How might we work with clients to unpack their pain points to solve business problems rapidly and curate unique customer experiences?

The Role

As an experience designer on IBM’s Client Engineering team, I lead design thinking workshops with cross-functional teams of sellers and technical folks to uncover a client’s current processes, goals, and challenges. We synthesize those findings to define a project scope that delivers maximum value to our clients during a 4-week pilot. During our pilots, I work with the technical team to craft unique user experiences with Figma, test the usability of the minimum viable product through surveys or user interviews, and build presentations to tell the story of the improved user experience and business value. Our tight timelines mean I am agile, flexible, and efficient, ensuring the team stays focused on the user. Our projects range from designing dashboard interfaces to developing risk assessment tools to AI virtual assistants. Our clients are from various industries, including banking, manufacturing, retail, and insurance.

Work from this role is confidential, so the following use cases are anonymized and do not include specific client details.

Lead Projects and Manage Stakeholder Expectations

A real estate management company wanted to partner with IBM to develop new AI-driven products to improve its offerings to clients. I facilitated an in-person design thinking workshop to investigate their offerings and customer experience and generate product ideas to bridge experience gaps. Once use cases were prioritized and one was selected for a pilot, I was appointed project lead and managed expectations, aligning scope, timelines, and deliverables, while overseeing risks and cross‑functional teams to ensure successful project delivery. This role involved coordinating across 8+ teams within IBM and the client to ensure the right people were involved and that we had a solid roadmap to transition the project from pilot to implementation and delivery.

Conducting Design Thinking Workshops and User Interviews to Inform Design Decisions

A strategy consulting agency had six different use cases for implementing AI into their processes that they were interested in exploring. They didn’t know which use case to start with, so I led a design thinking workshop to discuss their goals, priorities, and pain points and uncover which use case would provide the most value in the shortest time. Once we selected a use case, we created one journey map of their current process and another to show how they envision the process will be improved at the end of our pilot. Using design thinking to gather this information allowed us to empathize with the client and their users, ensuring our project solves real problems while contributing to their larger initiatives. It also helped us determine our success criteria and project plan. While building the pilot, we conducted interviews with the client’s subject-matter experts to better understand their users. This informed the order in which we placed widgets and how we titled the graphs to ensure users could effectively use the dashboards. Our deliverables received excellent feedback from the client, resulting in a new partnership and a $30,000 software sale.

Using Storytelling to Communicate Value

An insurance provider had a complicated process for their business units to request data, which included long wait times and an overworked data team, resulting in missed deadlines and fines. Our team created a virtual assistant that enabled business users to self-serve and find information without having to request and wait for the data team. To communicate the value of this updated process, I created storyboards of the current and future states of their process. This highlighted the frustrations in their original process and the improved user experience for both personas when using our virtual assistant. Our presentation received great feedback from our client’s executives and helped us break through to the client and communicate the value of our solution.

Credentials

It’s important to stay educated and constantly be learning. Throughout my time at IBM, I have taken many courses to ensure I stay ahead of the market. Below are some relevant badges that I have earned: