Brief
Team
Approach
Before we started designing anything we held a three day workshop with Teams from Zurich Insurance and held a two day design workshop with Mastercard in New York. We learned about their challenges and used a traditional design thinking approach to get a sense of how they imagined the potential solutions.
We took pains not to fall into the trap of designing ambitious solutions that would never work in reality. Rather we let them speak, share ideas and challenges and took note of it all to inform our first concepts and further research.
I spent a lot of time planning design workshops, in particular, to focus on real outcomes. I organised a bi-weekly persona and customer journey workshop with our stakeholders to keep us focused on user challenges and to share any new learnings.
We workshopped remotely with potential users to learn more about their challenges and collect their feedback during Covid 19. We even held a workshop with the CEOs and Product Leaders of several large enterprises to view the challenges from the top-down to inform future planning.
While Sylon really had no 'competitors' before launch, there were several products that attempt to solve similar problems in innovative ways.
I kept a file in Figma to track and observe the design patterns they were adopting and highlighted common patterns and critiqued their UX/UI to keep a record of why we would follow certain patterns and not other.
Solutions
We designed and built a first MVP in the space of 6 weeks, very aware of the fact that startups often spend too long on an MVP, investing more and more design and engineering effort into it, only to later realise that it never solved the problem in the first place.
The first MVP was designed to bring a product team through the first phase of product development, resulting in an auto-generated pitch deck of 'Product Story' that they could show to their leaders at gate review.
We released the MVP to Mastercard and Zurich and started collecting feedback the users. While we had a high NPS score from these users we were aware that the number of users we had during the MVP phase were not particularly statistically significant so we engaged them in in-depth user interviews and testing sessions. We never intended for the MVP to be anything more than an MVP and this gave us the flexibility to take our learnings and design the platform for a wider release.
We made substantial changes based on the feedback of these users (as well as our internal teams), found areas that might limit design in the future and started again for broad release.
Key Features
For Product Teams: We designed a step-by-step guided learning and tracking platform for product development teams.Teams would follow a process approved by their organization by selecting at least 6 canvases to complete at each stage of development.
The Sylon platform guides users through this process with contextual help, video guidance and provides them with resources so they can understand how to answer the canvas questions they might be unfamiliar with.
After completing these canvases users would stop at a gate review point at which they would present their findings and progress to leadership before proceeding to the next development stage.
For Team Leaders: we designed a project tracker that would allow leaders to provide feedback on ongoing projects, track progress and collect documentation sourced by their teams to provide to their own peers and leaders.
We focused specifically on a new notification and commenting system for these users to ensure all project communication would happen within a single source of truth within the Sylon Platform.
For C-Suite: We focused on a mobile-first solution that showed every team in the organization and top-level detail around progress and blockers so that they could quickly intervene to get things moving again.
For these users we kept the intricate details of each project under the surface. They could delve deep into a team's work when necessary but were provided with a brief each day which highlighted areas of success and any problems with progress within specific teams.
The Product Story: No more pitch decks or spending hours in Powerpoint preparing for check-in meetings. The Product Story would be auto-generated from the canvases each organization chose themselves, meaning that the information leaders needed to see would be available within it.
7
Launch partners: Mastercard, JetBlue, Goldman Sachs, Bradesco, VNSNY, Zurich and PTSB.
6wks
Time it took to build the first MVP of the Sylon Platform.
