My Role
I led curriculum design, workshop coordination & facilitation, and the overall design and practice management of a new “Flex” design strategy team by collaborating with the Enterprise Head of Design Thinking and the Heads of Partnerships Design and Product.
I played the lead role on the majority of our projects, and over time I managed 2 Product Designers, 3 Business Analysts, and 3 part-time Researchers.
Challenge & Approach
In 2015, I co-led a 2-day design thinking workshop for executives in Capital One’s Retail Partnerships line of business. I worked closely with our enterprise-wide VP of Design Thinking & Product Strategy to set a strategy and goals for the workshop and the future.
I set a short-term goal to meet with the executive VP of Retail Partnerships to understand high-level goals and lay out options for how to further apply design thinking as a new value prop.
Once we had agreement and enthusiasm, my challenge was to detail out what this would look like, the costs, and to execute projects internally and with our partners. Ultimately, success would look like partners requesting projects and devoting budget to this new offering.
Team Establishment & Pitch
We set a goal of within a month to define the team and potential projects that we could explore for this new team.
Insights & Discovery
Through the first few projects, we’ve seen a pattern in an occasional struggle for retail partner engagement. However, we’ve also seen that at times the partner was over-engaged and wanted to have 100 people involved in meetings.
- We adjusted the way we pitch and plan for future projects by clearly communicating and requiring 1 dedicated person and champion from the partner end and explicitly identifying when to involve the rest of the “extended team”.
- We’ve also learned that designers, researchers, and product managers who weren’t part of this team felt left out and those on the Flex team started to become alienated from other more tactical design work. So we created rotational roles.
Modified Operating Model
Program Framework
It was important to keep an eye on the overall goal of bringing design thinking to the Retail Partnerships business in multiple ways with a portfolio that included education from hands-on mentorship to week-long extended workshops and half-day “crash courses”.
We also were able to leverage different workshops as a way to advertise our services internally and externally. One of my greatest accomplishments was coordinating and facilitating a custom design thinking workshop for our external retail partners – all in one room together sharing common challenges.
Impact - A new value prop for Capital One
The Flex Team has proven to have a positive impact on both Capital One and its retail partners, with demand and a backlog of project requests for the majority of retailer teams.
We were able to demonstrate value, and also drive a culture shift that became a draw for top-tier product talent in the industry. Our first hire which was exclusively focused on the Flex Team was a very senior and accomplished designer from one of the top agencies in Chicago.
The team has since grown to handle multiple simultaneous projects with budget supporting additional hires in design, research, and product management.