking and a lot of interaction, so they have to be 100% present.
In a multi-language company, when possible, it’s better if pairs share the same native language so that it doesn't become an obstacle.
Given that the experience is really demanding, to maintain participants' attention, a break in the middle is needed.
Even when participants don’t understand at the beginning what the heck they’re doing, they understand it by the end and end up with a smile.
Sending materials is too expensive, so we needed to find an alternative solution.
So, I took all the feedback and improved the workshop’s content. Then, I invited a bigger crew of participants for a second version, trying to have different backgrounds and roles.
At this point, the company already had 800 employees, and this project reached the CEO's ears. He decided that these sessions were really valuable for the company, and every Mural employee should take this course, at least once. Because of that, this project should have an associated company OKR. However, so far, I was the only one spending time on this, and I couldn't keep working solely as a Senior Product Designer while also scaling these courses up to reach the entire company.
After some discussions with my manager and the VP of Design, we decided that I needed help from the rest of the designers in the team. This could also be a good opportunity for everyone to become a better facilitator. So, this became a Design Team OKR: by the end of that Quarter, all the members of the design team had to have facilitated this workshop at least once.
For all this to happen, we were also going to receive help from the People Operations team for logistics. At this point, what started as a small project had evolved into a company-wide initiative that required cross-collaboration between the whole design team (22 people) and POps.
I began polishing the workshop script and materials to make it easily consumable by the rest of the designers, especially those with less experience in facilitating remote sessions. Then, I had the first crowded group (picture) with 24 participants.
Most of them had zero design background, and some of them had serious issues following the workshop dynamic. The workshop that was supposed to last 2.5 hours took 3.5 hours, and half of the crew had to leave the call. It was chaos. It was at that moment that I realized for this to happen successfully, we should have one main facilitator and a supporter: a co-facilitator to answer participants' questions and help jump into break-up groups if needed.
Once I prepared the material, I recorded some videos explaining the script in a lot of detail and scheduled a meeting with the whole design team to show them everything. I recommended all of them, first, attend the course as an observer; then become a co-facilitator, and finally, facilitate one themselves. We agreed on an agenda for the next three months (until the end of the quarter), and we started!
The materials consisted of:
A Google Doc with the whole script.
A Google Doc with facilitation advice, recommendations, and tips.
A Mural with the presentation.
A Mural template that facilitators needed to duplicate so that every participant could have their own mural.
A Spotify playlist for playing music during individual work moments.
When the quarter ended, we achieved the following:
14 sessions in 10 weeks.
13 different facilitators.
Reached 230 employees.
Reached 84% of the company OKR.
We also collected feedback from 103 employees who took the course:
88% of them thought that the Design team had done a good job facilitating the workshops.
62% mentioned being comfortable talking about Design Thinking after this workshop.
46% mentioned being confident in trying to apply Design Thinking in their roles.
In those three months, both the company and the design team grew, so we needed to keep this project alive. I invited all designers to a Retrospective meeting so that we could make improvements for the next Quarter.
With all the participants' and facilitators' feedback, I worked on a new version of the workshop and collaborated with the People Operations team to improve some logistics issues. Then, we started scheduling workshops again. We conducted another whole quarter of workshops, organized by POps, facilitated by Design, and coordinated by me. However, Mural was growing rapidly, and the coordination was consuming a lot of my time. As a result, leadership made the decision to hire an external vendor to facilitate the workshops. I transferred all my knowledge and shared all the materials with the external vendor, and I supervised their efforts. Once 90% of the employees had already gone through the workshop, leadership decided to include it as a compulsory workshop within the company's onboarding process, and it remains there to this day.
