PNC

And a positive experience was that we worked really well together, there were no team issues at all the entire time. We had a really nice client. So that's all good sort of atmosphere, like there was no conflict or anything like that which can certainly spoil things. [2967],[2966]
Yep. And how do you think about their Gen Y customers, they weren't doing real well attracting them or retaining them, didn't have a real presence. They were under market share for that segment and they wanted to think about how do we, we're obviously not thinking about them right, what do we do? And so we took a pretty broad look at the financial lives of young, particularly tech savvy people. And younger, they weren't all super young, but people over 21, people sort of under 40. [2984]
And we pretty much developed some pretty quickly some interesting frameworks that I think were really robust and I think that was really satisfying because it sort of set the tone for doing good ideation. We had some really strong ways of thinking about money in more emotional ways rather than transactional ways and how people feel about their money and sort of developed certainly from some of the patterns that emerged from the research and stuff like that. And it sort of came a little bit easily in a way that there was no real ... It wasn't hard to convince the client that these were useful frameworks, we came up with ideas, we came up with things that were ... They wanted a broad range, a landscape of things, we did some concept testing and some things bombed, that's okay, we learn from them and we were able to pick them up and turn them into something else. [2985],[2968],[2969]
It wasn't hard to convince the client that these were useful frameworks, we came up with ideas, we came up with things that were ... They wanted a broad range, a landscape of things, we did some concept testing and some things bombed, that's okay, we learn from them and we were able to pick them up and turn them into something else. [2986]
So there was a very nice and I think partly in the work we do, since we have clients, that if a client is making the team very, very apprehensive at every step of the way, they can sort of cause them pain because they don't have that freedom to sort of fail. And with a good client that understands that you're going to put out concepts and sometimes you know in fat they didn't go, after the first concept review, I remember with users, I do remember now they said, "Gosh, is this the way it ... " A couple bombed, or no, it didn't bomb but like really didn't resonate with people and we said, "Well, this is normal. We throw out a range of things and we sort of hit the extremes and we still learn something from the ones that didn't do well." It's not about yes or no, it's about using prototypes to learn something. And once we told them that, they understood it. They went, "Oh, that's interesting. Okay. That's fine." [2970]
"We can handle that." So I think that that's part of it is that you sort of, if there's a nice atmosphere, like that project where there were no big conflicts or things like that to get in the way. And plus the work was strong, it sort of came together and there wasn't this sort of days of swimming around and not coming up with anything. Like it progressed really, really well. In fact at the end of it, we were remarking that we sort of didn't have any late nights, it was very smooth in the sense that we just made progress every day. Every week we just kept on chugging along and checking off little pieces of it until we got to where we needed to go. And it wasn't this sort of sense like [inaudible 00:16:27], "Oh, my God, we made no progress." It's like it was this very, very sort of very continuous thing. So it was very satisfying. There are projects where like you literally can go a week and like you feel like you made no progress [2987],[2971]
One thing we promised in the brief was to really understand how to access these people, not just develop solutions for them which we really did pretty well, but also how do we find these people and how do we connect with them was part of the original briefing and frankly we didn't really deliver on that. So they told us, like, "You didn't really deliver on that." [2988]
That's part of what made it a very good project, there was a core team of like five people on their side that were there consistently through the entire thing. As far as real decision makers, I think there were two of them that were real decision makers and they were there for the entire time. And they were very, very straightforward. I mean, I remember we had one meeting and like, "Love this," and then they said something else, "You know what? We really don't think you hit it there." And they were very, very open and honest and straightforward the entire time. [2990],[2989]
That's part of what made it a very good project, there was a core team of like five people on their side that were there consistently through the entire thing. As far as real decision makers, I think there were two of them that were real decision makers and they were there for the entire time. And they were very, very straightforward. I mean, I remember we had one meeting and like, "Love this," and then they said something else, "You know what? We really don't think you hit it there." And they were very, very open and honest and straightforward the entire time. They were excellent clients. And having clients that tell you exactly where you stand, there's no second guessing, they tell you in real time, makes for a very happy team because yeah, well, we didn't quite hit it there, that's okay, and I forget which meeting this was, I think that there was a ... One thing we promised in the brief was to really understand how to access these people, not just develop solutions for them which we really did pretty well, but also how do we find these people and how do we connect with them was part of the original briefing and frankly we didn't really deliver on that. So they told us, like, "You didn't really deliver on that." [2973],[2972],[2974],[2975]
