Software Learning Summit

I helped plan and lead a design thinking workshop at an annual summit for 300+ Motorola Solutions professionals.  

  • Team : Software Enterprise Learning Services + Innovation Labs Customer Experience
  • Tools : Design Thinking
  • Role : Teammate & Design Thinking Facilitator
  • Duration : 3 Mos Planning: 3 Day Event

Design Thinking 101

I helped plan and lead a design thinking workshop at an annual summit for 300+ MSI professionals.  

The members of the specific MSI group we worked with, the Software Enterprise Learning Organization, are charged with teaching customers how to use newly purchased MSI software products.

They are an often untapped source of creative super-power — they understand usability pain points and product gaps better than most other MSI personnel, as they are present when new tools are being implemented and understood in their new environments.

Our goal was to empower SELS pros to use full-fledged Design Thinking to collect user stories and to design solutions to pain points as they encountered them.

Lo-Fi Prototyping For Beginners

To help summit participants ease into the creative exercises of the week, we asked them to ‘invent a new way to give gifts’. They iterated first on paper, then went through critique and finally built their ideas in craft materials.  Our hope was that folks would remember the importance of empathy (a hallmark of great gift-givers), then that they would start to understand the D-Thinking definitions of ideation, prototyping and testing.

 

Personas

After a few group warm-ups, we split off and worked in smaller groups for two days.  To reinforce the importance of empathy, we built personas for the public safety workers our products are meant to serve.

Journey Mapping

Solutions

On day 3, we spent some time ‘solutioning’.

 

 

Successes

Our event sparked creative, collaborative, group-driven problem solving for complex software ecosystem and cross-silo integration projects, and it also generated many brand new, 21st century state-of-the-art customer-focused product ideas.  

It was a lot of fun and very fascinating to work on ‘North Star’ or moonshot ideas – big, creative goals – to aim at together over long stretches of time. Importantly, we were also able to underpin the strategy for implementation of an LMS that would help ease tech-debt and growing pains in the meantime.

Lessons

Build generous breaks into your schedule when you host multi-day events!  This will benefit participants and facilitators.