Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the eighth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.
Following up on my previous newsletter, I'd like to highlight the experience-driven approach of R/GA's interaction design (CX) team, which pioneered one of the most significant innovations in the early 2010s retail environment.
New room, one client, rebranding, repositioning, internal front-end, external backend, 18 months creating the product in collaboration with another agency called the Method, collaborated on the launch of a digital product and service across 48 countries and four continents.
The tool enables people in remote locations to order, customise, and receive a mobile device, which is crucial for their survival. Remote areas, such as South America, Africa, or APAC, had limited options for accessing mobile devices and connecting to the world.
Inspired by the noble idea, Nokia, through its transition with Microsoft, has decided to create a physical digital kiosk where customers all around the world can select, customise, and style the Nokia phone to their liking. Choose the prepaid plan, customise the hardware and software all in one place and order directly from Nokia, which brings the quality of digital connection to rural parts of the world.
A unique proposition enables a single European centre point to customise, deliver, and update devices worldwide, including software installed on Nokia phones, delivering high-quality services directly to customers' doorsteps.
The R/GA partnership with Nokia aimed to establish a spoke team that leveraged great visual direction and seamless integration between the two companies, delivering agile-based program delivery across multiple London and international offices.
The project management was the biggest challenge. Non-necessarily due to the client's personality, but primarily because of the constantly changing environment. This tectonic environment seeded a methodology that reflected on the Power of One. Back then, we hadn't called it that way, but the evolution brought the four pillars together.
As we require multiple iterations over a very short period, we need to understand who is working on what. Reframing a two-week sprint into one sprint fixed feature delivery and strengthened our response time – One Team.
Our weekly deliverables are committed to a single space, allowing everyone to review the code, documentation, design, and business decisions that drive these designs – One Place.
The agreement to simplify our approach originated from design, as we referred to it as "Hero". At the same time, the engineering team termed it the "main component", and the business may have had an alternative name in mind. This led to a massive naming exercise driven by the development, documenting design decisions in a form that everyone could use – Only Language.
Despite all project setbacks, we always shipped on Friday. We called a feature, focusing on one building element in reflection of the software development that happened in India – One Product.
Multiple stakeholders with diverse needs and broader objectives have forced our Team to constantly adapt, leaving little to no space for testing the idea. We have therefore brought the prototyping closer to the visual design (Reflect this was 2010, no Sketch, inVision or Figma yet).
This aimed to create a unified feedback space allowing all parties to view their feedback, requirements, timelines, and overall objectives for delivery.
This way, we have not only unified our feedback loop but also opened more opportunities for collaboration between the remote teams and joined multiple product owners into one single backlog.
One of the most significant business challenge of this proposition was within the 20 months we have a 17 different product on us people who joining and leaving as fast as clients change the requirement six or seven times within the week that shows majority of the product owners outside of their comfort zone and resign on the possibility of unifying this client under the one single preposition.
The development team, on the other hand, has taken the initiative to extend their roadmap to a design roadmap; therefore, design and development tickets were in one Place. Everything that came as an additional requirement has been put on the same backlog and prioritised on the basic criteria, whether the task is big enough to fit the sprint or not. This allowed all parties, including the product owner + design directors, the solution architect, and the rest of the Team, to make an informed decision and deliver increment on time.
Main learnings are, of course, prioritising transparency and, most importantly, the RAG reports for evaluating high, medium, and low priority tasks across three main disciplines: Brent (UI, custom experience, CX), and finally, engineering.
That's all for this edition!
I hope these insights were valuable and sparked new ideas for scaling your design propositions. Remember, the journey from concept to widespread impact is a shared one, and your experiences are invaluable. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and stay tuned for our next newsletter, featuring more strategies and success stories from our incredible community.
Happy scaling!
J+
