An internship of magnitude
While a student of Interaction Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, I’ve heard from some peers about design teams in Estonia, and that at Pipedrive they had a great design team. Before joining the company as an intern, I didn’t know what to expect there. Good things were about to come.
On October 11, 2018, I completed a 4 months Product Design internship at Pipedrive in Tallinn, Estonia. I’ve worked with two projects, one individual and one team project. The individual project I worked more closely to the research team, led by Paula and supported by the mentorship of the designer Birgit. The team project was done together with the other two interns, Renata, and Brenda.
Teams at scale
Before this internship experience at Pipedrive, I’ve worked as a UX consultant at MSUX, an UX Research consultancy in Brazil, where I had a great time and the opportunity to work closely to our customers in design teams from different companies in the technology, banking, health care, and other industry segments. While a rich experience, we were a small and very close team, but I remained eager to see how these other design teams from larger tech companies work on a daily basis.
Already inside Pipedrive, I’ve managed to uncover, week after week what was like to work and collaborate with a bigger design team, that scaled from our 3 people intern team to other design teams, who were tackling different parts of the product. Teams were spread across offices in different locations and I was mostly in contact with people in two Tallinn offices and the Lisbon office remotely. So, how the designers put the product together? I wondered.
Collaboration was the key. Those who are able to, get together in person in meeting rooms, others were present remotely online. The important part is that teams were in frequent contact, they were open to share and also receive helpful feedback on their work. I as intern felt very welcome to participate, to give feedback on the bits I was able to, on work that was already going on before I came, and also got very valuable comments to improve the work I was doing. I felt like everyone got each other’s back, and that family spirit went along throughout the whole time I was working at Pipedrive. What I felt was that people were up to improve each other and then make a better product. So as a group, people got was is needed to understand the customer needs and make the customer better by using the product.
A pinch of motivation
When previously working with smaller teams, I never had the need to use Abstract, an app to organize Sketch app files and work collaboratively. Right at the beginning of the internship I looked at the tools used by the other designers, saw Abstract and thought “Hey, this is new to me, and looks interesting! I want to learn more about”. So then later in a 1-on-1 with my PM Leaana-Helena, I talked about it with her, and she recommended me to set a goal and learn the tool. I knew that I could rely on other designers to learn the tool if I have any questions, so I felt very comfortable with it and left the meeting with an interesting challenge, master Abstract.
By the time our team project was not yet tackling any visual design, so Sketch was on stand-by and my individual project was mostly about printed media with Adobe Illustrator as my main digital tool. I didn’t need Abstract in the beginning, so the challenge got very personal.
I started to play around with the tool in my free time, and just later I’ve put it to real use for the team project. I kept then discovering the bits of the app on a daily basis. I felt that it was more fun and I was more open to learning the tool when I got motivated and supported by the team. The same feeling I got from and for other people too. I heard something like this more than once “Hey, I know someone who is a specialist on this, I can put you in contact with him”.
If you have the inner drive to learn or go for something good, inside Pipedrive it is a sure thing that you will find someone that will motivate you and at least guide to your objective. And your achievement will be really rewarding.
The individual project
During the onboard, before we were presented with the briefing for both, individual and team projects, I was looking around the office and getting acquainted with the environment. At some point, I wondered: “where are the customers?” Looking for any visualization, a journey map, empathy map, persona, etc. Well, I haven’t visited every corner of the office, yet (which took me some took to fulfill that curiosity to explore everything).
We could pick among three individual projects, and I chose the one about customer visualization. Paula, Head of Research, my PM at the time, together with Birgit Suuder, product designer, proposed me the challenge, how to make the customer visible to everyone in the office??
Paula shared previous research materials with me, with one persona on focus to be the first to make it to the work environment.
The process started with listening to previous interviews with a customer and taking notes to later analyze what is important to share with everyone.
With an understanding of the customer values and needs, it was time to put together initial sketches of how the customer visualization should be, what type of information we need to share with everyone, etc.
Paula and Birgit helped to improve the visualization with many rounds of feedback. I appreciate that!
At some point, I realized that we needed to frame not only who was the Pipedrive customer in a shareable visualization, but also the project target audience, I mean, us! Designers, developers, marketers, PMs, literally everyone who works with the product.
So I tested a few iterations of the visualization, just by showing it and talking to people in the office, I used the conversation to get feedback and learn about who I was designing for, Pipedrivers!
I used the internal brand and illustration guidelines, carefully defined by talented illustrators in-house, and applied it to the poster. Most of my work on the poster was about composition and how to make the data visible.
