PGi supplies the world's businesses with conferencing and collaboration solutions, from audio conferencing to webcasting to collaboration SAAS products. With more than $450M in revenue, a broad product portfolio and an engaged, powerful sales force, our global company needed a formal means of fielding customer, end-user, executive and sales engineer feedback to spin up new service concepts. In 2013, I joined PGi’s VP of Innovation and a senior engineer to form the company’s first official innovation lab.
Objective
Establish an internal innovation practice to carry PGi’s product organization forward under the CTO, former WebMD founder David Guthrie. Methodically funnel ideas for new business, then prototype and productize those ideas.
Challenges
1. Make sure the right ideas win. In soliciting insights, we’d be engaging charismatic, powerful executives with their own agendas. But a good idea can come from anywhere, and prototyping time and effort is precious. We needed an ironclad method to ensure only the best opportunities were explored no matter the idea’s origin.
2. Activate a siloed employee base, and work up enough reputation to impose on the company’s expert resources. Engagement can be tough with more than 2,300 globally spread associates. We knew we needed to leverage targeted tactics to get engagement on a grass-roots level. We also needed to capitalize on niche expertise when needed, despite the fact that everyone is busy with their own jobs.
Role + team
As the design lead for the team, I partnered with the VP of Innovation (who served as product lead) and a lead engineer. The role involved application of design thinking to transform concepts into prototypes and new business using rapid iteration, overseeing user experience design, usability and brand consistency.
We kicked off our official charter by drafting a formal process and mission statement. I focused my talent on designing a custom internal department logo, visual identity system, and graphic model of our process to broadcast to the organization.
To engage associates and solicit ideas from the get-go, we pursued several strategic approaches. First, we partnered with corporate communications to build out an informational site on the company intranet, then crafted a missive from the CTO’s chair to announce the initiative. Then, we created and made available scrum materials for anyone in the company to print out and use, offering advice and training on agile processes. Our website included interactive forms for any associate to submit a business idea or patent application.
We wanted to curate a certain culture and mystique around the Innovation Lab, so we designed signature desk gifts to be given only to PGi associates who dedicated significant time and energy toward a project. The special packaging included a space for our team to write and sign a handwritten thank-you to the contributor, and we found that people kept both the gift and the packaging on display when they received one.
To further engage the company, the Lab hosted ideation sessions with product managers, tech leads and sales engineers, a key group with unique access to customer wants. We designed workshops to prompt discussion around business and technology trends, brainstorm new opportunities and open dialogue about customer issues. I researched and created the technology trend prompt slides below, among other materials.
One of the fundamental aspects of the Lab’s charter was baked-in permission to fail, and many concepts that made it as far as the prototype phase did exactly this (for varying reasons).
iMeet Concierge
One promising concept that ultimately didn’t productize was an expansion of the iMeet portfolio called iMeet Concierge. Our team learned that many diamond customers desired a special dashboard for managing VIP conference calls and accounts. So we rapidly scaled up a clickable demo of a web-enabled control center for managing C-Level executives’ calls. Administrative assistants could white-glove calls for important business leaders, muting background noise for the executives and dialing out to invitees, among other features.
CaptureMeet
CaptureMeet was a small desktop app concept we comped for European customers who needed to record meetings, but wanted all recordings to save locally to users’ computers instead of saving in the cloud.
We designated an MVP feature set and the prototype got as far as these low-fidelity comps, clickable enough through InVision to walk customers through a fast onboarding and a compact interface for recording.