📉 Enterprise AI · 🤝 User Engagement
IBM CLOUD PAK FOR AIOPS - PRODUCT FEATURE ROADMAP / CUSTOMER ACQUISITION VIA DESIGN-LED ENGAGEMENT
TL;DR | Business success via design involved in customer acquisition conversation, by leading with “listening to the customer” strategy (vs. yet another sales pitch) + fast turnaround designing new experience and product roadmap based on customer feedback for buy-in.
*This case study focuses on 1 client, but my team and I have also done several other similar client engagements.
Duration
Team
Tools
1 Quarter
1 Researcher, 2 Senior PMs, 1 Sales, 2 Designers
Field Study, Mural, Whiteboarding
The Project
Gathering real customer data as a product team can be hard. Especially as a B2B enterprise.
Fortunately, investing in our user research partnerships with our clients led us to opportunities to meet them where they are in-person. This potentially meant feeding two birds with one scone: 1) establishing strong customer relationships, and 2) getting contextual user insights and product feedback. I worked closely with our UX researcher and led in-person user research and client working sessions. I worked with our PMs to put together a product roadmap (based on feedback) which was also validated by product team for feasibility and alignment (and was also scribed into requirements). I shared the final presentation to client and IBM senior leadership (entailing E2E as-is and to-be client experience narratives + feature roadmap).
My Role
Lead facilitator, on-site client workflow workshop
Lead facilitator, on-site user observational research
Lead designer and presenter (for client buy-in), user narratives, to-be UX & product feature roadmap
Engagement Strategy
The idea was to re-imagine the typical sales-y interaction with our client as a more "empathizing with your pain" approach. We would start with a workflow discussion with our potential end users, and observe how their day would go (basing off our discussion). Then towards the end of the our engagement our team would gather insights from the research and put together a story summarizing the current pains the client is experiencing today. We would end with what the "to-be" narrative would be once the client starting using Cloud Pak for AIOps, addressing aforementioned the pain points.
Outcomes & Impact
Solidifying long-term customer relationships
Customer buy-in and subscription expansion
Trail-blazed new ways for design to be at the forefront of CX / client acquisition strategy
In Hindsight
Human to human = invaluable.
Meeting customers where they are is a win-win for both the team and the client
In B2B setting, being strategic of the time we get with the client / at the client site = building trust with client on the long-term + extracting important insights
More creative storytelling with AI
In the future, we can utilize AI to explore unconventional narrative formats to share out product and draw customers in (esp. existing customers who may be used to the same old "Meet ___" deck)
Can also prompt AI agents to tailor the story as well as the story format tailored to real customer use cases