Marketplace service design and training 

Training of a multi-disciplinary team of 11 people on service design and lean UX techniques to launch an IT services marketplace. 

Telecommunications- UK
October 17- March 18

The challenge
To help the business build an internal service design capability that supported the development of services across 3 different teams in the organisation. The project included the development and launch of 4 different services to be offered in a marketplace of which the trained service designers were responsible for. 

The outcome

Training and coaching of 11 people on the design thinking methodology and lean start up techniques to design an IT services marketplace. I created training materials, tools, designed brainstorm activities and helped the team ideate and launch a tested minimum viable service.

Approach: Designing and testing hypotheses early
Helping a multi-disciplinary team design a marketplace posed the challenge of formulating strong hypotheses early enough to ideate, test and iterate a minimum viable service in 5 months. Because the team I was responsible for was inexperienced in doing service design, the approach to the training combined lean methods of testing and failing fast, which allowed them to arrive to the ideation phase relatively quickly. 

The training contents for the discovery and define phases taught how to formulate a problem statement and hypotheses based on assumptions, how to prioritise those based on design research methods, how to synthesise information and prioritise opportunity areas, journey mapping, service blueprinting, and how to formulate and test a service vision. In addition to applying the design methodology, the team assessed the back end of the as is and future marketplace user experience, and understand the existing and prospective capabilities for the service to take place.

Reflecting back on the process, it is fair to say that more time should have been given to properly researching and defining the problem. The team felt the pressure due to the urgency of the launch, which made it difficult to uncover non-obvious insights and dig further into specific aspects of them. 

The highlight of the project was that the concept the team arrived to was guided by a human and not a business need, as it was originally envisaged. 

The preparation for the following phases of the project will focus on ideating concepts that solve one specific problem that can be made into low fidelity prototypes to be tested with users. 

In the next phases the team will focus on building low fidelity prototypes of one of the concepts and testing it until it is ready to be built. This phase will include a developer and a technical architect in the team who can guide and inform the build phase. 

The solution
An internal IT services marketplace that initially will host 4 services that users across the entire organisation can use. All the services will be designed led by service design and lean techniques.