I mean, all of them reported directly to the CEO and so they were absolutely empowered to make decisions and feel responsible for them. [2992],[2991]
Can you repair. So yeah, so having that really tight team with the client side is I think it's hugely valuable. But it doesn't always happen. I tend to evaluate in what we do, the chance of getting something to market with, innovative thing to market with a bad client team, just it lowers the chances of success measurably because it'll get stuck in the organization and never get out the other end. If you have a very tight and powered client team at a high level organization like this, I mean, all of them reported directly to the CEO and so they were absolutely empowered to make decisions and feel responsible for them. [2976],[2977]
They were looking to do something innovative, they were not looking to do something crazy. So I would say risk is ... There are times when risk was ... They were open to things that were risky, ultimately I think that they weren't looking to completely set up a new business. So I don't know how that means from a risk point of view. So, something that meant a completely new business model with a brand new business, completely different organization, that's a highly risky thing to do. I don't think they were prepared to do that. [2978]
I'd say medium high, medium high. They were certainly not risk averse but I think that they were looking very much from a ... As we really settled into a direction for what they were really going to pick up on, they started to go back and just saying, "Okay, what does this mean for our business?" So I think that they were willing to consider pretty radical things but then sort of had to be tempered by how does it fit in their business model. [2979]
They did, although not as soon as we had expected them to. Actually, it didn't happen in the space of this project, they did it in a subsequent project where they did some ... [2993]
was a great brief, actually, it was a nice ... And we worked with them to develop it. [2994]
No, the timer budget was just, that's why it was so smooth, it's like the team just went through, we hit all the milestones, there was enough time to do things, it wasn't a problem. No. [2980],[2981]
And there was a real insight there about that allocated and unallocated money are really quite different in people's minds and right now there aren't systems to support those differences. So it was a real pretty, I think pretty profound insight that the team found. I made a framework to explain it, why it's true, and then we ideated around it, and came up with a pretty unique solution. This is a subsequent project, but the phase here we're talking about, we already had these initial concepts that we're teasing around this thing that got conflated into the next piece of work. But we had a couple really key insights, I think, that really had a lot of power behind them. [2982]
So it wasn't a hard thing to do but there was a little bit of a learning for how to sort of settle differences between doing research for research's sake and research in the service of design. They're slightly different, the techniques may be the same but how you process the data and the kinds of frameworks you develop are different because you're developing frameworks that are useful for design rather than ones that are useful for explaining the world in a descriptive way. [2995]
Well, it was good, we had a brand new person to [inaudible 00:26:26], it was his first project, so that was ... And my role a little bit was to help mentor him through the process from a research point of view. He was certainly an experienced researcher but not in a place like [inaudible 00:26:40]. So it wasn't a hard thing to do but there was a little bit of a learning for how to sort of settle differences between doing research for research's sake and research in the service of design. They're slightly different, the techniques may be the same but how you process the data and the kinds of frameworks you develop are different because you're developing frameworks that are useful for design rather than ones that are useful for explaining the world in a descriptive way. We tend to develop what I call more generative frameworks rather than descriptive frameworks. And I think there's a subtle difference that researchers need to understand. So that was [inaudible 00:27:21] but he was all open to that. The project leader was very experienced, I worked with him on several programs, we've always worked well together. And the other designer on the programs, I've worked with her several ... So, I knew the other people, a new person who was willing to learn but very smart and sharp, so it wasn't an issue. It was a very good team. [2983]
Reference Tags
[2967] Great example - Team Dynamics,[2966] Organizing effectively,[2984] Empathetic disposition,[2985] Creative Confidence,[2968] Communicating ideas across domains,[2969] Great example - Productive innovation norms,[2986] Optimism,[2970] Great example - Productive innovation norms,[2987] Organizing effectively,[2971] Balanced workload pressure,[2988] Communicating ideas across domains,[2990] Communicating ideas across domains,[2989] Organizational encouragement,[2973] Communicating ideas across domains,[2972] Great example - Productive innovation norms,[2974] Organizing effectively,[2975] Trust,[2992] Organizing effectively,[2991] Promote autonomy & sense of ownership,[2976] Decisive leadership,[2977] Organizing effectively,[2978] Lack of real innovation mandate,[2979] Lack of real innovation mandate,[2993] Alignment,[2994] Effort justification,[2980] Appropriate resources,[2981] Balanced workload pressure,[2982] Appeal to novelty,[2995] Methodologically creative,[2983] Organizing effectively