Design transformation at NOW TV / Sky
I have championed several initiatives at NOW TV to increase customer empathy and design awareness and maturity across the organisation including organising and facilitating the first (and multiple) design sprints, running design thinking bootcamps for new starters and other teams and founding the Sky Design Club to enable designers spread all over the Sky Group to network and share knowledge.
Context
NOW TV started as a little experiment of Sky which was successful in targeting a market audience that did not want to sign up Sky’s more expensive long-term contracts. Being a startup within Sky had it’s pros and cons. Whilst NOW TV certainly was more nimble in its product development, there was also lack of a fundamental design thinking mindsets and ways of working. Although it had the financial backing off Sky, it came with the traditional corporate siloed thinking and redtape where some changes were more difficult to make than others.
My role
UX Lead trying out different design transformation experiments, sometimes succeeding, other times failing but always learning
Challenges
- Lack of awareness and practice of design thinking methodologies in problem solving
- No design voice across Sky
- Growth driven goals prioritised over customer experience goals
- Weak capability to track and measure data
Process (or more like experiments I tried)
When I joined NOW TV, I knew I was in for a long haul. No cultural change is an overnight fix. Patience (and persistence) were definitely the virtues I needed LOTS OF. I love trying out new things just to see if it works. So as part of this design transformation at NOW TV / Sky, I tried out these experiments over a period of three years:
- Design sprints to improve collaboration, customer-centricity and ways of working between cross-functional teams and silos
- Design thinking bootcamps to upskill non-design teams and raise awareness of customer-centred problem solving methodologies
- Sky Design Club to enable designers all over the Sky group to meet, network and share learnings
- NOW TV Design Thinking framework to strengthen the voice of the UX and Design team within the organisation
- A new workflow for the Product, Design and Data teams to use data better
Design sprints
Design thinking advocates a user-centric and collaborative approach to problem solving. Many of the projects at NOW TV were more traditional in the way they were run with top-down decision-making and siloed involvement of teams. I introduced the idea of design sprints to the team as a way to try out a different way of thinking and working. Design sprints were these new and scary things at Sky and NOW TV. Many hadn't heard of it and those who had were worried it would be a waste of time and money. After reading the Sprint Book by Jake Knapp, I put together a tailored proposal and plan for how we can run design sprints at NOW TV. After several months of getting the right people on board across different teams, we finally ran our first design sprint in the middle of 2017.
It's all well and good shutting yourself in a room with people for 5 days but if you can't tell a great story about what you did, why and how, then it's a lot more difficult to get the buy-in and funding to do it again and again. Based on past experience, I knew that a video would tell a much richer and more engaging story than just a report. Hence, I brought my personal DSLR in to capture the story of the entire sprint. The video below was filmed by myself and one of my team members and UX Designers Antony White and edited by Antony. This video was intended to tell the story of the sprint and sell the value of the methodology and this way of working internally and was very successful in getting people excited about design sprints.
The video is password-protected. Please email hello@nirishshakya.com if you'd like to watch it.
One of the sprints I ran for the Operations Team at NOW TV got me a 'Best of Sky' Awards nomination from the Director of Operations!
I've recently been fortunate to sit in on some design sprint sessions Nirish led, and was hugely impressed with the way he marshalled a room full of creative and sparky individuals towards a solid output - a master of herding cats! I think he's great and an asset to NOW TV.
Adi Heesom, Director of Operations, NOW TV
Design thinking bootcamps
I had been thinking of running design education sessions for non-designers at NOW TV for a while. Then one day out of the blue, I received an email from the coordinator of New Starter onboarding at Sky who had seen my design thinking bootcamps on the General Assembly website and asked if I could run something similar for the new starters at Sky. I instantly jumped on the opportunity! The feedback from the participants was so positive that I was asked to run another one and then another. What started as a one-off activity turned into a regular education and outreach program.
The first Design Thinking bootcamp I ran at NOW TV was in a corporate box at Twickenham Stadium!
The big feather on the UX & Design Team's cap came when the Strategy and Propositions Team at NOW TV asked me to run a one-day bootcamp to help their team solve problems through design thinking. I was very pleasantly surprised to see other teams appreciating the value of design thinking. I planned and prepared the content collaboratively with the Strategy team.
Running a Design Thinking bootcamp for the NOW TV Strategy and Propositions Team
The effort I had put into running this bootcamp and the impact it had on the team got me multiple nominations from the Strategy and Proposition team for the quarterly NOWbel Awards in the ‘Collaborative and Inclusive’ category. And winning the actual award was totally unexpected!
Nirish went above and beyond to run a Design Thinking workshop for the strategy and propositions team. This involved a huge amount of time and planning, with an amazing output as the team learned how to empathise better with customers, create innovative solutions and validate the risks of building the wrong solution. Nirish brought such a creative and innovative outlook to the session, as he always does at NOW TV!
Augusta Sharp, Senior Manager Commercial Strategy
Nirish joined us at our recent team day and spent a couple of hours leading our team through a session on Design Thinking (themed on prioritisation). It was hugely beneficial, sparked lots of new ideas and provided a fresh perspective. Not only that I thought it was a pretty awesome example of collaboration and leveraging the power of teams working together. Thanks again Nirish!
Robert Poderoso, Head of Commercial Strategy & Distribution
Nirish took a day out of his day job to run a fantastic Design Thinking workshop for the Strategy and Propositions team. He worked really collaboratively in the build up to the day and left us with a new approach to problem solving and some great tools to use as we continue in our roles. A great example of going above and beyond to support colleagues.
Sam Cohen, Commercial Strategy Controller
Sky Design Club
Sky has a lot of designers spread across the group but there was no one platform for us to meet with each other and share learnings. We didn't even know how many of us there were! The only cross-pollination that would happen was at a project level or a need basis. I started the Sky Design Club in 2016 as a meetup along with a designer from Sky to gather designers (and non-designers) all across Sky and NOW TV. Since then, we've had both internal and external speakers present on various topics from AI chatbots to VR and design maturity to design consistency. I also created a Slack channel for the Sky Design Club where designers could chat and ask questions.
I didn't realise there were so many of us!
A Sky Designer at the first Sky Design Club meetup
NOW TV design thinking framework
As part of my continuous improvement initiatives for the NOW TV UX & Design Team, I created a design thinking framework that we could agree on as our north star for how we would like to solve problems for the business and the customers.
We also started using the framework to communicate our mindset and ways of working to other teams at the beginning of and during a project. I also listed the methods and activities during each phase of the process. These were just meant to be guidelines and the UX and UI Leads on the project were able to pick and choose their preferred process and methods. I also created an effort estimation spreadsheet using the same framework and methods to more accurately estimate the UX and UI work required for every brief that comes in. The consistency of messaging across these multiple tools have helped us reinforce the methodology more strongly with other teams.
I also found the framework useful in giving progress updates to the project team. Having the methodology as the same frame of reference in every update and being able to see the progression and completion of tasks gave stakeholders more confident in the methodology.
Crossing off completed activities and highlighting activities in progress
Outcomes
We are still learning how to measure quantifiable impact of these initiatives but culturally we have been seeing a gradual shift in mindsets and behaviours across multiple levels of the organisation towards a more human-centric approach to problem-solving. For a rapidly growing organisation like NOW TV with a constant flow of staff in and out of the organisation, any new fledgling cultural transformation can be fragile and easy to lose. Hence, we have found that persistent reinforcement of the design thinking mindset over a long term is key to its adoption.