Infusionsoft is a marketing and workflow automation platform designed to help small businesses grow & succeed. My role at the company was to create services that supported the seamless onboarding of new or consistently inactive customers as well as help build a design thinking culture.
Saguaro Market is a four day, once a month, maker-market in Tucson, AZ.
It's the first of several channels designed to build the creative economy in a way that creates success for our customers, our partners, our community, and ourselves.
Living our core values while building this business is at the heart of what we do. We firmly believe that you get what you put out into the world and that you treat people the way you want to be treated. This is what defines success for us.
*The images to the right display the progression of myIntuit from the very beginning to where it is now. Each new prototype, wireframe, and iteration were products of learnings from the previous prototype, wireframe, or iteration.
Overview: In my role as the Product Manager for Tier 0 HR support I conducted 100+ customer (employee) interviews, many of them with people leaders. The objective of most interviews was to uncover insights about an aspect of an offering's end-to-end experience. After conducting a number of these interviews I began to notice a pattern of problems that nearly all people managers mentioned at some point in their interview. myIntuit (also known as the Control Panel) was designed to solve this pattern of problems.
Problem: Intuit people leaders had as many as 50 unique processes to follow and tools to use each week to manage the administrative aspects of their job as a people manager. There was no consistent method for accessing these tools nor was there documentation for knowing when and how to use them. In most cases these tasks could only be completed when managers were at their desks because most tools were only available from their specific computer residing behind the firewall.
Vision: One place to manage my Intuit life.
Solution The Control Panel is a cloud-based, responsive solution for Intuit people managers that provides easy and consistent access to the key information, tools, and tasks required to manage a team. The Control Panel is made up of unique apps such as My Team or People Finder connected by services such as Search & Location.
Process: We used Lean Start-Up Principles using the Next design tool to inform & lead the building process. We started out with the question: "How might we populate multiple delivery systems with a single content repository?" and through many iterations ending up solving "How might we make the job of being a people leader at Intuit easier?"
Outcome: Initial lean experiments rated an 8 on the delight metrics scale and saved managers and average of three or more hours a week.
My Role: Product manager, customer researcher, experience designer; Intuit
Overview: Innovation Catalysts are a community of employees who are experts in Design for Delight (Intuit's brand of design thinking). Innovation Catalysts build and maintain the culture that fosters engagement and encourages innovation – a culture where emotionally engaging products that people love can be created.
Our mission: Build D4D capabilities across Intuit with an emphasis on Rapid Experiments that get to delight.
Our vision: Profoundly delighting customers is why we exist, and D4D is implicitly how we do it.
Some of the things we do:
-We spend our time practicing D4D techniques and being an active community member.
-We use D4D everyday helping our teams and others drive to strong, tangible outcomes for the organization.
-We coach teams to use D4D and leverage other Catalysts for our own work, which promotes knowledge and skill sharing across the community.
-We use a lot of post-it notes and sharpies.
Our problem: How might we use existing operating mechanisms to encourage the teams closest to the products to embrace an Awesome Product Leadership mindset.
Our hypothesis: If we add an Awesome Product question to a engineering team's Retrospective meeting, the team's expectations of each other for creating awesome products will increase.
Experiment: Have 2 engineering teams add the question, "what aspect of this sprint led to an awesome product experience for our customer?" to their retrospective meeting. Prior to adding the question, team members were asked to complete a survey designed to rate how awesome their product was. After 4 retrospective meetings during which the question was asked the team members completed the same survey.
Results: Team members rated the awesome-ness of their product higher after the questions were asked.
The problem: HR online answers were not available to employees outside the firewall or on a mobile device when they often needed the information the most.
The experiment: If we send an email to 400 employees advertising a new HR Connect On-the-Go app, 50% of all recipients will open the email, of the 50% that open the message 10% will click the link to download the app.
The results: 54 messages were opened and 14 links were clicked. This behavioral result was in contrast to the qualitative data we received which indicated that most employees would download the app.
Winner of the 2013 Tucson Google Start-up Weekend competition. The team researched and launched the winning start-up in less than 52-hours. Began with the concept of Nest for residential irrigation and pivoted our way to a liquor delivery app (VegasBooze.com) similar in concept to Uber.
See more about the Google Start-up Weekend competition here: http://startupweekend.org/google/google-sw/
*Solution built on an enterprise custom Sharepoint 2010 publishing site which provided creative and interactive design restraints.
