Salesforce Design Thinking Workshops

Role UX Design Lead responsible for End to End design on Admissions and Advancement products within Education Cloud. Work closely with Research, Product Management, Sales Engineering and Partners to influence product strategy and roadmap, align cross functional parties on problem statement, potential solutions, and priorities

Workshops

Product Management Leadership announced a specific direction for the product. My manager and I advocated for Design Thinking workshops to re-imagine product vision and roadmap. I designed and facilitated cross-functional workshops to brainstorm, create and align on vision and roadmap. Achieved deeper alignment across cross-functional stakeholders, stronger UX influence on roadmap, and growth of junior designers.

I designed a series of divergent and convergent cross functional activities and communicated the objective and importance of these activities by providing clear expectations on the workshop outcomes - what we want to get, what we don’t want, examples and various industry case studies of how other companies have done this and how it has helped them.

Team:

  • 3 Designers

  • 5 Product Managers

  • 1 Researcher

  • Technical Architects (indirect participation)

Considerations and Challenges to work around:

  • Remote only

  • Avoid long virtual meetings

  • Limited PM bandwidth

  • Critical timeline

  • PTO, Illness, COVID

  • Researcher joined company midway

Four different product themes. Assigned PM + UX designer pair to each theme

Changed distribution of Designers and PMs

  • Beginner’s mindset

  • Develop relationships

  • Experience working on a unified project

Understanding the Product Rationale and Vision

Designers contributed stickie notes ahead of time on the following topics. We then had a group discussion around these and identified emerging themes as a group. These were the questions:

  1. Who will this benefit and how?

  2. Why are we going down this product direction?

  3. What happens if we do not do this?

  4. What does this product direction actually mean in terms of experience and product?

Group discussion and mapping around product rationale and vision
Group discussion and mapping around product rationale and vision
Group discussion and mapping around product rationale and vision

Moodboarding for Design Principles

I put together various images in a Figjam file. I divided up the designers into 2 teams of 2 each and they brainstormed what design principles they aspire for Education Cloud products to achieve. We then met, discussed and voted. I presented these to Product Management for alignment.

Moodboarding exercises to align on Design Principles
Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 4.37.43 PM.png

How Might We Generation and Refinement

Crazy 8s

Picture Storyboards to Product Storyboards to Wireframes

  • Hero + How Might We Statement + Product Storyboard + First Stab Wireframe per theme.

  • Identify Research Needs and Questions per theme.

Product Storyboard
Screenshot 2023-01-20 at 1.41.43 PM.png
Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 5.12.17 PM.png

Lessons Learned

  • Survey

  • Discussion

Output and Outcomes

Output

  • Product Storyboards and Wireframes

  • Research Needs and Questions

  • Input into Product Roadmap

Outcomes

  • Helped position UX as valuable thought partner to help visualize and inform PM thinking

  • Strong alignment on problem statement, vision, goals

  • Inspiring ideation and growth of junior designers

  • Common themes to inform future strategic work

  • Positive feedback from PM, especially on How Might We Statement and how it was a useful framework for the future