Scaling Design Thinking

in the Enterprise
Best Practices From a 5-Year Case Study
 Scaling Design Thinking
in the Enterprise
Best Practices From a 5-Year Case Study

Copyright © 2017 by UXPin Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication text may be uploaded or

posted online without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention:

Permissions Request,” to [email protected].
 Index

A Few Quick Words 7

Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 10

Design Thinking in 30 Seconds 11
Design Thinking in Action 13
Conclusion16

Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 17

Pitching to Leadership  19
Teaching Leadership 22
Build Your First Employee Fanbase  24
Conclusion29

Step 2: Converting the Organization 30

Formal Activities and Events  30
Informal Activities 34
Commit to a Plan and Train Other Trainers 37
Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 39
Xen Desktop: Uncovering the Right Problem 40
GoTo Meeting: Testing the Freemium Hypothesis 43
Conclusion45

Ongoing: Measuring Success 47

Measuring Design Thinking Outreach 47
Measuring the Bottom Line of Design Thinking 48
Circulating the Results 49

Final Words 51

Enterprise UX Process Case Study 52

THE CHALLENGE
THE SOLUTION
THE RESULTS
Author

Julie Baher, Sr. UX Director at Illumina

At Illumina, Julia leads a team dedicated to improving human health

through design thinking. Previously, Julie led Citrix’s CX team for SaaS
products. She led design for enterprise products including XenClient,
Cloud Platform and App Orchestration. Prior to Citrix, Julie ran the de-
sign team for the shared platform of Adobe’s Creative Suite and led
user research for Photoshop. She has designed everything from web-
sites (xerox.com) to online education (online MBA program) to training
programs (Charles Schwab, National Semiconductor) to computer net-
works (Onizuka Airforce base, ZiffDavis Labs).
All-in-one design
and prototyping tool
UXPin has everything you need to create prototypes that look and
work like the end product. No more switching between a bunch of
tools to take your design from static to interactive. Try for free.

Create the real Keep your team Gather feedback

experience in the loop and act on it
Design life-like prototypes down to Give everyone a truly interactive Test your prototypes with users
the last tiny detail using interactions, experience to help them understand and think through the product to
variables, or states. how the product works. a much greater degree.
 A Few Quick Words

Now is a great time to be a design leader.

More engineering-driven organizations are realizing that design

solves complicated problems, thereby establishing a competitive
edge for their products and services.

You might have heard of billion-dollar corporations like IBM, GE, and
3M hiring C-level design leaders along with hundreds to thousands
of designers. Of course, besides just hiring design talent, they hope
he new wave of thinkers will instill a customer focus within every
employee.

During my five years at Citrix between 2010 to 2015, I was fortunate

to gain first-hand experience leading a transformation in product
strategy to a customer-centered approach. It began when several se-
nior executives attended the design thinking bootcamp at Stanford’s
d-school, returning with a new vision for our product development
processes.
 A Few Quick Words 8

I was then tasked with solidifying design thinking as a core business

competency across the 8,000-person organization. Quite the challenge,
wouldn’t you say?

The Before View

 A Few Quick Words 9

Ultimately this work led to a rethinking of how the company inno-

vated and built products.

Through several programs, the customer became the center of our

focus, from how we set the product roadmap to how we tuned the
existing product set. We challenged ourselves to push beyond the sta-
tus quo. We used tools from design thinking and Lean Startup–both
of which center on customer engagement and feedback.

This change began in one corner of the organization (championed

by the UX team), then grew across the company.

How user-oriented is your organization? What challenges would you

face while spreading a user-centered practice beyond your UX team?
Where would you start?

In this guide, I’ll explain how my team helped build a more innova-
tive culture at Citrix through practical design thinking. I’ve broken
down the process into three main phases that you can scale up or
down depending on your organization.

Let’s get started!

Julie Baher
Sr. Director of UX at Illumina
(Former Group Director of CX at Citrix)
 Design Thinking
Beyond Buzzwords

While you practice design thinking every day, outsiders most likely
see it as some form of magical thinking. At the very least, it’s certainly
a buzzword.

To make others care about the practice behind the buzzword, you
need to relate it back to the business and show some real examples of
its value. Cut through the jargon and describe it as a business process.

First, I’ll explain how we boiled down design thinking into a 30-second
value proposition, then I’ll explain some of my favorite case studies
as evidence of its effectiveness.
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 11

Design Thinking in 30 Seconds

Design thinking might feel convoluted from over-usage, but it’s ac-
tually a very straightforward concept.

The core tenets are simply

1. focusing first on customer problems,
2. iterating on ideas, and
3. soliciting feedback to focus and refine those ideas.

At Citrix, we boiled down design thinking into key activities within

the stages of Empathy, Ideate, and Prototype.

1. Here’s how we explained the value of design thinking:

“For people in non-design roles, focus easily drifts away from the
customer. They might focus on a schedule or an internal process.
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 12

Often, as companies scale, many employees have limited or no

contact with the company’s customer.

Luckily, through structured activities, we can teach people to re-

focus on the problems that matter to customers and improve the
bottom line.

Rather than latch onto the first solution, employees can better eval-
uate a multitude of options before committing resources. They’ll
be able to better avoid the vicious cycle of incremental effort with
minimal customer impact.

As employees evaluate and explore ideas earlier, we’ll waste less

money on the wrong issues.”

2. And the elevator pitch version:

“Design thinking isn’t a philosophy. It’s a problem-solving strategy
employees can learn to improve their business processes. With
the right people teaching it, the company will see more profitable
and innovative options appear when making decisions that can
cost a lot of time and money.”
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 13

Design Thinking in Action

In many organizations, UX teams become facilitators and trainers

of a design thinking movement. They help employees in other roles
learn this new way of approaching problems.

But before you can lead design change, you need to:

• Know what you’re pitching and how it benefits the bottom line.

• Understand how design thinking fits into the current system and
culture.

• Know where to find crucial points of influence that make or break

your efforts–it’s very difficult to encourage shifts in process and
perspective without a strong fan base.

To show how design thinking can transform products and services,

we’ll look at a few examples. These stories will help you understand
1. how design thinking impacts the business in a variety of indus-
tries and
2. how to craft your change strategy from idea to results.

1. GE Healthcare
Innovation Architect Doug Deitz transformed the MRI experience
for children by creating a new offering at GE Healthcare.
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 14

Photo credit: Slate

A designer of MRI instruments, he watched a family bring their

child in for an MRI. Looking on as the child cried, Doug re-exam-
ined his device–but this time from the child’s perspective. Bending
down on his knees, he saw the experience in a whole new way.

It was terrifying.

The child’s reaction drove him to reimagine the experience.

Doug worked with a cross-functional team of healthcare providers,

patients, and GE designers to transform the MRI design, as well
as the testing room, to create a child-centered world where the
MRI became a canoe in a river. Not only did this reduce anxiety
for the children and family, it saved the hospital medication costs
since they sedated far fewer children.
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 15

2. Bank of America
Bank of America partnered with IDEO to help their customers save
money. Traditionally, that means running a marketing campaign
to encourage savings.

Photo credit: IDEO

Instead, based on consumer observations and interviews, IDEO

designed Keep the Change–a program that led to the participation
of 2.5 million existing customers and the opening of 700,000 new
accounts.

Their program made it easy for customers to save money by

rounding up purchases made on their debit cards to the nearest
dollar and transferring the difference into the customer's’ savings
account from their checking account.

3. Intuit
At Intuit, a team applied design thinking to create the Fasal app to
help Indian farmers get the best price for their produce.
 Design Thinking Beyond Buzzwords 16

Based on their observations and learnings from the farmers, they

brainstormed solutions and then created a prototype app. Based on
their SMS-based app pilot, they estimated that the new approach
to sharing data about produce prices could net the farmers $250-
$500 annually.

Within the first few months of launch, the app grew to 500,000 users
who now earned more than 20% income. With a solid user base,
Intuit can now monetize the app through third-party advertising.

Conclusion

With some examples to reference, now the real work starts.

To successfully implement design thinking across your own organi-

zation, you must first align with (or devise) a process for execution
and collection of results. Next, you’ll need to quantify those results.

In the remaining sections, I’ll explain straightforward tips based on

successful processes at Citrix.
 Step 1: Recruit Your
Core Supporters

Culture change isn’t one-size-fits all, and it only happens with con-
scious effort and supporters.

I liken this to the adoption of Agile in engineering organizations.

Today, we take it for granted that most software teams follow agile
processes. The forgotten reality is that it only came about through
concerted leadership, training, experimentation, and adaptation.

You need both top-down and bottom-up support to get started. That
means obtaining executive buy-in and embedding well-placed influ-
encers in the ranks.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful boss (Catherine Courage) who at-

tended Stanford’s d-school program and was also Citrix’s VP of Product
Design at the time. She helped identify important key collaborators,
funded training and consulting, and was a constant champion.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 18

Long-term progress of design culture at Citrix

Draw up a list of the key leaders and influencers in your organization.

Ask yourself, where do you see seeds of innovation popping up? Who
is looking to engage more with your customers? These folks are your
early adopters.