The project was very fun, I got to meet many people in the office, besides fellow designers, people from other departments too. It was an initial step to have customer insights, literally visible to everyone in the office. Yay!
I’m grateful to Paula, Birgit, and everyone who welcomed me and have been so dedicated with mentorship throughout all this period. Suur aitäh!
Team project
The team project was a great experience, we were a group fo three interns. Leaana-Helena was our PM and provided invaluable guidance throughout the project, I had the opportunity to learn so much with her!
After the onboard, we got the briefing, and our mission was:
Research and prototype a solution for personal and team salespeople progress tracking, and motivation to improve long term goals.
Research
Once we got the briefing explained, it was up to us to define how would we tackle the project. We sat down to discuss how would we plan the project, then we counted the weeks and built the planning around the double diamond, which helped us to have a good estimate of the time needed for each part of the process.
We used Confluence to share the documentation of the project with the other teams, and among our team, we used Miro (Realtimeboard by time), it allowed us to adjust the planning if something unexpected happens and helped to keep track of the progress and all the data.
As my colleagues were tackling other projects at the same time, I started by drawing the research plan and later split the tasks. The research was built with desk research, job shadowing, in-depth interviews, and survey.
On each step, we split the tasks and diverged, later on, we converged to discuss the data gathered, the project needs, the user values, and the challenges, so we could review our plan and decide how to move on to the next steps.
Synthesis
Each research approach helped us to understand the customer better, we got insides that we wouldn’t obtain otherwise. The company has a clear definition of the target audience, but the research effort is a continuous process. The researchers Agne and Paula were very kind and helped us to use the customer database and execute the research.
Once the research phase was completed, we did a design-sprint together with our PM Leaana-Helena. In three days we put out the first ideas, focused on one, quickly prototyped and tested it internally.
Ideation
The design print gave our team a good direction to move forward in the define phase. After we made a synthesis of the insights obtained in the research phase, we used the Lotus Blossom ideation technique with a central theme “motivation in sales”, so we could expand more our options based on the values and needs we identified.
The outcome was a focus point for the
- How to raise the value of team collaboration?
- How to visualize clear tasks and progress tracking?
- Being able to see individual progress and how this contributes to team targets.
- Gamification
The process is iterative, and bits of the planning were constantly changing. Making the planning flexible was a good starting point so we could integrate or change any step as needed.
Sketching
Soon we started to sketch out some ideas so we could see already what might work and prototype it later. First, we diverged and sketched more detailed ideas individually, then we came together, explained each idea and voted. Later we converged and started to build on top of the ideas together until we have a mature idea worth taking forward to prototype and get feedback upon.
Prototyping
We made a prototype of the selected idea and invited 5 Pipedrive customers to try it. As we identified any usability issue or value for the customer, we quickly made changes and tested a slightly different version with the next customer. Iterating between sessions gave us the opportunity to obtain more qualitative insights, and to be sure that we were going in the right direction.
Testing
After we fix the problems identified with the first prototype, we reviewed the concept and tested an updated version of the prototype with 9 customers. For the usability testing, we created a test script with the points we need to focus on. The prototype simulated a scenario for the participant to follow and give feedback upon. After the testings were completed, everything was documented and summarize with key takeaways.
Learnings from the process
- Use real data in the prototypes. With real data, people have less room to imagine what is not relevant and focus on the important features.
- More low-fi prototypes to test raw ideas quickly.
- Carefully consider new changes and ideas, prioritize accordingly.
- Decide and move on. Don’t get stuck on one idea too long, make a decision and move forward.
The outcome
Competition and collaboration widgets for Pipedrive
Ability to have in dashboards, competition and collaboration widgets tied to goals, to allow people to easily keep track of how they are doing compared to their peers in teams and individually.
People valued to have a small competition to keep the motivation up. However, we cared to avoid making it a toxic competition.
Reflection
This internship experience gave the perspective I was looking for. It was great to actively participate in the company challenges, give and receive feedback, and to learn so much with talented professionals.
During the whole process, our team was constantly in contact with other teams, in meetings we had the opportunity to give and receive feedback. We also gathered outside the office for great chilling times! I felt encouraged to learn more and that I had the support you to do that. The teams keep a good cooperative spirit and support each other to grow, is that spirit that I believe makes people better every day, and allow people to make the customer better with a great product.
I thank the Pipedrive team for the great experience, Jaanus, Leaana-Helena, for all the kindness and support, my fellow teammates Renata and Brenda, and everyone who had been with us made it a good time.
I hope I could inspire and give back at least a little compared to what all I got.
Panna on vaja!
