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THE challenge
MetLife had invested in developing experience design principles in order to enable creating more cohesive experiences across different lines of business. But teams needed help understanding how to take a business priority and come up with ideas that built on design principles, particularly when it came to thinking outside of the status quo.
Key work done:
Facilitated first sets of workshops to diverse stakeholders as a proof of concept
Edited toolkit guides, workshop assets, and activity templates (adapting industry practices to MetLife’s culture & internal best practices)
The outcome
I managed the development of multiple toolkits, covering journey mapping, implementing experience design principles, and facilitating design thinking ideation sessions. Teams saw a cohesive approach replicated across multiple business units, which led to a stronger shared sense of ownership. Work was easier to ramp up, and leadership was able to share examples of successes related to each of our brand principles, which made departments new to this way of working more eager to commit to the workshops (and subsequent work to make ideas real).
Setting clear objectives
Enable teams across different departments, and different markets globally, to come together on shared challenges
Create a scaffolding for problem solving that helped leadership more readily identify at what point in the process and for what types of asks the customer experience and brand design teams were best suited
Enable higher volume of design engagements by lowering the effort to prepare for and start initiatives
Creating playbooks &
workshop assets
With the support of a great team at Co:Collective and The Design Gym, we created:
Templates for table-side activities and ready-to-print files for room-sized panels to ease workshop preparation
Guidebooks designed not for all to become practitioners, but to have a place to begin documenting initial hypotheses & identify the right brief for research vendors and executing teams
Activities defined not to create a one size fits all, but to establish key standards (what happens, and how well is it delivering) that can flex depending on the project
In addition to providing my own input in best practices, my role included adapting our initial prototypes to fit MetLife’s culture and internal project practices.
Many of our workshops included senior leadership - rather than deliver step by step instructions on how to “do design”, our objective with leadership participants was to make sure we prepared them, empowering them to create the space for teams to change how they worked together.
Success factors:
Be clear on how to apply learnings immediately. Make all parts of the workshop active listening - ask participants to jot down connections they see (prompted via placemats / hand outs). Engage prior to work session: have participants bring in a business challenge they are working on in the moment (asking in the workshop session itself without giving participants prep time is a hard gamble)
Ensure leadership participants walk away feeling like they have enough of a handle on the "what" and the "why" around design methods and mindsets that they feel confident they can answer their teams' questions as they first begin to apply them in projects
Reframe the design mindsets and methods we introduced away from how managers might conduct the activity, and closer to how as a manager you best create the space for others to apply new practices
“I managed Ariana Koblitz at MetLife. In that time, she introduced a new practice bridging the outputs of market research to implementation across multiple channels (be it in person, online, or via paper collateral). Our challenge was to bring a variety of stakeholders along the journey, exposing them to new ways of thinking and not letting the discomfort of new behaviors get in the way. Ariana prioritized building strong relationships across the company, in particular with our partner teams in Mexico, Japan, China, and Korea.”
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