Our strategy at Citrix was to get a few senior leaders (VP’s of our
product business units, marketing, finance and IT) on board early.
Once they bought in, other leaders started coming to us, wanting to
learn more and engage their teams.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 19

Pitching to Leadership

Leaders only need to know two things:

1. what design thinking is, and
2. how it meets business goals.

When you approach them, explain everything in layman’s terms with

plenty of supporting information.

Highlight relatable examples of design thinking’s business impact.

Then, make the connection between examples from other companies
and the challenges facing your organization.

What’s on the executives top-of-mind? Did they recently suffer a

failed product launch? Are customers complaining about a product
or service? Has a new opportunity or market emerged?

You don’t need to be the messenger yourself, and it doesn’t necessarily

need to be in the form of a PowerPoint deck. Of course, that is the
cultural currency at many companies, so boil down your story to no
more than 8-slides (executives like a short narrative!) and practice
your pitch.

• Outline a challenge or opportunity the organization faces in the

current quarter.

• Point out the 3 tenets of design thinking, then dive straight into
the elevator pitch. Speak to the pains of your audience. For ex-
ample, a VP of Engineering needs to deliver solutions on-schedule
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 20

and within scope. Requirements that change late in the process

jeopardize their success. When you validate specifications earlier
through prototypes, you minimize the risk of delays and costs.

• Demonstrate how similar companies or industries used design

thinking to solve that problem (include numbers to show the re-
sults).

• Outline how design thinking applies to your company.

• Pitch a trial pilot project, ideally a 3 month or less project so you

can return with the results. Either estimate desired business re-
sults (e.g. “increase sales conversion for new customers by 15%
without affecting churn”), or emphasize that you’ll speak with all
stakeholders to craft clear business goals.

• Ask for executive support for just the pilot.

Know where your organization fits along the 8 stages of UX maturity,

and adapt your talking points accordingly. As a universal best prac-
tice, focus on the quick wins – don’t scare off potential champions
by unveiling a grand plan for UX.

If executives still resist your pitch, don’t give up just yet. It’s nor-
mal for people to reject ideas until they’ve seen evidence of at
least a small success.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 21

As Dave Malouf suggests, try breaking down your existing product

into segmented units, then shop around a new vision for one unit
with any UX allies outside of the design team.

Essentially, run your own small skunkworks project.

Once you build some consensus, try prototyping new ideas and
testing with 3-5 users in 30-minute sessions on your own. Hold a
quick session with stakeholders where you summarize the usability
results and your recommended action plan.

Marcin Treder, CEO of UXPin

 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 22

Teaching Leadership

Once you get buy-in, it helps to teach leadership some introductory

design thinking.

At Citrix, we sent many of our leaders to the Stanford d-school exec-

utive bootcamps (From Insights to Innovation and Customer Focused
Innovation). We also ran custom crafted design thinking introductory
workshops with Lime Design. These events connected executives
and senior leaders with our purchasers and end-users, giving them
direct experience with the tools of design thinking.

They soon realized we hadn’t truly been listening to our customers

when building our products.

Introductory design thinking workshop we lead at Citrix

 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 23

Of course, you might lack the budget to hire outside consultants for
workshops. Luckily, you can still run a 90-120 minute mini-workshop
on your own with 4-8 executive stakeholders. We called it “the taste
of design thinking”.

These “taste events” are a variation of the Stanford Gift Giving exer-
cise. The goal is to help participants experience a full design thinking
cycle from empathy to prototyping in a short period of time.
What’s key is that these were interactive sessions, not long lectures.

• In brief, participants start in pairs and interview each other about

a topic you provide. We usually picked a non-work topic such as
designing your partner’s before-work morning routine.

• They then sketch ideas and prototype them. The big unveil is that
they test the ideas with their partner.

• For the remaining 30 minutes, do a group debrief to discuss how

empathy, prototyping and testing could apply to actual projects
at your company.

Following the introductory workshop for our internal IT team, a

senior technology director interviewed some new hires to help him
create a better employee onboarding experience. Afterwards, he
remarked, “I thought we were doing a great job for our employees.
But now I see the new hire experience was terrible for some people.”

It was the first time he’d seen the experience through their eyes.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 24

He went on to become our biggest evangelist, and all it took was a

half-day workshop, an hour interviewing some new hires, and quickly
reflecting on the experience.

Build Your First Employee Fanbase

Once you have some leaders on board, prioritize the first groups or
teams you want to influence. Start small and run a few pilots, learning
from your experiences as you scale up. Treat evangelism as a design
project – you must be willing to iterate on your approach.

