Work / Case study / Enterprise program / 2019
Thirty ideas to one product vision, in a day
Conceived, funded, and led a design-thinking program inside a Fortune 10 Chief Data Office. Ten participants, thirty raw ideas, one prioritized developer-hub vision leadership could defend.
The problem
Developers inside a large enterprise were losing time to tool sprawl: five to six tools in a single development workflow, redundant systems with overlapping features, weak ways to find and reuse existing work, and almost no social or recognition layer connecting people doing similar things.
The question driving the work: how do you streamline the way developers access resources and innovate, in a way that fosters collaboration and reuse?
The approach
A structured design-thinking workshop built on prior-state research: an earlier discovery workshop plus developer interviews. The session moved through a deliberate sequence.
- Persona grounding, so every later decision traced back to a real user rather than an abstraction.
- As-is scenario mapping to surface where the current experience broke down.
- Big-idea generation, producing roughly thirty candidate concepts.
- Prioritization on an impact-versus-feasibility matrix, separating no-brainers from big bets and save-for-laters.
- Prototype deep dive to make the winning direction tangible.
The outcome
Ten participants and thirty raw ideas converged to a single prioritized product vision: a developer hub combining a community layer, recommendation of existing components and data, contribution recognition, and individualized profiles.
The prioritization matrix gave leadership a defensible rationale for what to build first versus defer, and the session closed with a concrete prototype and a next-step timeline rather than a list of opinions.
What it demonstrates
- Running human-centered method at enterprise scale to turn diffuse frustration into a prioritized, buildable direction.
- Anchoring product decisions in personas and as-is reality, not feature wish-lists.
- Facilitated convergence: many voices, one vision, with a transparent prioritization rationale stakeholders can stand behind.
Method-only. Proprietary tool names, participant names, and specific persona detail removed. No confidential employer material reproduced.