Using Design Thinking Methods To Solve Developer Experience Opportunities

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at two external events… as a keynote presenter at HP’s DevOps Summit (shout out to my co-presenter, Rocio Montes) and as speaker at Anita Borg’s Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) conference (shout out to my co-presenter, Sonia May-Patlan) . In both opportunities, I shared my past journey in being a founding member of an inner source movement and open source program. In both stories. design thinking was the toolset used to solve for the customer, the internal engineer.

So, what’s design thinking?

The Interaction Design Foundation explains that Design Thinking…

• Is an iterative process that helps understand users (customers), challenge assumptions, and redefine problems.
• Is a way of thinking and working, as well as a collection of hands-on methods.
• Provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.
• Develops understanding of and empathy for people for whom we’re designing products or services
• Helps us question: question the problem, assumptions, and implications.
• Is useful for problems that are ill-defined or unknown:
• Re-frames problems in human-centric ways,
• Creates ideas through brainstorming,
• Adopts a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing.
• Involves ongoing experimentation: sketching, prototyping, testing, and trying out concepts and ideas.

Now that we’ve aligned on what is design thinking, how would you use this methodology to bring about culture change such as inner source? Design Thinking is about having an experimentation mindset and approach, which means you are constantly learning and measuring. There are three big components that you need to understand and have shared vision with your team. who is going to tackle the opportunities/problems with you.

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1. What problem are you solving? Understand the problem you are trying to solve and who your customer is. If you have more than one customer, determine who is your primary customer. This is the person or persona who will be your priority. It is totally cool to have secondary or tertiary customers but declaring who the primary customer is will be key to focusing your scope.
2. How might we solve it? Go broad with as many ideas on how to solve a problem before you narrow to how you could solve it
3. How might we quickly learn? Design your experiments by first understanding the assumptions you are making. Choose your most critical assumption and build cheap experiments to learn quickly. You don’t have to be Tom Chi and prototype an experience in 45 minutes but it is about finding cheap and free ways to understand customer behavior.

Initiating a movement like inner source or launching an open source program will also employ a change management framework. I really like the book by Chip and Dan Heath (aka The Heath Brothers) titled “Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard“. Here’s how the framework works: In every change, there are three components…the vision (the rider), the emotional connection to the vision (the elephant) and the outlined steps to get to the vision (the path). In many change management journeys, companies stop at the vision or they stop after the vision and emotional connection are made. It is super important that all three happen. In the work I co-presented for inner source and open source, all three components were explicit and declared with every participant who joins the movement or program.

Here’s an example of how this change management framework and design thinking model were used using a past case study…

At Intuit, prior to January, 2019, there were zero (0%) female maintainers of open source projects. This was an opportunity that we (we were a two person team) wanted to change. The open source community, at large, hasn’t been able to make big strides in moving the needle much either. In fact, did you know that less than 6% of all open source projects in the world are maintained or contributed to by women in tech? This number hasn’t moved much in the last 20 years. After employing both design thinking model and change management framework, Intuit was able to grow the female maintainer population…which is now at 23% (in less than 3 years). This means that 23% of all open source projects at Intuit are maintained by female technologists.

Here was our approach to this open source opportunity:

1. (Understanding the problem, what problem are we trying to solve?) We took time to conduct listening tours, focus groups and surveys to understand the lay of the land. We learned that the biggest hurdle for many female technologists was in two camps: “I don’t know how to get started” and “I never knew I could do this”
2. (How might we solve it?) From the listening tours and surveys, we brainstormed on how to solve the opportunity with volunteers from across the globe. We would host brainstorming sessions in the APAC region or across the Americas to get as many ideas and thoughts form the community. This also helped with getting buy in for what we are trying to do.
3. (Declare the vision, the rider) After distilling our lessons learned from the interviews and surveys, as well as ideas from brainstorm, we declared our draft vision
4. (How might we quickly learn?) We created a list of potential cheap experiments we could run which we can easily launch in no time. We also declared our metrics for success — this means that as we conduct our experiments, we would be able to take what we observe and determine if we have met the success metric. In this case study, we ran workshops, AMAs (ask me anything), fireside chats, learning communities and brown bag events during lunch. To do these, we partnered with various ERGs and with the group who leads the TWI, Tech women @ Intuit, initiative.
5. (Connect the vision to the emotional connection) After our initial set of experiments and distilled our lessons learned, we revisited our vision and iterated. Then, we reached out to “influencers” across the globe to ensure that we addressed “what’s in it for me?”… “why should I care”..”why is this important for me to know/to do” questions. By the way, influencers (yup, we took inspiration from Instagram) were the technologists who the community really respected for their thought leadership. They were at all levels — from Staff engineers to Architects. By ensuring that we we addressed these types of questions and concerns, we were able to connect our vision to the why, the emotional connection.
6. (Shape the path) Finally, this is the last step but you may find that you will iterate on this as well. We documented and presented the path…the actions and next steps that lead people through the movement. For open source, we created a portal that teaches how to get started. We integrated open source in engineer onboarding experience and we established learning communities (communities led by engineers for engineers) so that engineers can share best practices and tips.

Whew! I know, there is a lot here but I hope I’ve inspired you to consider both a design thinking model and change management framework when driving big experience opportunities. Let’s summarize…Here are the key messages:

• Design thinking is an iterative process (much like agile) of solving customer problems. The center is the customer
• Design thinking is a methodology that started in engineering and allows participants to learn and fail fast AND to measure results quickly
• Having a good change management framework is also a critical toolset for initiatives that drive culture change
• A Design Thinking model answers three questions

(1) What customer problem are you trying to solve?

(2) How might you solve this problem?

(3) How might we learn quickly? (others call this Fail Fast)

Got any tips or similar models you would like to share? I’d love to keep the conversation going and learn from each other!