1. Training
First, you’ll need to introduce design thinking to employees. The
training needs to be tightly coupled with helping them apply it to
a real project. Take a learn-by-doing philosophy so that training is
hands-on and is immediately applicable to real-world problems.

Use the same “taste of design thinking” workshop to introduce

them with minimal investment. Don’t worry–later on, I’ll talk
about how to scale it up.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 25

Before you go too far in training everyone, you want to learn how
well folks can apply their new techniques to actual projects. So,
you’ll want to shift gears between training activities and applica-
tions of design thinking.

2. Project Work
You’ll also need a first success story, so you’ll need to jump in and
do a project.

At Citrix, our first project was working with the Customer Education
team. They wanted to improve their existing course offerings. As
our first internal customer, we led them through an introductory
design thinking class. Over the next few months, we continued
to coach and mentor their team as they applied the concepts to
redesigning their courses.

In the introductory class, we guided the team through the complete

design thinking cycle during the 2-hour “taste of design thinking”
workshop. It helps to teach concepts by using a topic unrelated to
everyday work, helping people to absorb ideas with an open mind.

Next, segue from general concepts to specific, work-related appli-

cation. I recommend you pre-plan the scope of the team project. A
good starting project allows for creativity in the solution space. It
should be something important to the business, but not so broad
that you’re boiling the ocean.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 26

For our Customer Education team, rather than try to redesign all
their training products, we zoomed in on the upcoming release
of our XenDesktop training course. These training courses teach
IT professionals how to install and configure the product on their
servers. During the process, we didn’t specify the platform of the
solution (online, classroom, etc). We purposely left the solution
space wide open early on so that the end result emerges via the
design process.

When working with your pilot team, create a short project brief
before diving in very far. These key questions help guide the dis-
cussion towards actionable insights:

1. Why do we think this challenge is worth tackling? Why now?

2. Who are your target users? Who might benefit inside the com-
pany?
3. Are there any dependencies on other groups? (Tip: you may
want to include a representative from that group in your proj-
ect team)
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 27

4. What constraints will the team face? (technology, timing, budget)

5. How will we measure success? (Tip: encourage specific goals
like “Reduce churn by 6% in the first 3 months”)

As our project progressed, we discovered that the Customer Edu-

cation team found the broad exploratory phase of design thinking
unsettling. They were accustomed to detailed schedules, plans,
and roadmaps.

Since we didn’t know the solution yet, the team held off on activ-
ities they normally do at the start of a project, such as scheduling,
scoping, and budgeting. As a designer, you probably aren’t afraid
of a blank canvas to “go broad before going narrow”. But since
many people are hesitant, reassure them that everything will
eventually come into focus.

To adapt to various ways of working and microcultures, we in-

cluded more hand-holding in our training materials as well as
scaffolded each phase with clear activities and outcomes for the
project teams. These materials helped teams cope with the uncer-
tainty and open-ended nature of ideation.

Designers and design leaders need to see themselves as a facilita-

tor for gathering, shaping, and testing input.
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 28

Consider holding 1:1 sessions with vocal stakeholders. During design

reviews, let them air their thoughts, but if they dive too deep into
prescriptive advice, tell them you care so much about their ideas
that you want to dedicate focused time to discuss.

Sometimes, you’ll find that stakeholders might even reconsider since

they realize they need to separate personal opinions from facts. It
seems like a paradox, but sometimes being overly open actually
helps people better accept dissenting opinions.

Daniel Castro, Design Director at Sumo Logic

3. Adapt to Microcultures
At Citrix we found micro-cultures across our US and global loca-
tions, meaning some teams required more or less guidance to suit
their needs.

I like to describe this as doing internal ethnography on your work

culture. Similar to how you develop personas, note the dynamics
of different teams and locations.

You’ll probably start seeing some patterns across teams:

• What does the team value?

• Are they a hierarchical or flat group?
• How do they make decisions? By consensus? By one leader?
• Do they gravitate to structure and rules or do they forge their
own path?
 Step 1: Recruit Your Core Supporters 29

• Do they have lots of contact outside the company, or are they

insular and inward-focused?

These attributes help you determine which aspects of design think-

ing will come easy and which require more follow up.

Some teams naturally spend time talking with customers, so you

won’t need to focus as much on empathy (although, they need to
“listen” to customers...so check that they can actually articulate
insights about their interactions). More technical teams may pos-
sess the skills for prototyping, which means you’ll focus more on
helping them evaluate their builds against customer needs.

Conclusion

Both teaching and coaching are key to building a design thinking

movement. Start with a well scoped project or two and use those to
learn about your company as well as hone your approach.

You’ll make mistakes, and that’s okay. We made our fair share – the
experience is a learning process so be open to change.

As you gain momentum, you’ll want to move on to think about how

to scale up your efforts.
 Step 2: Converting
the Organization

So how do you go from one team to scaling design thinking across

an entire organization?

To spread the word, try a mix of formal and informal activities.

Formal Activities and Events

Leverage any (and all) of the existing internal systems at your company.

Look at your corporate calendar. What upcoming events could you

establish a presence, give a quick 15-30 minute talk, or run a 30-min-
ute workshop? When are employees naturally brought together?
What are the communication channels at your company (Internal
newsletters/Slack/Yammer/etc.)?

Here’s a few successful tactics from our work at Citrix:

 Step 2: Converting the Organization 31

• Two of our designer/editors wrote brief monthly articles in the

company intranet about our design thinking progress and results.

• As we exposed various employees to design thinking across dif-

ferent departments, I often knew who owned the agenda for team
meetings and group all-hands. I’d talk to the meeting lead for 10
minutes to give an overview of design thinking, soliciting employ-
ees to sign up for training classes. Use your executive pitch deck
as a template, then add a few more slides for success stories.

• I worked with our Leadership & Development team to include our

“taste of design thinking” workshop in the company’s internal em-
ployee course portal (larger companies like Citrix use a Learning
Management System, but posters around the office work as well).
You can just as easily upload the workshop guidelines into a cloud
folder for employee reference and new hire onboarding.

• We also held the “taste of design thinking” sessions at our annual

sales kickoff events, our customer service annual meeting, and at
Citrix customer conferences (where we invited actual customers
to participate and learn).

When it comes to formal training programs, if you have budget, it’s

also great to hire a consultancy to help create training.

For our initial workshops we partnered with the Lime Design con-
sultancy. Other options are the Stanford d-School or LUMA Institute
(UXPin customer Autodesk actually uses LUMA for all their employ-
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 32

ees). The cost was not ongoing–after our first few workshops, we
knew enough to run our own workshops.

IT Personas

IT Buyer’s Personas at Citrix

High-Level Journey Maps

High-level journey map for Citrix end-users

 Step 2: Converting the Organization 33

High/Lows and Opportunities Journey Map

Detailed journey map for Citrix end-users.

Even if you don’t have budget for an external firm, you’ll find plenty
of resources and toolkits online.

Here are some of my favorites for building up your design facilitator

toolkit:

• Stanford d-School Methods

• Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit
• Extreme by Design Resources
• Ideo’s Design Thinking Resources
• Coursera’s “Design Thinking for Innovation” online course
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 34

Informal Activities

In addition to the formalized training experiences, we developed

some unique informal learning events.

One of my favorite ideas was leveraging lunch time at our cafeterias

for a pop-up design studio. It’s always a challenge to find time for
employees to do training (we all have day jobs, right?). So lunch is
the perfect time to sneak in some learning. The tactic works for office
spaces of any size.

• We created a series of short activities to engage employees in the

key concepts. To tie them to an immediate project (instead of it
just being a “blue-sky design activity”), we engaged our HR Cor-
porate Citizenship team to deliver them insights for onboarding
and corporate responsibility projects.
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 35

• Led by one of my colleagues, we created a pop-up design studio

in the cafeteria in our US and UK offices. With some portable white
boards and simple materials, our pop-up studio came to life.
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 36

• As employees entered the café, they walked through our interactive

exercises. For example, employees at one station shared 6-word
stories of how they contribute to the community while also read-
ing about how others volunteered. At another, they brainstormed
how Citrix could help with social causes (at the end, we rewarded
participation with cupcakes – food always helps!).

The participants could visit as many stations as they wanted and the
whole experience required less than 20 minutes. Not only did the
event introduce employees to some of the key mindsets of design
thinking, we delivered quick value to a business group (HR).

Over 150 people participated across our Santa Clara, Fort Lauderdale
and UK offices during the three pop-ups we held. Of course, if the
pop-up session isn’t feasible, you can try simple lunch-and-learns.

Once a week, hold a 30-minute session during lunch with one de-
partment to explain the practical value of design thinking. Use your
pitch deck as a template, modifying the benefits to suit the depart-
ment. Mention any inspiring products (and any relevant metrics),
then ask attendees about products they enjoy and why. If you ran
any side prototyping experiments, show the before and after results
in the session.
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 37

Commit to a Plan and Train Other Trainers

As you teach more people about design thinking, you need a plan to
scale your efforts.

Set goals for how many employees and which employee groups you
want to reach each year. Which offices? What roles? Where can you
start to show the greatest impact the quickest? These questions should
guide your roadmap toward real business results.