Overview: The HR Connect team is the tier 1 support for HR Shared services at Intuit. I was asked to perform experiments to determine why customers weren't self helping, why they weren't using chat and email at the same rate as phone calls, and what we could do with the data to decrease operational costs. After running a series of 10 unique lean experiments we learned that:
1) User's weren't self helping because the existing offering content was confusing.
2) User's weren't using help & chat because they either didn't know they could or they didn't trust that they'd get a timely response.
3) About 70% of all employees were NOT using either self-help or assisted help to answer their HR related questions.
4) Of the questions that were asked about 10% were re-routed to other enterprise help lines. This is because workers didn't always know if their question was an HR, IT, or Procurement question and therefore either didn't ask their question at all, or they incorrectly guessed which helpline to call, or they asked their peers or manager.
5) The workforce felt more confident in the answers they received from the HR Connect team when they learned that HR Connect team members were Intuit employees (as opposed to outsourcers).
Objective: Based on this research our objectives for the newly designed online experience were:
1) Online content answers employee questions.
2) HR question are easily & accurately answered regardless of the selected channel.
3) Employees feel confident in the HR answer(s) they receive.
Results: We achieved each objective by doing these things:
1) "Online content answers employee questions".
Achieved by:
-providing access on the Intuit intranet to content contained in the Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) content repository. KCS content is comprised of articles written by HR Connect team members that contain answers to questions that are asked by employees. HR Connect team members can search the repository to answer new employee questions about the same topic. If the question or answer is outdated upon subsequent searches it is updated or archived by the HR Connect team member that finds it. It's an existing source of accurate and constantly curated HR content which we then made searchable and accessible on the intranet.
2) "HR question are easily & accurately answered regardless of the selected channel".
Achieved by:
-applying customer benefit metrics and thinking we determined that the channel an employee selected to get an answer was not important as long as he/she was able to chose the channel themselves and that their question was answered in a way that made the employee feel confident about the answer he/she received.
-to ensure that all assisted service channels were equally accessible we designed a widget with basic icons and simple text that made selecting the best channel easy to do.
3) "Employees feel confident in the HR answer(s) they receive."
Achieved by:
-including last refresh date on articles.
-providing easy access to HR Connect team member bio-information.
-creating a 24-hour maximum SLA so customers could anticipate when they would receive an answer.
My role: Customer research (qualitative and quantitative) & user experience design, Sharepoint development ; Intuit
Problem: As a product manager I generated large amounts of content that needed to be available to a large audience of people. Traditionally, Intuit employees use PowerPoint to share this type of information. For me, this resulted in too much information buried inside documents that were difficult to search and find and became outdated almost as soon as I published them. I needed to find an alternative way to share content in a more flexible and up to the minute manner.
Solution: I created Sharepoint 2013 sites/apps to track and share my products' information and progress. The content was in a dynamic, list driven format so that it was reusable on multiple pages & in multiple formats.
Results: The apps allowed me to decrease my overall amount of work by giving me one searchable place to keep all of my information, by allowing my leaders and customers to follow our progress, real-time which decreased the number of required status meetings, and it became a place where my customers and my team could give feedback or suggestions. Those suggestions were public so others could see what had already been submitted and "pile-on" or add their own unique ideas. It became a living artifact and reflection of our products.
*Solution built on an enterprise custom Sharepoint 2010 publishing site which provided creative and interactive design restraints.
Objective: Make the process of creating an employee requisition easy.
Primary customer: Hiring Managers (Secondary: Executive Assistants)
Results: Reduced the amount of content by 80% (from 10-pages to 2-pages), updated the page name & URL to increase the accuracy of search results, added graphics to make the call to action and selection criteria more obvious. Increased satisfaction scores from a negative number to +10.
My role: Customer research, experience architecture, & experience content writing; Intuit
Customer: Casino del Sol
Objective: Launch a responsive, data driven, dynamic web site to coincide with the grand-opening of the resort.
My role: Program manager, Creative direction; Anchor Wave
Site URL: http://www.casinodelsolresort.com/
*Solution built on an enterprise custom Sharepoint 2010 publishing site which provided creative and interactive design restraints.
The problem: Content for the employee engagement team was dispersed throughout the intranet and didn't tell a story of the overall program. There was no employee engagement "brand".
The results: Created a new sub-site with simplified navigation, access to the most important content and resources, and told a story of the engagement team's vision and objectives.
Company: Balderama Hotel Collection
Overview: The Copper Canyon, nestled in the Sierra Madre Range, is actually several large canyons boasting a grandeur four times larger than the Grand Canyon of the United States, although different in nature; narrower, deeper, and more verdant.
My role: Program manager, Creative direction; Anchor Wave
Site URL: http://mexicoscoppercanyon.com/
Customer: Castle & Cooke of Arizona, Inc. - a division of Castle & Cooke.
Overview: Castle & Cooke is a local residential and commercial builder serving souther Arizona with outstanding quality construction services for more than 20 years. Their local company builds more than quality homes for sale for local families, they create communities and support and promote local infrastructure. Their communities are designed to enhance the lives of residents of Sierra Vista, Arizona.
My role: Program manager, Creative direction; Anchor Wave
Site URL: http://www.castlecookearizona.com/
*All examples were built between 2007-2009.
The problem: The cost of classroom training was going up while the effectiveness was going down.
The solution: The Organizational Effectiveness Interactive team was created to address the need for large volumes of e-learning to be built in a consistent and cost effective manner.
As a certified Cognos and Business Objects Instructor and consultant, developed and facilitated custom curriculum. Gathered and documented business requirements used in the development of data warehouse and business intelligence reporting systems.
Traveled extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Latin America for companies such as 3M, Medtronic, Carlson Wagonlit, General Mills, Schneider National, and PepsiCo.
My role: Business Analyst, Trainer; RZ Solutions
The problem: Fiscal year planning was in full force. the Leave of Absence team had too may priorities and needed helping getting to the critical few.
The approach: 2-day offsite with an Innovation Catalyst (me) to help facilitate productive exercises and guide the conversation through the use of coachable moments and inquiry.
The solution: The team narrowed their focus for the upcoming year's goals and objectives to three buckets - Content, Tools & Resources, Online Training. If a goal or objective didn't fit onto one of the three buckets it wasn't prioritized.
*Solution built on an enterprise custom Sharepoint 2010 publishing site which provided creative and interactive design restraints.
The problem: Unique content for diverse audiences on a platform that was constrained in it's ability to target content or allow faceted or filtered search criteria.
The result: Simplified content so that only the most basic content was published. Provided concierge service for any escalated questions beyond what was on the intranet.
Opportunity: A director at Intuit and alumnus of California Polytechnic University asked me to co-host an introduction to design thinking seminar at Cal Poly for business school students as well as facilitate a Lean Start-up for students wanting to take their Lean skills to the next level.
Results: We spoke with 3 classes of 2nd year business school students & went through a custom "interviewing customers 101" class. During each class we offered all students an opportunity to come back at 8 am on the following Friday morning to participate in a Lean Start-Up event.
Given our audience we didn't have high hopes for filling too many seats at the event however, much to our surprise, we ended up with an overflow of students and a need to schedule a second event.
After the events completed we asked students to rate the experience. All students were satisfied with the experience and a handful of students even stated that it was the best academic learning experience they've ever had.
*Solution built on an enterprise custom Sharepoint 2010 publishing site which provided creative and interactive design restraints.
The problem: Too much content that was outdated, inaccurate, and confusing and no point of contact responsible for maintaining the site.
The approach: Gathered a cross functional group of subject matter experts; used D4D to narrow on the "need-to-know" information only.
The results: Reduced content by 75% and categorized all materials into 3 buckets.
I coached a team of directors in a unique Lean Start-in event intended to help leaders understand how to lead teams through rapid experimentation & deep customer empathy. The event was highly experiential and pushed many participants outside their comfort zone.
As a D4D team we learned that many leaders are big picture, strategic thinkers. Getting them down to the level of detail necessary to perform rapid experiments was difficult at best. This insight however helped to understand why rolling out coaching or servant leadership to directors was proving to be difficult. Director's didn't know what questions to ask to get their teams to discover the answers. From this point we ran an experiment with the hypothesis: "if we provide coaching to directors, their teams will rate them higher on a coaching effectiveness scale than they did prior to receiving the coaching..."
The scenario: At the 2014 Quickbooks Connect conference, Quickbooks customers were invited to participate in a mini lean start-up exercise.
My role: Coach a randomly assigned group of small business owners on how to create an experiment that drives insight into a particular problem or business opportunity.
The problem: What might we do to make people in San Jose happier?
My team's solution: If we make signs with instructions, and stand on a street corner holding our signs and acting silly, we can get at least 100 people to honk, smile, and wave at us.
The results: In one hour we were able to entice 175 people to honk, wave, & smile.
