design portfolio
design portfolio
Innovation Program | 2018
Project length: 2 months
Working in partnership with Pollen8 - a London based innovation agency - I joined a team of two PWC partners during the company Sandbox Innovation Program. The program is divided in 2 phases, designed to prepare candidates to pitch new business solutions to the Company Senior Managers in the aim of raising funds for further development.
The first phase is called Whitebox and consists of a 4 week sprint focused on problem framing and ideation. Successful candidates progress to Goldbox, a fast-paced 4 week project dedicated to test and refine the solution as well as define the product roadmap for the final pitch.
As the Design Lead for the team, my responsibilities included research planning and ops, facilitation of design workshops, concept, prototype and pitch deck design.
Our team wanted to uncover the reasons leading staff to leave PWC before their second year. So we started off by analysing insights collected by the HR department.
1-1 interviews were conducted with associates and partners as well as startups, to help us understand how they were currently recruiting talent. These were the main insights:
With a better understanding of the problem, it seemed like an obvious opportunity to link underused talent awaiting for projects on the large corporation with startups in need of professional skills.
Amongst a series of design workshops ran with the team, we have collected early stage learnings and assumptions in an attempt to map the experience, feelings and pain points faced by PWC staff before, during and after a hypothetical professional immersion at startups.
The same exercise was used to analyse the current situation and possible needs from startups willing to get expert support from PWC.
Having identified several opportunities to learn further about our users enabled us to build a thorough research plan as well as a concierge program to collect data and validate our proposal.
Research methodologies adopted:
• User interviews with PWC graduates
• User interviews with startups in London
• Surveys sent out to internal PWC teams
• Surveys sent out to We Work and other tech / startup hubs
We have also developed a concierge test to validate the proposal, including the following activities:
• Kick off session with startup and candidate
• Diary studies to be completed by candidate during 1 month immersion phase
• Weekly meetings with both parties
• Wrap up session to rate the experience
We clustered insights from the collected data and identified patterns. It allowed us to validate previous knowledge and decide on the key issues to tackle:
• Startups trust PWC brand, but were not aware of the potential of using expertise for a short period of time on a reduced rate. 83% of interviewed startups would take PWC staff and 50% would pay for this service.
• PWC employees find the immersion a great opportunity to grow and would feel more confident with a clear action plan. 48% leave in the first 4 years and, amongst them, 30% is due to lack of experience and / or responsibility. 90% of associates would be open for a secondment with startups.
• Startups lack time and resources to train new people in a frequent basis.
Our brainstorm toolkit included “Crazy 8’s” exercise to foster innovative solutions. In a very short timeline, participants attempted to visualise ideas and, at this stage, were encouraged to go for quantity and explore edgy solutions.
The need to connect skills to startups through a digital product was clear and should be used to communicate this bespoke PWC service on offer, while speeding up the recruitment and briefing process.
A Competitive Research was executed to get a better understanding of the recruitment tools and expert marketplaces available. We’ve analysed a few products and services used by startups to advertise opportunities and search for talent. It has also informed key functionalities to be considered on our product proposal.
A landing page was designed to support the pitch by communicating the service on offer for PWC internal teams as well as potential partners in the UK startup scene.
Low fidelity prototypes were built to test the offer and communication with the target community.
This InVision prototype takes startup recruiting teams through the process of registering a new account on PWC Sprint, requesting a new job and reviewing potential partners matched by the system:
https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/4KKXSV8ZRUG
The project was pitched to board members in the summer of 2018 and PWC Sprint continued to be developed by the team as a side project.