At Citrix, we aimed to train around 50 employees in the first year

and then scaled up to 3,000 in the second year. So how did we grow
so quickly? So far, I’ve only shared examples of the work that my
small team drove.

To expand the effort and grow our cadre of evangelists, we created

a train-the-trainer program.
 Step 2: Converting the Organization 38

As we worked across the company, we quickly identified other pas-

sionate employees who were natural evangelists of design thinking.
We added an apprentice model so they could progress from being
participants in a workshop to coaching a team and then eventually
leading training.

For those who wanted to become trainers, we asked that they help
with one workshop a quarter (a 2-3 day commitment). Initially, there
was no incentive for employees to participate. We wanted those who
were genuinely motivated. Several years into our design thinking
movement, our HR department added “design-driven” as one of the
guiding principles for employees (eventually becoming part of their
performance evaluations).

Over 3 years, we added 15 more volunteer trainers to our network.

We offered specialized courses for this select group on how to de-

sign and facilitate workshops. If budget allows, I highly recommend
Thiagi’s Interactive Training workshop.

If you lack the budget, the following free resources are incredibly
practical:

• Good Kickoff Meetings

• How to Run and Plan the Perfect UX Workshop
• Facilitating Great Design
• Facilitating Collaborative Design Workshops: A Step by Step Guide
• The Design Workshop: Bringing It All Together
 Step 3: Following Through
With Lean Startup

Design thinking helps everyone focus on the right problem to solve.

To then teach others to create the right solution, it helps to borrow a
few tactics from Lean Startup.

Lean Startup provides a framework for presenting an idea alongside

a business model, getting market feedback and continuing to refine,
or pivot entirely.

Both design thinking and Lean Startup help define your offering.
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 40

Design thinking starts from user empathy, arrives at several ideas,

then ends in a prototype. If your idea is a digital product, you might
create prototypes with your team in a collaborative platform like
UXPin. If it’s a physical product, you might create a prototype with
3D printing or manufacturing-on-demand. Or, if it’s a service, you
might run a limited pilot.

To quickly understand the overlap between Lean Startup and design

thinking, the Nordstrom Innovation Lab created a useful diagram
showing how the two processes fit together.

Once you’ve arrived at that prototype, Lean Startup starts to work in

parallel with design thinking. Lean Startup helps answer the ques-
tion of how you’ll turn the product idea into a business for the target
market. Both practices share the same methods of testing, iterating
and refining.

Xen Desktop: Uncovering the Right Problem

To continue with the example from Citrix:

• As we worked with the Education team, they created several new

ideas to deliver better training. Once they built a few prototypes,
we ran several testing sessions with customers. This first stage
lasted around 6 weeks.

• We gave the team specific assignments for each part of design

thinking. For example, team members (from multiple backgrounds)
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 41

were assigned to a certain number of customer interviews. As we

ideated on the customer input, the team was assigned to create
simple prototypes of new concepts. We scheduled regular meet-
ings to consolidate learnings as we went along.

• Once the concept was refined, it was moved into testing where
operations team members could join in and help launch our pilot.
This took several months, as there was quite a lot of work to develop
a course (your mileage may vary depending on what you build).

• Finally, we ran pilots of the course in our training center where

8-12 customers attended in-person.

So, what were the results?

We launched a new course for Xen Desktop that helped them better
understand their options first. In the past, training was too prod-
uct-focused, walking users through features screen-by-screen. This
was akin to following a very strict recipe assuming the users already
knew what they were cooking.

From our customer empathy work, we learned that IT professionals

first needed greater context before even thinking about deploying
the product. They needed to weigh different deployment options
and assess their current infrastructure to customize the deployment
approach.

The design thinking work led to a new set of principles for Xen Desk-
top courses:
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 42

• Offer a “Tell me, Show me, Let me” experience with easily digest-
ible pieces.

• Quickly establish the instructor's credibility.

• Rely less on lecture, and more on discussion and hands-on labs.

• Provide resources students can take home.

• Offer reinforcement exercises (same types of exercises, but with

less hand holding to demonstrate proficiency).

• Create a community between students and instructors.

• Offer the opportunity to "Ask an Expert" (either product team

member, someone recognized in the field or who previously took
the class).

Based on those insights, the Citrix Education Team reworked the con-
tent to teach this upfront analysis. The new courses were now only
20% lecture and 80% interactive exercises. They added more hands-
on opportunities for students to practice their skills. Additionally,
they created “learning to-go” which were take home materials for
customers to use back in the office. They also launched a community
for the trainees.

The results showed in NPS scores increasing by roughly 30%.

