First team to go through a remote workshop at the start of the 2020 pandemic
Preparing a global investment group managing more than $1.7 trillion to run remote Design Sprints.
Capital Group
Capital Group is one of the world's largest investment management organizations, managing more than $2.6 trillion in equity and fixed income assets for millions of individual and institutional investors globally.
Role
Consultant
Product Designer
Design Thinking Facilitator
Deliverables
Remote Design Sprints
Readout Decks
Facilitation Guides
Summary
Capital Group sought to expand their internal innovation team's capabilities by bringing in an external expert to train the team in Design Sprint facilitation and create facilitation guides. When the pandemic hit, we helped them pivot to remote work by identifying the digital tools needed for remote Design Sprints and creating facilitation guides. The team has since run over a dozen remote Design Sprints and grew their assets to $2.6 trillion as of the end of 2022.
Gathering real user directional feedback on concepts
The Challenge
Capital Group wanted to expand the capabilities of their internal innovation team by bringing in an external expert to help train the team in Design Sprint facilitation and create facilitation guides to extend and improve the ability to innovate and invest in products across the organization to build a competitive advantage. When COVID-19 hit, the company quickly moved the entire organization to work-from-home status and the challenge expanded to meeting their initial objective while delivering the same value remotely.
Our Approach
To start, we identified a strong internal team with whom we were already planning an in-person Design Sprint to pilot the remote Sprint and train-by-doing.
We identified the digital tools needed to create the same (or improved) experience as the in-person Sprint and onboarded the team into with a short training to ensure everyone could hit the ground running on day one of the Sprint.
The most challenging part of running a remote sprint with this team was getting everyone comfortable with the digital tools. In the end, the team was pleased with the learnings gained for the product and challenge on which the Sprint was focused, and we also learned a ton of best practices for remote Design Sprints.
We used these learnings to create detailed facilitation guides and frameworks for remote Design Sprints and other remote design thinking processes, in addition we created in-person facilitation guides for when the company would returned to in-person gatherings.
Final product designs used for production