Spreading a Design Mindset at Fannie Mae

“Design Thinking Half-Day Course”
Fannie Mae // Summer 2018 - Spring 2019
Design Thinking, Content Creation, Business Development

One of the first objectives of our new design team was to spread the design mindset and human-centered design around the enterprise. In 2017 our founding design director created a fully-staffed, bespoke, intensive course and with the team delivered it to over 800 colleagues in Digital Products, our primary partner organization. They were wildly successful in deepening ties and generating solutions with our partners, but now we had to figure how to scale this to the entire enterprise.

My Role

I lead a team comprised of two design strategists to revamp the design education course. I coordinated with a number of designers from across the team to deliver the course.

The Challenge

Now that our primary partners were trained, our organization needed to spread the design mindset to the remaining 7,000 colleagues around the enterprise. To scale up, we knew that we’d have to adapt the previous course to fit a broader audience.

We collected feedback from previous participants through surveys and conversations, and considered our team’s own limitations. Our main findings were that:

• The full days were just too long for most people.

• Tailoring design education to actual business problems caused participants to lose focus on actually appreciating design.

• Including too many advanced design concepts into an introductory session actually caused participants to raise their guard and tune out.

The Solution

We considered the findings and the first change made was to shorten the course to a half-day. Additionally we:

• shortened the lecture component of the course, and split it up across the session so participants would jump into activities much faster. We also added anecdotes about how our top leadership had utilized design thinking themselves.

• stripped out the more “advanced” design methodologies so their first taste of design was not one of frustration.

• settled on a standard universal “problem” to solve at each session - the air travel experience. We continued to meet with business unit leadership before each session, but only to discuss expectations and logistics.

The Outcome

After spending a few weeks rewriting the introduction to design thinking course, we spent the next two quarters delivering it to 17 additional business units ranging from new intern cohorts to groups of executive management.

We were able to run the courses with as few as two instructors and retained a superb satisfaction rate. We had hundreds of employees in our pipeline requesting a seat in the course over the next year. Our pilot ended with us hiring a new full-time design education lead who continued to deliver and iterate on the revamped course, and who added in a new two-day course from the LUMA institute into our team’s educational offerings.

The course also continued to be a pipeline of interested parties around the enterprise who partnered with our team to solve some of their more complex problems.