 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 43

GoTo Meeting: Testing the Freemium Hypothesis

In the previous example, the business model remain unchanged.

For GoTo Meeting, however, we prototyped several experimental

products. One was a freemium cloud version of GoTo Meeting. We
launched an MVP, then fine-tuned KPIs for many months. During
that time, we ran different experiments to test if we could increase
paid conversions to the full offering. We tracked and optimized for:

• Direct signups and freemium app usage

• Frequency of freemium app use
• Upgrades to paid plans

The new freemium model proved successful enough that it’s now
part of the core product line.

Making the Process Work for You

Here’s how to make design thinking and Lean Startup work for your
established organization:

• Start small – Corporations are naturally immune to change. Don’t

be afraid to compromise early on. The Xen Desktop project was
a bite-sized pilot where we involved just a handful of employees
and customers. However, we adjusted the timeline for the realities
of the enterprise, which is why it required months rather than
weeks to improve the experience.
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 44

• Immediately unpack assumptions – The wrong assumptions will

cost millions. If you do nothing else, plan a 30-minute session at
the beginning to reveal knowledge gaps. The activity helps prime
people for experimentation. Simply ask: “For our ideas to succeed,
what must be true?”. Oftentimes, people aren’t even aware of as-
sumptions until they see them tallied in front of them.

• Not all prototypes are created equal – Stakeholders might not

understand that prototypes don’t always reflect intended builds.
Since you’ll be testing several prototypes with the Lean Startup
method, explain to stakeholders the context of each experiment.
You may kill a lo-fi prototype after testing, so explain that it’s only
meant for learning. Since a later mid-fi or hi-fi prototype will prob-
ably be implemented, mention that they represent viable decisions.

• Clearly explain your experiments to your manager – In a cor-

porate environment, it’s almost a taboo to admit that you’ll fail. Set
realistic expectations upfront with your manager by explaining
the intended timelines, costs, and desired learnings of each experi-
ment. In every subsequent 1:1, communicate specific insights from
user interviews or usability tests (and how they helped invalidate
potentially expensive ideas).

I'm a big fan, not just of the Lean and Agile philosophy, but also
the related discipline of Extreme Programming which includes
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 45

things like test-driven development, pair programming, and con-

tinuous deployment.

The key is a hypothesis-driven process: "If we make this change, we

predict it will have this effect. Now let’s test to see if we were right
or wrong."

You want to design a small complete thing (not an under-designed

thing) as a quick experiment. You can then use Agile processes to
break down that complete thing into bite-sized tasks for engineers.

Laura Klein, Principal at Users Know

& Author of Lean UX for Startups

Conclusion

Whereas UX testing focuses on improving the design, Lean Startup

tests not only the product but the business model and market fit.

So while the product might be very usable, you might find that the
original target audience just isn’t interested. You’ll need to either (a)
change your prototype or (b) change your audience.

Similarly, you can try attaching different business models (subscription,

license, freemium, etc...) to your prototype to see which resonates
with your audience.
 Step 3: Following Through With Lean Startup 46

An easy way to do this is prototyping the website that goes along with
your concept. In 30-minute to 1-hour sessions, encourage users to
think aloud as they explore the marketing content, business model
and any existing visuals for your concept. Triangulate the feedback
against your user interview learnings – then you’ll have input on
both your idea and business model.
 Ongoing: Measuring Success

As you start the pilot project, you’ll need to measure success for
spreading design thinking and its impact on projects.

Circulate the initial goals with all the stakeholders, then update them
periodically until the project concludes.

Measuring Design Thinking Outreach

To measure the outreach of our design thinking effort, we tracked:

• Number of employees trained.

• Number of locations/offices reached.
• Total number of instructional hours a year.
• Number of trainers/evangelists across the company.
• Number of ideas generated.
• Number of experiments run.
 Ongoing: Measuring Success 48

Measuring the Bottom Line of Design Thinking

To measure the bottom-line impact, we examined a variety of proj-

ect-level metrics:

• Money saved by the organization as a result of productivity increase.

• Changes in NPS scores.
• Changes in call support volumes.

You can also use other measures such as sales, product reviews, or
new markets served over a specific period if time (30, 60, 90 days).

For the Xen Desktop project, we planned to track customer satisfac-

tion with the new courses, their ability to be self-sufficient with their
products (support calls volume) and sales of training courses. We hit
all these goals (especially the 30% increase in NPS scores).

In another project with our Legal team where we redesigned the ex-
perience of compliance training, we estimated that the new approach
(both a process and product solution) saved the company several
million dollars per year in employee time.

