These are the slides for a design thinking overview I gave to newly-onboarded developers at IBM. This is part of a larger session kicking off a six-month project where attendees will deliver user research, a set of hills and a prototype to key stakeholders looking for solutions to real problems. I used the example of helping Austin housing authorities fix the affordable housing problem that faces low-income families.

1. Design Thinking Review

2. The Goal
The Proposal
The Loop
Read the Proposal
Identify the Stakeholders
Annotate Initial Thoughts
Get to Know Your User
Just the Facts, Please
Define the As-Is
Think BIG!
Write Needs Statements
Synthesize User Needs into Hills
Prioritize Your Big Ideas
Create a Story Board for Your Best Ideas
Define a To-Be Scenario
Final Thoughts
Presentation Topics
Deadline 1
September 9
Deadline 2
Mid-October (TBD)
Deadline 3
February (TBD)

3. The Goal
I will show you how you can incorporate
design thinking into your work using one
of the SLAM proposals as an example.

4. The Proposal Presented by Ron Baker

5. First, a little background…
Affordable Housing is one of Austin’s top two issues.
Mayor Adler, the City Council, and City Agencies provide
guidance to Austin CityUP, a non-profit group of over 60
organizations looking at technology for Urban Progress.
2015: Austin CityUP Begins Formation with IBM a founding
organization
Aug 2016: Austin CityUP Workshops with City Agency,
Neighborhood Housing & Community Development (NHCD)
agency describes the problem.
Sep 2016: Housing Authority of the City of Austin (HACA)
and Austin Pathways provide additional background.
Oct 2016: IBM hosts an Austin CityUP collaboration
workshop in the Design Studio, with over 75 attendees
where the top priority projects are selected for official
committee formation. Not surprisingly, Transportation and
Affordable Housing are the top two priorities.
Nov 2016 to May 2017: The Affordable Housing Committee progresses through different business models,
solutions around the country, and potential data sources. NHCD and HACA continue to communicate the
possible solutions to the city leaders, gaining support. The committee membership grows and is connected at
the state and national levels. HUD shows interest.
June 2017: Several city council members decide to bring forward a Resolution to fund the technology
recommendations, and work begins on drafting the wording.
Aug 2017: After several workshops, the Resolution is passed and the City Manager is directed to implement the
first phase within 120 days, and provide sufficient analysis for budget planning for 2018.

6. Project Goal #1
For a household seeking affordable housing, provide
an immediate prioritized list of currently available
locations that best meet their needs.
based on the following conditions:
 is currently available, with a high enough degree of accuracy to save significant time compared to cold-
calling
 is willing to accept Section 8 vouchers
 provides the best commute options to a specified set of locations, prioritized by the applicant
• Initially based on distance, augmented by historical route planning analysis and overall
transportation cost
 satisfy additional location criteria, prioritized by the applicant
• Best school district available based on standard measurement
• Proximity to medical facilities and services
• Proximity to grocery stores, farmer’s markets, food supplies
• Lowest crime rate
• Lowest poverty rate
• Demographic characteristics (median age, median income, children age groups, ethnicity/race, etc.)

7. Project Goal #2
Provide a set of key performance indicators for a
local housing authority to monitor its progress as well
as insights that help determine policy.
 Section 8 compliance scoring for households in transition, duration of transition
 percentage of housing stock affordability by income range
with the following performance areas:

8. Project Goal #3
Incent property owners and investors to provide
affordable housing options, and give them insights to
keep properties occupied and profitable.
 Free services combined with value-add services
 What are consumers looking for? How does their property compare to the current trends on desired
preferences?
 Percentage of housing stock affordability by income range
with the following insights:

9. Project Goal #4
Minimize the movement of school age children
between different school districts due to housing
issues.
 School moves and missed days directly correlate to reduced student performance and graduation rates.
 Provide assistance for school guidance counselors to help families with affordable housing resources.
 School Funding is based on number of attendance days, so moving out of a school costs money and puts
budget planning at risk for programs.
with the following insights:

10. OBSERVE | REFLECT | MAKE
Remember this?

11. The Loop
Sometimes in design thinking workshops it can
be hard to notice when you’re observing,
reflecting, and making.
REFLECTOBSERVE MAKE
Look out for these labels:

