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Since 2014, I've designed and facilitated countless workshops for the Marketing department at The Adecco Group. Eventually this evolved into an offical day for workshopping with my team and the pilot of Squads, which has now been iterated on and launched globally.
Innovating as a team with Workshop Wednesdays
HOW IT STARTED
I like workshops. Meetings tend to go off-track and have a way of focusing on the wrong problems, or worse—starting with the solutions. I'll take any opportunity I have to design and facilitate a workshop. This has led me to designing many workshops for teams at The Adecco Group, including:
- Yearly planning for global CMO groups
- Project discovery sessions
- Debriefs and retrospectives
- Problem-solving sessions
- Team-building exercises
- Design sprints
- Training
Workshop to bridge the gap between marketing and design - Video by Edmundo Nava
Marketing Operations team Trello: Objective-based board for our strategies and goals
WORKSHOP WEDNESDAYS
As a manager, I had core values/objectives for my team, which I documented in a Trello board (see image). A dedicated day for workshopping and experimentation was one of the first pilots from the board. We used an offsite co-working space, made a Trello board to plan and document ideas, and started meeting every Wednesday. For the first few workshops, we tackled unique problems for other teams in our department. For each workshop (and for every workshop I design), I developed a custom framework using variations of methods gathered from places like the Hyper Island Toolbox, Google design sprints, and other common techniques.
PRESENTATION: Workshop to help train new team members on our design process through experiential learning and real-world problem solving..
Circles of Influence to focus the participants on where they can truly make an impact.
NEXT, SQUADS
One problem with the workshops is that most of the responsibility, and as such, the perks, fell on me. I wanted to give more autonomy to my team, to inspire and enable them to do their best work. Influenced by Spotify's Agile + Autonomous way of working, I set up squads for our smaller team of 12. Each group tackled one area of need: UX, Collaboration, Content, and Video, We met each Wednesday for a quick stand-up, then worked on self-identified project(s), and ended the day with another check-in to share what was accomplished. We mixed in these Squad days with the regular Workshop Wednesdays, alternating as needed to make room for larger workshops.
THE RESULTS
Both the Squads framework and Workshop Wednesday have been iterated on and expanded to larger teams.
The Squads idea was recently adopted by the Head of Marketing US and launched globally as a way to connect completely separate teams, giving them an opportunity to learn from each other and share ideas.
Workshop Wednesday is now led by one of my direct reports, who has opened up the voting and Trello board to the entire Marketing department, bringing more transparency to the overall planning and selection process that goes into each workshop.
Experienced in:
Leading design
User experience design
Design systems
Wireframes and prototypes
Art direction
Branding and identity systems
Content and copywriting
Campaign development
Information architecture
Leading products
Market and user research
Product-market fit validation
Developing roadmaps
Requirements gathering
Prioritization
User stories
Sprint planning
Product design
Leading teams
Design thinking + ideation sessions
Recruitment and hiring
Mentoring
Workshop facilitation
Product strategy development
UX and design strategy development
Marketing strategy development
Forecasting and future planning
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