You might save time, save money, or reduce the number of customer
complaints or service calls. Every business cares about those metrics.

In another high-profile project (GoTo Meeting redesign), we used

before/after measures of Net Promoter Score and decrease in call
 Ongoing: Measuring Success 49

support volume to show improvements (10 points, and 66% decrease,

respectively).

Circulating the Results

As you work with teams on their projects, or even if they run the proj-
ects themselves, I recommend you track the benefits to the company.
Celebrate your wins and publish them around the office.

At the conclusion of every project, we wrote a brief article for our

intranet outlining the success metrics and highlighting employee
efforts.

Also, with the project lead with whom we partnered, we presented

the results to their executive leadership (usually in a 1-hour meet-
 Ongoing: Measuring Success 50

ing). This let us craft a memorable narrative, but also helped boost
the project lead in front of their bosses. Leadership saw how the lead
quickly applied new skills to improve an actual business project, and
we deepened our advocacy with the lead.

If executive leadership can’t spare the time for a one-hour “retro”

meeting, a simple email works just as well. Show the designer as the
facilitator, and the project lead as the hero:

• Summarize the overall process (overall timeline and key activities).

• Bullet the challenges and how the project lead used key activities
to reveal insights.

• Bullet out the business results.

• End the email with any specific suggestions for the leader’s team
processes.

In doing so, the designer looks more like a business consultant, while
the project lead looks like an even more valuable team asset. The
more project leads and leaders you involve, the more the process
sells itself.
 Final Words

Growing design thinking from its roots in UX to a company’s core

competency is a journey. There’s no right or wrong path.

As you set out, adapt your tools and approach to fit your company’s
unique culture and UX maturity.

Track success and present ROI to the people who matter. Along the
way, integrate design thinking with other key approaches, such as
Lean Startup, to ensure successful follow-through.

And, when all else fails, trust the process. Use the tools of customer
empathy to learn about your own organization. Test and iterate your
design thinking rollout plan. Keep learning from your failures, and
don’t forget to celebrate your successes.

To see how SumoLogic used a design platform to scale their UX process,

check out the case study in the next section.
 Enterprise UX Process
Case Study
Speeding Up Design Reviews By 300%

THE CHALLENGE
Based in the Bay Area with 250+ employees and $161 mil-
lion in venture capital funding, Sumo Logic serves some of
the top enterprises in the world. The company’s analytics
platform visualizes more than 100 petabytes of data per day,
helping businesses harness the power of machine data to
streamline operations.
In 2015, Sumo Logic hired their first UX team comprised of
design leaders, interaction designers, visual designers, and
UX architects.

The company had been using Axure for wireframing but De-
sign Director Daniel Castro quickly found that the solution did
not allow for easy design modification and did not encourage
collaboration.

Tired of sharing PDFs back and forth, the company needed

a collaborative UX platform that could scale along with their
teams and processes.

THE SOLUTION
For the first six months, Design Director Daniel Castro and
his team spent much of their time holding happy hours and
offering show-and-tells of great UX design.

In a culture already used to collaborative tools such as Slack,

the slow process of emailing thoughts on static designs was
stifling. Castro had begun using UXPin at his previous job, and
knew it would offer his Sumo Logic team the collaboration
tools they needed.
Sumo Logic prototype created in UXPin for their Unified Logs Metrics product

“We are constantly collaborating with engineering and

product managers and it used to take a significant amount
of time to work together going back and forth,” Castro
said. “UXPin allows us to easily show the flow and main
components of our projects. We can share a link and
everyone can communicate with our key stakeholders,
expanding on each other’s comments and allowing us to
manage feedback contextually without redundancy. It’s
like a visual version of our thought process. We can even
make comments on a pixel level. This has made our review
process three times as fast.”
 “UXPin has played a vital role in creating a design-oriented
culture at Sumo Logic,” Castro added. “The team is great
to work with, and I’m excited to see what we can do next.”

THE RESULTS
• Design modification is quick and simple with UXPin, in-
stead of the limiting modifications possible with Axure
wireframing.

• Design reviews are three times as fast and now contextual

using UXPin to collaborate instead of emailing static PDFs.

• UXPin is “like gold” when trying to get approval from

stakeholders on projects, halving the effort needed to
communicate with stakeholders.

Want UXPin to help your team? Start a free trial now.

Your whole
team together
Bring your team together in the collaborative design platform
and start building the best experiences today. From first ideas
and mockups to prototypes and hand-off – stay connected
and ship products faster. Manage your design process in
context and in one place.

Title

Section Lorem

Lorem Lorem

Lorem Lorem

Lorem Lorem
Tab Tab Tab Tab