Togethr: the new way to ideate

Our main design goal was simple: use a digital solution to de-silo corporate decision making, promoting a diversity of perspectives and a meritocracy of ideas. We identified two key stakeholder groups working within companies: company management and lower level employees. 

For our product to be adopted, it must be adopted and its usage encouraged by company management, as these individuals are the ones who likely would be crowdsourcing work throughout the entire company. But perhaps just as important, those in managerial positions are also responsible to a large extent for determining how their subordinates utilize their paid time on the clock. Therefore, it was crucial that we understood their needs, concerns, and aspirations when it comes to solving this problem area.

For our product to be successfully utilized by different companies, it must be desired and used by our second stakeholder group: lower level employees, as these are likely to be the individuals actually completing the work. We wanted to know whether employees are currently working across teams, if they feel their voices are valued, what incentives would encourage them to contribute to this sort of product, and any other relevant questions that came about in the interviews. We were able to utilize our personal networks to conduct several historical interviews within this stakeholder group.

From our interviews with company executives and general employees, two related needs stood out. These needs are things that company employees or management have noticed––things that, if absent from work life––would make work life better.

1. Teams find employees who possess diverse skill sets—even in fields other than the employee’s own—to help solve problems that the team can’t easily solve.

2. Using a “power in numbers” approach to crowdsource ideas from many employees to find creative solutions where unique skills aren’t essential.

For the first need, one interviewee made the point that many employees have worked in a number of industries and it’s possible that about half of their skills are wasted while doing strictly one job. Another product manager recognized that “products are always cross-functional too. So PMs are managing the intersections of many different functional teams.” It isn’t the case, however, that these cross functional teams have all of the tools necessary to get the job done. It’s possible that there is someone outside of the designated team who has skills that could be useful. Those are the skills that must be harnessed to solve this problem.

For the second key need, one CEO of an emerging tech startup noted the value in gathering creative ideas. He spoke of a time when his company needed a slogan for their webpage. No one group or person was necessarily an expert in slogan-making, so he outsourced the creative task to all 10+ members of the company, giving the winner of the best slogan a free dinner. A Harvard professor in government agrees, saying that often times different parts of an organization follow the saying “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. So if you simply leave the creative solution up to one group in a company, they are likely to solve it looking through the lens of their limited skillset, when it may be helpful to diversify the eyes that look at the problem.