Customer-centered product design education
I led an initiative to mature product practices at AT&T, educating designers and product managers in customer-centered methods.
2024 | 6 months - multiple phases
My title
Associate Director of Design
My role
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Design leadership
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Author of design education learning path
Team
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1 designer
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1 content designer
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1 researcher
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1 product strategist
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1 program manager
Accolades for this work
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2024 Most Valuable Peeps Award —Awarded by Erin Scarborough SVP, AT&T
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Connection Award, March 2024 — Nominated by peers for the Product Strategy Toolkit
Challenges
In 2024 AT&T's product org. received a thumbs down from the CEO for lengthy time to market
“I'm not satisfied with our current rate and pace of change"
— John Stankey
Design leadership & operations​
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After a company re-org, design leaders needed to reassess and articulate how process should change to integrate with the product organization.
Designers & researchers
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Design work wasn’t being fully utilized by product mangers.
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The design team didn’t have a seat at the product table.
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Designers felt disempowered and burnt out.
Product managers​
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The SVP's guiding principle for the org. was “Put the customer first [PERIOD]”, but PMs struggled in practice.
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Product processes were perpetuating technical debt.
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Poor digital experiences were driving callcenter costs.
Impact
This work sparked change, driving maturity of the product practice
BY THE NUMBERS
Adoption of our customer-centered methods
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​190 people trained
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Methods applied by PMs of top 10 priority initiatives.
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SVP of B2C product org. set a 2025 requirement to use our methods for planning on all priority initiatives.
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The B2B product org. chose to adopt methods and use our toolkit for product managers.
Accomplishments
Design leaders aligned on a unified vision and:
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Agreed on next steps for adapting to the product org.
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Promoted this work to AT&T senior leadership.
Moral improved for designers as they:
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Better understood their role with product partners.
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Had specific steps to achieve alignment with partners.
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Understood the big picture.
Product managers
were able to:
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Cool collaborative friction.
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Get quicker alignment.
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Write cleaner requirements based on customer needs.
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Enact better phased planning.
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Launch holistic MVPs faster.
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Reduce change-requests sent to the technology org.
What I did
Created a self-service learning path for the design team and provided hands-on coaching
Self-service, design education series
I led a team to create a learning path for designers and researchers, teaching them how to streamline their process and deliver customer-centered artifacts that are friendly to product managers.
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Foundational frameworks:
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Jobs-to-be-done
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Experience requirements (a.ka. user enablements)
​My role:
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Design education author
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Project lead and editor
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Facilitator and coach
In-person training workshop at the AT&T headqurarters in Dallas
I designed and facilitated a workshop to up-skill 50-60 designers, researchers and CX strategists on core methods of the self-service design education series.
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The exercise helped the team:
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Think like product managers.
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Turn research insights into customer needs and a product vision.
Ongoing remote coaching for the design team
​I regularly provided coaching to our distributed team, helping them integrate the new design education series.
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Types of coaching I provided:​
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Presented training modules at the weekly team all-hands meeting.
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Attended design pinups to provide coaching for project teams.
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One-on-one coaching.
What I did
Created a toolkit for product managers and provided hands-on coaching to maximize collaboration
Product strategy toolkit for PMs
We created self-service templates and a repository of resources for product managers at AT&T.
The toolkit helped PMs:
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Generate product visions, strategies and delivery plans rooted in customer needs.
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Collaborate more effectively with legal, pricing experts, marketing, SMEs, channel partners, designers and others.
​My role
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Co-creator of toolkit resources
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Design leadership
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Template design & art direction
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Virtual facilitation
Workshops for product managers
I facilitated at critical moments between product and the design team. The activities I designed helped PMs:
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Adopt the customer vision as the product vision.
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Incorporate design work with their planning documentation.
"It’s been really useful to the [product] team mostly because it’s incredibly comprehensive. We came back to this so many times, we used it a bunch to develop our requirements document."
—Product Manager
Business problem
Data shows that AT&T has difficulty retaining customers who move and want to continue their fiber internet service at their new address.
Design team objective
Find out why fiber-to-fiber movers are leaving AT&T. Then design the movers experience that will help them stay.
Example workshop: "movers"
Experience puzzle workshop
I created an activity for PMs, to help them:
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Build alignment between multiple product teams for an enterprise-level solution.
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Clarify which teams own which sections of the customer journey to guide their requirements.
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Highlight critical gaps and overlap.
What I did
Guided design leadership and operations to create a shared vision of the team’s role in the product org
Recommendations to make the design practice product-friendly
We presented recommendations to our VP and design leadership on ways to evolve our design practice within the product org. I then facilitated discussions to drive consensus and action items.
​My role
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Design leadership
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Design maturity planning
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Change agent
Revived operations backlog and resources cleanup
I worked with design operations to build a new backlog of design resources in alignment with leadership’s vision. Before adding new materials to Figma and SharePoint, I overhauled the holistic information architecture and executed cleanup of existing repositories.
​My role
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Design operations
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Migration to a Figma Enterprise license
Figma and SharePoint cleanup​​
The effort provided:
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Consistent information architecture
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De-duplication of repositories
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Prep for migration to an Enterprise Figma license
Design operations backlog
We planned revisions and additions to:
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Figma libraries
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Figma templates
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Learning paths
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Playbooks & guides
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Tutorials
Single source for design education
We created a new SharePoint website for design practice standards that replace multiple resource repositories. This made a cleaner distinction between Figma libraries and educational content.
The SharePoint site focused on:
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Learning paths
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Video tutorials
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Guides, playbooks and articles
Wireframe
Reflections
Positive takeaways
Empowering others
Teaching people how to think vs. telling them what to do is the best approach to leadership. I always knew this to be true but I got to see it play out on a much bigger scale through the course of this initiative.
Force multiplier
Stepping up as a design leader through coaching, workshops and designing self-service resources allowed me to be a force multiplier. My impact was vertical and horizontal both at a team and organizational level.
"Seeing the way you plan programs, you think about each person individually. Their hopes and aspirations, their skills. Then people emerge from that work being successful, growing as a team and growing professionally."
—Design leadership
Growth opportunities
To share or not to share...
This initiative spanned a long time and was highly ambiguous. It wasn’t always obvious when to share progress with the team. If an idea was not fully baked sharing too early caused confusion. But if too much time passes, opportunities for feedback are missed or people are left hanging. Finding the sweet-spot is an ongoing work-in-progress but I learned that keeping regular check-ins are the best default.
Giving direction provides clarity
During this work I was very hands-off with a designer letting them run with an assignment when I should have set more guardrails. We got good results from their work but the exercise overly complex for what we needed. Upon reflection, I realized I'd been worried about micromanaging and left too much for the designer to decide on their own. This experience emphasized that giving the right amount of direction is beneficial to everyone, it's not micromanaging.
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