A design-led event featuring discovery work and collaboration among product, engineering and design team
CLIENT: Bank of Montreal
THE CHALLENGE
BMO Digital Acceleration team is responsible for BMO's online bank experience. It is composed of 7 product teams, each focusing on one particular journey, such as payment, transfer, insights, alerts, etc. However, this siloed approach had some obvious downside, such as inconsistent solutions, messy navigation, and inefficient use of resources.
MY ROLE
Design Jam organizer, workshop planner and facilitator, design direction, researcher
THE OUTCOME
The 4-week design jam helped teams to prioritize product roadmaps and backlogs as they gained customer insights earlier in the process. Cross-team collaborations also ensured a more seamless solution because the team was able to have a holistic view of how upcoming features can fit together. Besides, the team discovered more opportunities worth further investigation. Finally, the design jam established a solid foundation for BMO's new integrated product design and development model.
Getting buy-ins upfront is critical
Nothing will get done if people are not holding the same vision. Before I made any concrete plan for the design jam, I had a series of one-on-one conversations with designers, researchers, and Product Owners whom I knew would be more supportive of co-design methodology and design thinking approach. I asked about the challenges they encountered while working in a silo, and shared my idea and asked for their input. Those conversations helped me to build empathy with future participants of the design jam and also helped me to further define the plan.
Once I had a handful of allies on my side, I then started to pitch the idea to other key players. I understand that changing behaviour is hard, thus I am prepared to compromise. If I receive pushback, I asked why, and have them brainstorm options with me so we might end up with a workable solution that still accomplishes the desired outcome.
Corrdinated multidisciplinary teams and indivisuals
50+ participates all together
I took a collaborative approach to ensure high commitment and engagement: 1) Understand each teams' and key individual contributors' current priorities, workload, and deliverable commitment (what and when); 2) Clarify the RACI and level of involvement; 3) Ensure the right participants and audiences for workshops, brainstorming sessions, design critiques, etc. to promote cross-pollination and ensure a balanced representation among experience, product and technology.
3
Disciplines
Experience
Product
Technology
5
5 Agile Teams
Pay for Things
Pay Someone
Alerts
Understand my Cashflow
Transaction Migration
5
5 Experience Teams
Design (UX/UI)
Content
Research
Digital Strategy & Insights
Design Ops
Took a user-centred, iterative approach
PHASE 1: GETTING READY (1 WEEK)
Focusing on conducting research (particularly stakeholder interviews) and digging out previous findings
PHASE 2: DESIGN SPRINT (4 WEEKS)
Phase 2 started with share out and co-design workshops to clarifying problems and brainstorm preliminary directions. Once team members were on the same page, there were three 1-week design sprints packed with collaborative workshops, whiteboarding activities, design review sessions, usability testing, and more.
PHASE 3: REFLECTION + NEXT STEPS (1 WEEK)
Design jam retrospective where teams openly share their feedback. And more importantly, the team discussed the potential to integrate this design activity into BMO Agile Transformation Model
Pace and plan design jam activities based on the distinct product development phase each team was at
When the design jam started, each participating product team was at a different product phase, some already had clear requirements and deadline defined, while others might just have had a rough idea of the problems they might want to solve, or they were not tied to any deliverables but just wanted to explore possibilities based on their hypothesis. As an organizer, I had to be aware of each team's needs and goals and coordinate resources and timelines accordingly.
Project
Product phase
Design Jam Focus
Results
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Change Contact
-
Alert delivery management
Requirements & Deadline defined
Design + Validate
Design solutions that are ready for the scrum
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E-Transfer History
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Credit Card Restriction
Had an idea of the problem
Research + Exploratory
Leverage gained insights for future work
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Notifications/Alerts
-
Insights/Product offers
Has a hypothesis
Design + discover
Opportunities to look at the entire journey
Outcome #1: Gained customer insights earlier in the process helped teams to prioritize product roadmap and backlog
Validated the usefulness of a feature
TEAM/FEATURE EXPLORED
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Pay for things / Fast Card
KEY LEARNING
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Customers want to return to resume normal use of their credit card as quickly as possible, however, most customers felt they should not have to pay a fee to have their lost card expedited.
IMPACT
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The team will NOT pursue this feature in the short term, which in turn save money and resources to develop an unwanted client feature.
Outcome #2: Connected various features to achieve a seamless user experience and drive digital adoption
Anticipated customers' needs and offer related digital solutions
TEAM/FEATURE EXPLORED
-
Transaction Migration / Change Contact
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Alerts / Manage Alerts
KEY LEARNING
-
Customers who just updated their contact info might have the need to change their alert settings.
IMPACT
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Remind users to update their Alert Settings at the time when they complete updating their contact information.
OUTCOME #3: A very open-minded approach in order to holistically reveal opportunities worth further investigation
Build a comprehensive message centre
TEAM/FEATURE EXPLORED
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All teams
KEY LEARNING
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The methods customers normally use to communicate in daily life drives their preference in receiving communications from the bank
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Content is King
Future Opportunities
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How might we communicate varied types of messages (such as alerts, insights, credit scores and product offers) to our customers effectively via their preferred device, channel, and methods.
Voice from the team
Product Owner
It's disrupting and silo-breaking! I saw other PO’s plan, and thought we should bring theirs and ours together.
Product Owner
The concept is great, getting the connectivity, rapid testing, getting the team together, all that aligns with what we should be doing
Designer
Great team work, the end product is really good! Design Jam is something missing from how we build things
Reflections
I won't deny that the 6-week design jam was nerve-racking as this was the first time I organized a design event at this scale. I literally did all the planning and facilitated every single workshop and design review session myself. In addition, I provided support for the 8 designers throughout this intensive journey. There were expected and unexpected challenges, however, there was not even one second I doubted the direction I was heading to. We can't work in silos although each discipline or each product team has its own focus and deliverables. I believe through a user-centred approach and iterative methodology, we will be able to deliver feasible, scalable and consistent solutions in a fun, creative, and effective way.