An Interview with Diana Sonis
There’s a big difference between reading about cross-functional teams and leading them in real life. In this article – the fourth in our five-article series – CX by Design co-founder Diana Sonis shares her experiences captaining a cross-functional team for a large, multi-cultural organization.
A multinational eyewear and ophthalmic equipment company was struggling to meet its expected metrics for the US market. Despite the company’s market research, US customers remained largely unaware of these products – and this needed to change.
In the following interview, CX by Design’s Diana Sonis will share what she learned about cross-functional teams from leading multiple workshops of up to 40 people and training them in the principles of design thinking, empathy, and user research.
Insights from Leading Cross-Functional Teams
Question: Tell us about the client. What was standing in the way of their success?
Diana: This multinational company manufactures and sells prescription lenses for eyeglasses and sunglasses. They’d recently launched products that never reached the expected success metrics set by management. When we met them, their innovation team was tasked with a number of challenges:
- They needed to understand the U.S. consumer’s mindset around vision challenges
- Market research showed that consumers generally buy whatever the retail store recommends. And they were unaware of the lens brand in their eyeglasses. This is something the company wanted to change.
- Brand recognition (and the customer’s journey to purchasing prescription eyewear) was further complicated by multiple outside actors, like health insurance and optometrists.
- And, most importantly, customers often gave up on the company’s main product (progressive lenses), but the team didn’t know how – or why – to solve this problem.
The innovation team knew Design Thinking could help, but they had no experience in the field. They had never interviewed customers to learn more about their goals, needs, and motivations. Nor had they ever held structured ideation and prototyping sessions that resulted in real-time customer feedback.
The team also wanted to make Design Thinking a repeatable process throughout the company. They all agreed that there is a huge benefit to the bottom line if products and services were designed starting with the customer first. Thus, it was also important to show that Design Thinking methods and tools can uncover some real insights that solve concrete business challenges. They needed management buy-in.
How were you able to identify these problem areas and present them to management?
During our five months with this client, we designed and facilitated several weeks of in-person workshops that adapted Design Thinking methodology and tools to the challenges facing the innovation team. Whenever the team was working on their own, we supplemented the in-person workshops with weekly check-ins and conference calls.
The company already knew that they wanted to focus on a specific age demographic. Beyond that, very little was defined. When we came together with their team, we:
- Defined the long-term goal of the company and the innovation team.
- Focused on the problems to solve in this specific sprint and went through empathy workshops to practice better understanding their customers
- Guided their team on how to facilitate user interviews
- Identified the pain points in the experience their customers go through (or will go through) by analyzing the data gathered
- Collaborated on solution ideation for those pain points with the goal of building solutions that match their audience’s needs, goals, and motivationsSome ideation sessions were attended by 7 people; others had close to 40.
- Quickly prototyped and tested with real users and with the team to gather insights and plan for next steps.
What teams and roles were involved in this project?
The day-to-day group (i.e. the innovation team) included:
- A team champion (a C-level exec whose job it was to oversee innovation at the company).
- 1-2 engineers/scientists who knew what could and couldn’t be done.
- 1-2 people from sales and marketing.
- 3-4 people from product and R&D.
In the larger sessions and workshop that we held in the ideation stage, we had 6-8 people from various of the above-mentioned groups as well as C-level execs in general.
What communication and collaboration challenges did you face? How did you deal with them?
We didn’t really have a ton of challenges here. This was largely because the team was already well-versed on collaboration before we came in. They had a shared common language when it came to customers and well-defined project goals.
That said, as in any group, some voices are louder than others. So the biggest challenge we faced was uneven participation; some voices dominated while others remained unheard. And that was often due to hierarchy, confidence, or sometimes cultural norms. (This was an international company, so we not only had a cross-functional team, but also a cross-cultural team.)
You conducted some sizable training initiatives. What was that like?
The key was to stay very organized – cliche, I know. But we defined each activity to its minutest detail and timed it to the minute so that we could get what we needed out of the workshop. Roles had to be clearly defined as well. We had C-level execs in the workshop, but we were leading it – so we had to sometimes cut them off (in the most polite way!) because they were taking too much time, etc. And, where things were clearly not working, we adjusted on the fly without trying to be too precious about it.
How did you ensure that everyone in your workshops and other engagements had the chance to voice their ideas?
We timed everything and we organized people in working groups; each group had a chance to say something. In general, if we noticed someone being extra quiet, we tended to invite them to speak.
Fast-forward to project completion. What was the outcome for the team and the company as a whole?
Following the prototype and customer-test sessions, the client discovered several critical customer pain points with their current products and several potential new services they could provide to enhance the customer experience. It was mind-blowing for everyone watching the testing footage.
Disruptive solutions emerged that would involve changing the way the other actors in the customer experience are currently operating – like providing better tools for optometrists so that they can provide a pleasant, informative, and speedy experience to the customer.
From an internal standpoint, entirely focusing on the customer journey from A to Z completely changed the way the innovation team envisioned the actions they could have on the product and service timeline. Bringing in so many people for a cross-functional ideation session gave them a wealth of ideas. As a bonus, having their ideas heard and tested helped align other departments and management.
Throughout this project, the innovation team learned how to prototype and test ideas and concepts in just a few days. They made progress much faster, without the cost and time of actually building and producing a full product or service before validating the need for it. The team continued to rapidly prototype and test a dozen more ideas that were sketched and storyboarded with us during the ideation sessions. The insights they discovered and shared with upper management had a big impact on the future pipeline of the R & D department.
What did you wish you knew about cross-functional teams before coming into this project?
I wish I knew the team power dynamics better. Anytime you come into an organization, it’s important to spend a bit of time upfront with various groups (and 1:1 with key stakeholders) to understand the context you’ll be working in. It makes for better communication and facilitation.
What did you learn from this project?
Power dynamics don’t necessarily follow job titles. I’d map the informal power dynamics beforehand, if possible. Who do people defer to?
Level-set on a shared language and define common terms. Even though this team had a shared language when it came to the customer, we had to define terms like “insight” when they were doing customer research because people weren’t sure how to categorize something as an insight vs. not.
Understand that not everyone comes to collaborate. Some people are contributors. Some are decision-makers who come to be seen and/or heard. And some people are just curious observers. Their engagement has to be used accordingly.
What’s one thing you’d like to share about cross-functional teams?
You’ll get truly incredible ideas when there is a cross-functional team involved. It’s energizing and often surprising to almost everyone on the team to listen to how their colleagues approach the same problem. You get a lot of laughs and it’s fun!
Next: Strategy for Cross-Functional Teams
In the final article of this series, CX by Design co-founder Lis Hubert will share the strategies she’s developed for successful cross-functional team projects. Check it out!
