IBM Watson Health Team and Studio

BUILDING A STRONG TEAM

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What Problems were there to solve?

My time at IBM Watson Health was fun, exciting and hard work. Healthcare is indeed hard. Here is the story of building a Studio at the Watson Health HQ in Cambridge, MA.

When I came aboard there was a team of 3 designers. The building was brand new even though Watson Health was almost 2 years old at this point but this was going to be headquarters for Watson Health. Eventually we brought over some user researchers from another building, and we started to fill up our space. I was brought on to specifically be the point person there at headquarters.

The challenge of talent at Watson Health

We were given young designers from Design Thinking Bootcamp (only 3 months long in Austin), and slowly we started building out teams.

• I had a team working on Watson for Genomics.
• I had a team working on special projects.
• Another team working on some large high profile $$$ projects in the Life Sciences pillar.
• And some working on the Watson for Oncology pillar.

What problem I was solving was working with young talent I didn't hire, but acquired them. Integrating young UX'ers who didn't really know anything about healthcare or even UX into a group of people who had been doing healthcare for years was indeed a challenge.

Now I have hire plenty before this, but I had never hired brand new designers before. IBM hires people right out of school and they go through a 3-month long Bootcamp on Design Thinking. Then they choose the location they want to work. I acquired 5 folks in Boston. While we had several other designers who had also gone though Bootcamp, but I had been working with them on their UX skills. None of the original ones I inherited even knew what a task flow was, so it was a good thing education is a passion of mine.

It took me about 6 months to really understand how to work best with this type of team. I finally had a breakthrough with one girl in particular. Things were going really wrong with a project and I was able to totally turn it around. The client was about done with us, and I am lucky she was the type to take things to heart and work with me to make things better. She left the Studio just before I left to work as a user researcher on a Quantum research team. I was incredibly proud of her.

For a while, I was in charge of the Oncology team in NY. That was challenging because of the distance and several folks there were already unhappy and were causing a bit of havoc. One quit the day I arrived in NY. There was in-fighting, people tattling on others and some just creating havoc on purpose.

Long story short, it ended up being an interesting challenge and was thrilled to have that experience.

How I measured success

#1 Challenge: Before I left IBM, the teams were all running well and there were no longer any chaos happening. Figuring out which designers work better with others is satisfying. I encourage the Gallop Strengthfinder 2.0 tests. I had them all take the test, put them in the matrix provided and saw why some were not working as well with others. Once I moved some around, things went super smooth. By the end we had over 28 designers, which is why I decided to make us a studio!

CREATING A STUDIO FROM SCRATCH

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The challenge of creating a Design Studio

While building a team and creating a studio may seem related, the studio was an entirely different kind of challenge. Just because you throw a bunch of designers into one place did and does not make it a studio in IBM's eyes. I needed to make it a destination point for clients. We already had an imersion center (showcasing the newest and greatest we had to offer) but we needed to get interest in us doing Design Thinking workshops for our clients. We needed to be throught leaders in our community, and be a place of pride to bring clients.

Once we had assembled a decent size crew of about 25, I decided to make our studio an official IBM Studio. There were Studios all over the world, and since we were the headquarters of Watson Health, we needed to be a Studio as well.

So how did we do it?

1. There was of course, paperwork to be filled and filed
2. We had events and lots of them
3. Talks on women leadership
4. Hackathons
5. Hosted Startup Weekends
6. Events like giving Doctors and Nurses a voice in how they work which was so amazing to hear.

How I measured success

#1 Challenge: Getting everyone on board with the plan. That meant leadership and while they were for it, the biggest challenge came from facilities. To be a true Studio, we needed a sign and that was the hardest part because facilities didn't want any one part of the building to stand out from the other. Luckily we were able to convince them in the end to add it to our floor designation in the lobby.

#2 Challenge: While the building was rented, we had a few spaces where we could do workshops and even convinced facilities (again) to let us use the dinning area for larger workshops which happened constantly. We even hosted an all New England day of learning and fun for the East Coast IBM designers. Being Studio Lead was very rewarding.

I even got a chance to work on Watson Health's version of the Design System. That was rewarding because the one we were given just didn't fit healthcare and how Doctors want to use software. It was my 2nd Design System.(Below was a seating arrangement we had to show IBM how the team worked together. So we had a sitting area, whiteboard area, booksheves and places we could just gather for events.