Backcasting CBC Companies

CBC is a financial IT company that provides various risk management, data, and lending support services for a family of businesses across the United States.

Roles

I assumed the following roles in designing the Back-Casting Activity:

Lead UX Researcher
UX Designer
Moderator

Deliverables

The following were the deliverables I contributed in for this project:

Workshop Planning
Workshop Analysis
Product Road Map

Project Specifications

Duration: 1 week
Tools:

Excel
Powerpoint

Overview

Due to the proprietary nature of this business, I can’t go over the specifics of the products. The UX team was approached with a new product idea that could potentially replace a product we currently use today. Below, I will discuss my contribution to introducing a new UX methodology to the stakeholders and UX team, the challenges I faced, and my solution in the discovery phase of this product. This project is currently ongoing in 2020.

In the nature of the business structure, it is easy for team members to not be aligned on the objective, goals, and path forward. The stakeholders are busy and it is a challenge to get them together to talk and get alignment on the expectations for the product. With that said, I was able to get everyone together by running a backcasting activity

Challenges

During this time our company is remote due to Covid19 and we do not have a whiteboarding platform. This led to the challenge of getting 3 hours on everyone’s schedule, asking them to have sticky notes at their desk, and letting everyone speak during the activity.

Methodology

I used the whiteboard plugin in Adobe XD to get the team together. Ahead of the meeting, I emailed all the stakeholders and asked them to bring colored sticky notes or different colored pens along with paper. They came into the activity knowing that we are going to brainstorm.

The activity was set to be three hours long. Below is how the activity was broken down.

Introduction
Individually each member wrote down on their individual sticky notes what the product we are producing looks like today.
One by one each member read their sticky notes while I typed on the virtual sticky notes for all to see.
Individually each member wrote down all the pain points or company and our customers face with these sticky notes
One by one each member read their sticky notes while I typed on and grouped together the virtual sticky notes for all to see.
Individually each member wrote down on their sticky notes what the see the product being and producing in 5 years.
Individually we repeated the activity with the notion that there are no barriers, where do they see the producing being in 5 years.
One by one each member read their sticky notes while I typed on and grouped together the virtual sticky notes for all to see.
Individually each member wrote why the customer cares about this new product. Why is it improving their lives?
Together we had a group discussion to pick the first ideal state and what is the vision of the product in 5 years and why do we believe this is the best product for our customer.
Now that we established a 5 year vision, steps 6-9 were repeated for where the product needs to be in 3 years and what value does the 3 year vision bring to our customer.
Steps 6-9 was repeated one more time for a 1 year vision. We discussed where the product needs to be in 1 year in order to make the 3 year vision occur.