Workfront was facing the issue that so many enterprise software companies face, Companies would buy the product based on the promised benefit that sales sold them on, but the product was so unintuitive and complex that the intended users would hardly use it. While that first sale is great, when it comes time to renew contracts, your churn rate goes way up. So we set out to discover, who are the actual users (not necessarily the ones buying the software) and what goals, needs, and frustrations do they have, and how can we solve that within our product offering.

Talking to users instead of customers

Turns out our actual users were the front-line workers who were responsible for the actual making of things within companies, whether physical or digital, they had jobs to do and they knew how to do them. For them, the adding on of a process that would take them longer than the actual task itself seemed like a huge waste of time.

Whiteboarding ideas: Involving everyone in the design thinking process.

My goal is to get markers into everyone’s hands, if I can get developers and PM’s drawing sketches then we can all start to see ideas starting to surface and I find that people think with their hands better than just trying to talk the ideas into existence.