Bringing clear and focused strategy through user-centricity

Strategy
|
Omnicell
|
2023

Challenges

Broad User Definitions

Existing user personas were generic and lacked the depth to provide meaningful insights for design decisions. This hindered the development of tailored solutions that could meet defined business goals.

Siloed Business Decisions

The organization faced challenges in aligning product design with business goals, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Solutions

I began by establishing a nuanced and shared understanding of our users across the team, moving away from broad categories like "Pharmacy Administrators" to more detailed models that considered the nuanced responsibilities of pharmacists. This shift allowed for a deeper understanding of users and their goals.

A collection of Jobs to be Done paired with common pharmacy permissions.

I facilitated cross-departmental workshops, collaborated with business leaders, and developed user-centered artifacts to incorporate into daily team rituals. This created a shared hypotheses of the user's experience. I developed long-term visions for features and actively contributed to team-wide strategy efforts, shifting the focus from features to holistic user experiences.

A set of three columns of journey maps showing the current state in our app, where we expect the new version to land, and where we hope to go in the future.
Journey maps were a key tool to stimulate conversations

Eventually, our efforts as a team to focus on the user bore fruit with our business colleagues. A strategy-defining business leader at the organization reached out to me wanting feedback on a business case he was writing to fund his teams through 2024. Through my support, we refined it to be more concrete and user-centered, complete with specific user-centered success criteria. This not only gave a much more compelling argument for the funding, it also provided transparency and alignment for the many product teams that would work on these experiences.

By bringing a user-centered approach to business-focused discussions, I was able to drive toward more concrete definitions of success.

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Results

Alignment of Design with Business Goals

By incorporating a business-aware mindset into the design process, we discovered and aligned better with the company's overarching goals.

Improved Collaboration

Introducing more detailed and accurate user definitions allowed for more targeted design solutions, improving the overall user experience.

Enhanced User Understanding

Integrating business data, journey maps, and business metrics into our strategy discussions fostered better collaboration between design, product management, engineering, and business teams.