Leading the design strategy for a flagship electric vehicle program.
I led the design strategy workstreams for two key electric vehicle programs at Ford, aimed at serving a specific vehicle segment. Both presented challenging conditions that required a nimble approach, with multiple contributing workstreams, frequent interruptions, and adjustments in timing and resources.
Despite these challenges, I maneuvered the team through to gain a deep understanding for the segment and customers, such that we ultimately identified insights and experiences to deliver that were, per our leadership, among the highest quality delivered by the D-Ford human-centered design organization. These experiences are now being applied across Ford’s product portfolio.
The first program was a fast-tracked electric vehicle program with unique underlying technical elements. The circumstances of this program required that I develop a unique project plan to quickly make an informed experience strategy hypothesis in place of the usual first program milestone deliverable.
Per the plan, I lead the team in a novel and extremely rapid synthesis of D-Ford’s knowledge about the segment. The team identified patterns in the insights of the prior D-Ford work, and used that information, combined with details of the program’s unique technical elements, to begin generating rough conceptual user journeys.
We sought feedback on the journeys from Ford personnel matching our customer profile, and used these conversations as input to bypass a usual research phase to meet the program’s time constraints. This way, we were able to directly identify the key elements for a working experience strategy. When I presented these experience pillars to senior program leadership, our team received commendation for our effectiveness and the quality of our strategy despite the constrained conditions.
The first program was ultimately cancelled due to a shift in the underlying technical elements, and so work pivoted to a second program, with the same target customers.
Now armed with completed archetypal and ethnographic customer data, we could combine it with our synthesized knowledge from for the first program, and align it with the corporate strategic framework for the segment. Collaborating with marketing colleagues, we planned and conducted workshops to understand the customer's key personal priorities that we could use as a framework for marketing and experience strategy purposes.
With the knowledge we gained, my team was then able brainstorm to identify our question space, customer tensions, and design principle hypotheses. I then led the team to put together conceptual storyboard prototype stimuli and discussion guide questions for our primary research phase. This preparation, completed in a record one week under my leadership, typically took other teams at least three weeks.
Together, we synthesized our research into five key experiential domains to deliver in the vehicle program. I presented this experience strategy to senior leadership, storytelling with our top-priority experience, and supporting it with quantitative and qualitative data the team collected, which showcased a unique business strategy that we were able to create by expanding upon this core experience.
For this project, I emphasized to the team deep immersion in the life of our customer. Therefore, we got into the field quite a bit: I planned two team trips to familiarize ourselves with the customer’s activities, and three local events with electric vehicles to try driving, using, and charging them in unique relevant scenarios.
While the program continued to be interrupted due to organizational changes, these immersion activities continued to inspire and advance our design work. These experiences led the members of the team into self-guided exploration of applications for AI, XR, and many other more esoteric technologies for this customer to deliver the key experiences we identified for the program. It was a lot of fun bringing these ideas together and collaboratively building upon them.
Corporate strategy shifts resulted in the second program being deprioritized, so we developed distributable one-pagers on the new technology-enabled experiences we identified, so that they could be flagged as corporate strategic technology development goals. Many of these technologies, inspired by the human-centered design team’s deep immersion in our customer, are now integral to other programs and Ford's future technology portfolio.