Coaching teams to think in user needs
The challenge was not a single product or a single team. It was a culture — one in which ICT development had historically been driven by technical requirements and internal system constraints rather than by the people using the software. Changing that required more than a framework hand-off. It required sustained coaching at the team level. We worked directly with ICT development teams, introducing Design Thinking as a practical method for surfacing and acting on user needs. Teams learned to bring users into their development cycles early and to validate decisions against real behaviour. The shift was incremental but cumulative — each sprint that started with a user question rather than a technical assumption reinforced a new way of thinking. Alongside team-level coaching, we facilitated cross-business alignment. Multiple independent business lines had been operating with different priorities and different ideas of what "good" looked like for users. Getting them to agree on a shared UX vision was as much a negotiation exercise as a design one.
One UX vision. Multiple business lines. A shared target that had not existed before we started.
Results that outlast the engagement
The clearest sign of a successful transformation engagement is what happens after it ends. In this case, the corporate moved quickly to institutionalise what had changed. They established a dedicated User Experience Owner role — an internal function responsible for overseeing UX development and keeping the cultural momentum going. The practical outcomes were also measurable. IT projects began meeting user needs more reliably. Development processes became faster. The elimination of work that did not serve real user requirements freed up time and budget. Fragmented digital services that had caused friction for internal and external customers were brought into alignment with a shared vision. The ICT teams and wider employee base adopted a user-centric mindset — not as a formal mandate, but as a natural product of having worked differently for long enough that it stuck.
Speedier development cycles. Reduced waste. And a new internal role created to make sure user centricity stays at the centre.
Next projects.
(2016-25©)
