IBM Hired Hundreds of Designers to Figure Out What Customers Want
To shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs—at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.
25 July 2016
| Mark Bergin
|
via
Bloomberg
A few months ago, senior executives at Vodafone's Irish division sat down with a 16-year-old boy to ask him about his daily routine and, specifically, how he uses his smartphone. The kid told them that the first thing he does in the morning is check Snapchat.
On the way to school, Snapchat. On the way home, Snapchat. Sometimes he stops by an ice-cream shop, picks up frozen yogurt bars and uses the free Wi-fi to upload videos onto, yes, Snapchat.
The Vodafone executives had just received a crash course in "design thinking," a philosophy embraced wholesale by the tech services industry, which is struggling to avoid being disrupted by slick, intuitive apps from Slack and Salesforce even as its traditional business managing corporate IT goes away.
Design thinking sounds like a slogan concocted by a management consultant. In fact, it's a problem-solving approach used by designers for decades. And it's hard to argue with the goal, which boils down to knowing what your customers want.
That's not a skill that comes naturally to the engineers who build software for big corporations. So to shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs—at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.
At IBM, they team up with engineers and consultants and embed with a multiplicity of clients. Besides providing customer insights, the teams encourage constant feedback and tweak products as they're built—a process aimed at getting them out faster.
On the way to school, Snapchat. On the way home, Snapchat. Sometimes he stops by an ice-cream shop, picks up frozen yogurt bars and uses the free Wi-fi to upload videos onto, yes, Snapchat.
The Vodafone executives had just received a crash course in "design thinking," a philosophy embraced wholesale by the tech services industry, which is struggling to avoid being disrupted by slick, intuitive apps from Slack and Salesforce even as its traditional business managing corporate IT goes away.
Design thinking sounds like a slogan concocted by a management consultant. In fact, it's a problem-solving approach used by designers for decades. And it's hard to argue with the goal, which boils down to knowing what your customers want.
That's not a skill that comes naturally to the engineers who build software for big corporations. So to shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs—at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.
At IBM, they team up with engineers and consultants and embed with a multiplicity of clients. Besides providing customer insights, the teams encourage constant feedback and tweak products as they're built—a process aimed at getting them out faster.
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