IBM had an ambition: create a repeatable system that enabled Offering Leaders to build $100M services businesses. The challenge was behavioral, not just operational. Offering Managers knew what outcomes they needed to achieve, but didn't trust the process required to get there. Research revealed that they were skipping the rigorous discovery work and jumping straight to polished sales materials. The result was offerings that sounded good but didn't address real market, customer, or user needs.
The question the team set out to answer: how do we create behavioral shifts at scale, across a large and distributed organization?
The IBM Consulting Design Team conducted research with Offering Managers across the organization. A key insight from the field: managers were designing offerings broadly on purpose, planning to tailor them later, while performing focus for their stakeholders during reviews. The rigorous work to build $100M businesses simply wasn't happening.
The as-is state was stark: a room full of offering managers, and just a handful of designers scattered among them — outnumbered and underutilized.
The solution wasn't a single tool — it was a system: an updated program, a new curriculum, and a brand new software tool to support both. I led the UX team through ideation, sketching program concepts as illustrated storyboards to rapidly communicate intended activities and test ideas with the team. We explored multiple program structures before landing on a phased model spanning foundation, acceleration, and activation.
Early screen designs were built for rapid user testing, not polish. I used hand sketches to put the pieces together and communicate intended interactions to the team quickly. From there we moved into high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch, iterating through multiple rounds of user testing. The prototype map grew complex — dozens of screens and flows connected across two user roles.
The software tool we designed was ViewPoint — a platform that guided Offering Leaders through a structured development process, tracking progress across nine units from discovery through commercialization. I designed the component system for ViewPoint in parallel with IBM's nascent design language, Carbon, contributing patterns back as we built them: typography, color, tables, modals, navigation, forms, and more.
[ This is where you noted "this is where I got to shine." What did it teach you about designing for behavioral change, not just task completion? What was the hardest part of changing how a large organization worked? ]