12. Read the Proposal
Whenever I get a new project my team and I
spend time reading over the introductory
materials and try to gain as much domain
knowledge as possible. On a product team,
this is where we introduce ourselves to the
SMEs. Don’t be shy!
OBSERVE

13. Identify the Stakeholders
Create a stakeholder map to figure out who
has a stake in success and who is going to be
impacted by your work.
REFLECT

15. Annotate Initial Thoughts
After reading the proposal we have a short
working session where we write down our initial
thoughts, questions and assumptions by throwing
PostIts up on the wall and making free
associations. You can do an Assumption and
Questions activity if you want.
REFLECT

17. Get to Know Your User
In design thinking you have to put your user at
the center early and often. Go ahead and create
an empathy map to track your initial thoughts
about your user. This first draft will likely have a
lot of assumptions. That’s okay for now.
MAKE

19. Just the Facts, Please!
Empathy maps are meaningless if they’re only
based on assumptions. Validate your empathy
map by doing user research. A simple interview
with a sponsor user is a great start. You don't
have to show them the empathy map.
REFLECT

20. End of Month 1 September 9

21. Define the As-Is
View as-is mapping as a diagnostic tool. You
can’t make life better for your users if you don’t
understand their pain points and how bad things
are for them right now.
OBSERVE

23. Think BIG!
Once you’ve identified existing pain points for
your user, you can start to think about solving
them. Start big and try to develop “jet pack”
ideas. Innovation doesn’t happen by thinking
inside the box.
MAKE

25. Let Me Point Something Out
I would recommend doing big ideas before needs
statements so your team doesn’t feel restricted
by user parameters. Doing them before needs
statements relieves that pressure.

26. Write Needs Statements
Now that we've explored the universe of
possibilities, let's go back and define user needs
statements to see if any of our big ideas align to
a user's need.
REFLECT

28. Synthesize User Needs into Hills
Hills! Don’t let them scare you. In fact, needs
statements are similar to hills. Writing hills allow
us to take a more mission statement-like view of
the work we're trying to achieve. On an IBM
product team you write hills for every release.
REFLECT

30. End of Month 2 Mid-October (TBD)

31. Prioritize Your Big Ideas
You and your team will come up with a ton of
ideas, but which ones should you do first? Which
ones will take too much time to do properly? Let
the prioritization grid be your guide!
REFLECT

33. Create Story Boards for Your Best Ideas
For the sake of this discussion let’s chose one
idea from your prioritization grid and turn it into a
story board. Think of story boarding as a more
detailed Big Ideas exercise. We’re just
developing the plot. That’s all.
MAKE

35. Why Should We Storyboard?
If we have prioritized our best Big Ideas, then
why do we need to storyboard? Because it’s a
cheap way to refine an idea and add detail to it
without writing a line of code or creating a single
UX wireframe. Low cost, high value granularity!

36. Define a To-Be Scenario
We’ve made our storyboard, and we still like
where our idea is going. Great! Let’s add more
detail by creating a to-be scenario. The to-be
should answer the questions: How have we
made life better for our users and what value
have we brought to them?
MAKE

38. Extrapolating the To-Be
The to-be typically starts with a “Golden Thread”
of PostIt notes that tells the new and improved
user journey. However, we don’t have to stop
there.

39. Extrapolating the To-Be
We can add more context to our to-be scenario by:
• including detailed storyboards that enhance individual steps
• providing low, mid, or high-fidelity UX screens of the UI
during the user journey
• showing a coded prototype that explains user interactions

40. Final Thoughts
Your stakeholders are probably expecting you to produce
functioning prototypes, either coded or assembled. If you get into
trouble close to deadline I’d recommend at least having some
level of fidelity related to the previous bullet points. So, either
story boards or UI screens. The goal is to add as much detail to
your story as possible.

41. Final Thoughts (continued)
From a design thinking / agile perspective, you should consider
this final deadline Playback 0. When you get to your product
teams these are the types of deliverables your product team will
have created. In the end, you take these artifacts and use them
to explain the user journey to your stakeholders to create
alignment so that your teams can go off and deliver your product
to market.

42. SLAM #2 February (TBD)

43. APPENDIX

44. Use this chart as a
cheat sheet if you wonder
what you should do next.
https://apps.na.collabserv.com/wikis/home?lang=en-us -
!/wiki/W2a643afa6cfc_445e_9e53_a99e36faeac4
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