Overview
A Silicon Valley bank’s product organization was undergoing an agile transformation. This required a substantial talent transformation including recruiting new talent, re-skilling current employees, and shifting people’s mindsets to new ways of working.
My team was brought in to partner with the bank’s learning and development department to design a personalized, modern, digitally-enabled learning experience for existing employees and new joiners, so that they could quickly be equipped with the required skills, behaviors, and mentality to drive innovation within the bank.
My Role
Lead Service Designer
User Researcher
My Team
3 Service Designers
1 Project Manager
3 Learning & Development SMEs
My Tools
Figma
PowerPoint
MS Excel
How might we institute new skills, mindsets, behaviors, and ways of working to drive innovation within the bank?
Impact
In 2 months we helped our client address the challenge of instituting new skills, behaviors, and mentality to drive innovation within the bank.
Traditional employee training is largely focused on the completion of training, whereas our design of the learning program focused on the demonstration of ability (performance output). Our design of the program helped different types of employees effectively develop the vital skills needs to execute the bank’s vision in their day-to-day jobs.
Persona matrix
Process
I. Planning
I put together a project plan for the service design workstream which entailed sequences of activities, target timeline, dependencies, task owners, and deliverables.
Project plan for the service design work (Content has been blurred for confidentiality.)
II. Research
We designed the survey questions and conducted it with the bank’s employees and leaders. Based on the survey responses, we then designed interview questions tailored to the bank’s employees in different roles such as product managers and business implementation managers. Through both the survey and the interviews, we were able to build a holistic view of people’s needs and challenges with training and learning.
148
Survey Responses
17
User Interviews
4 unique learner personas generated from research data
Sample Key Insights
I need a support system to help grow my career.
— the “Newbie”
I need opportunities to apply and practice what I learned.
— the “Fresh Slate”
I need time to dedicate to the learning program.
— the “Value-Seeker”
I need to understand how the training applies directly to my job.
— the “Re-Skiller”
III. Ideate in Design Workshop
I facilitated design workshops to share research findings with the learning and development SMEs and business stakeholders from the client-side. We then ideated together on practical solutions for the different types of learners in the bank.
Workshop ideation wall
IV. Produce Service Blueprints
Based on high-level ideas generated from our workshops, I worked with the team to further refine those ideas by making them tangible and practical based on the time, technology, and resource constraints we gathered during the workshop. I then led two designers to produce four customized service blueprints for the 4 types of learners.
Sample service blueprint for one of the persona. (Content has been blurred for confidentiality.)
V. Present Research Findings & Solutions
We summarized our top 6 findings, and how these informed our design decisions, to the senior leadership to get buy-in to implement our recommendations.
Summary of how research insights informed our design.
Epilogue
I was excited to see the creation of 12 new agile teams which, after our training, embodied the mindset and behaviors that they gained from the learning experience that we designed. It was fulfilling to know that these teams brought those teachings to their everyday work.
