Micro-Alignment Within Agile

SITUATION

Moving From Business-Centric to Customer-Centric

E*TRADE decided to adopt an agile methodology as part of its drive to constantly enhance the way they work. This would allow them to make smaller design changes often, while monitoring market trends and customer feedback. Put another way, agile allows them to focus more tightly on the customer.

CHALLENGE

Implement + Scaled Design Thinking & Agile Methods

Implementing an agile working process means moving fast and constantly evaluating & iterating projects. This means E*TRADE would need to consistently align cross-channel teams more often and more closely, as well as prioritize/reprioritize the roadmap and ideate on pivoted solutions.

For co-located teams, this can pose a challenge. With E*TRADE's core team based out of New York and the rest distributed across the US, it's even more of a challenge.

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SOLUTION

Digital Customer Experience Design Process

Their new design process helps deliver on E*TRADE’s mission to put the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE at the center of the stage. So that other teams can ramp up quickly and understand the project context, the design process makes use of MURAL frameworks in each stage.

Everything is recorded in murals, from research to design.

When the design team engages with researchers, they need to get caught up and briefed on the most recent updates. But instead of each team needing to prepare an executive presentation to share, they can just turn to the murals directly. Testing murals are updated so research teams can jump right in there to see the newest information without digging through and reviewing all of the past assets.

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RESULTS

Radical Transparency of the Process

Designers feel more empowered to lead the conversations and MURAL is now also used broadly across product development. By implementing the new process E*TRADE was able to close the gap between the product and design teams.

They're able to capture the full history of their projects, making it easier to see ongoing improvements by visualizing what the product looked like before and after design. Research teams can quickly understand context. Marketing joins the project at the end and quickly catch up all the findings.

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By using a cloud based solution there is no more versioning. Murals act as a single source of truth that showcases the full brief, making it easier to share research and ramp up new team members more quickly.

IMPACT

• Project Turn Around Time Reduced: By communicating more efficiently the team can be more productive.
• Faster Onboarding of New Members: New team members can be on-boarded in less time by making the process more visible.
• Reduced Need to Travel: By making design and agile collaboration possible in the day to day, there is no need to organize costly workshops and fly everyone in.

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TAKE ACTION

Jobs to Be Done Journey - Template

This template, designed by and used within E*TRADE, will help you map out and understand how your customers achieve their jobs to be done (JTBD) via your current and potentially new services.

Create a mural in your workspace from the template below:

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