Summary
The Consumability Program is a division-wide initiative to ensure excellent product experience. This program benchmarks product key use cases against a set of standards, co-created with business unit leaders, to ensure that IBM Security products are up to par.
The additional benefit of this program was to serve as a way to unite teams to work better together. By providing not only standards but also guidance, we worked to enable more teams to make significant, targeted change within their offering to deliver better user experience from end-to-end.
Fun Fact:
Consumability is a word made up by IBM.
No, really. Check it out.
Origins
The before diving deeper into the program, it’s important to note the foundational work I completed to enable the Heuristic Reviews to scale.
Instructional material I created to support my team completing Heuristic Reviews
Previously, a few teams have been conducting one-off heuristic reviews. However, there was yet to be a framework to tell the story of how teammates would conduct the assessment. Trying a new way of presenting the data, I began to map key workflows to the key client journey experiences. The presentation also focused on product improvements being mapped to usability heuristics and documented show-stoppers.
This presentation was circulated amongst out leadership team and forced action to be taken for the most severe issues found. More importantly, we never actually presented this information - it was able to be handed off and understood standalone.
I took to task the goal of driving this work into scale. I used product design principles to deliver a service design experience. My focus was to enable other teams to succeed in this same way each and every time they were asked to complete a heuristic review.
This lead me to a guiding philosophy that flowed from this work into the Consumability Program:
“Methodology matters - it is replicable, understandable, and what sets you up on a foundation of trust. Methodology matters and not just results.
Ok - thank you! I’ll get off my soapbox now. ”
Use a stick to blaze a trail, not to punish a team
A comic I doodled in to share in a retrospective on creating the program, as told by cute ghosts
“When we ask for research - we appreciate your work - it always feels like we’re going through the shredder.”
The imperative for the Consumability program overall is to provide a pathway for offering teams to become successful. As we created the standards, we ran into silo after silo and began to bring them together. The simple step of just getting the right folks in the room helped to quickly bring together overlapping work, knowledge sharing, and collaboration for the standards. This demonstrated an investment in bringing teams up, not just breaking them down.
It was important to me to get teams working together. First, it began with the leadership team buying into this process. I lead 10 remote workshops - yes, 10 individual workshops - to create each of the standards that spanned the entire product lifecycle. These workshops unpacked each leader and their teams’ and their wealth of knowledge to inform us of:
What are known issues with our business unit?
What is our goal end state?
What are the minimal things we can do to get from where we are today to a step, itty-bitty baby-crawl super-simple, in the right direction?
Afterwards, I also wanted to focus on getting product teams to work together better as well. Creating a review system alone is not sufficient to improve offering success. Building the supplemental material for this work was equally important. The last thing we wanted was to surprise teams who were asked to undergo assessment. I created supplemental resources to help product teams to prepare for the evaluation and evangelized these resources constantly as we enrolled new teams into the process.
In reality the Consumability Program is more than just the quality assurance review. It was tracking and remediating issues and it was up to us as program leaders to create the parts that helped to bring together and accelerate product teams undergoing this process. The program set a goal of where teams needed to be, guidance on how to get there, and embedded tracking up to our VP to ensure the visibility of teams’ progress.
Slack message launching the Consumability Program work onto our internal brand guide
The fight continues
I’d love to say that I got it right in one go and the program is working phenomenally. But that would be a terrible, bold-faced lie. This first version, at best, is my ugly baby.
“[These ideas] are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing - in the form of time and patience - in order to grow.”
I’m excited to see where this Consumability Program ends up after some real nurturing. I’m excited to see where it ends up in it’s back-ne growing, cargo shorts wearing phase. I’m excited to see what it has to say after it’s read Kant for the first time and feels like it suddenly knows everything.
Even eight months after this program spun up, I’ve found more and more people interested in developing all of it’s contents, from the scoring to the assessing to re-writing the standards in a way that is even more tangible, even more impactful. This project, this effort, is a labor of love. It speaks the true power of unlocking a team - heck an entire business unit’s! - potential to really unify on providing our customers with a world-class experience.
The fight for design exceptionalism continues.
I’m proud to say in this fight, we’ve got a great crew of allies.