design & strategy consulting
The Situation
A small team of civil activists/developers and two community radio stations, secured funding to develop an open-source speech-to-text tool for the Hungarian language. This tool aimed to transcribe and make searchable the archives of community radios.
The Team
Radio Representative
Data Engineer
NLP Engineer
Frontend Developer
Language Scientist
Marketing Specialist
Personal notes
As one of my first professional projects after university, I was eager to apply my academic knowledge to a real-world challenge when I was approached to join the team. My role was to assist in strategic planning to ensure that both the project and the team could thrive even after the funding period ended.
Getting Up to Speed
Objective: to understand the team’s current design process and familiarize myself with the fields
Method:
Conversations with team members to understand their roles
Desk research on radio consumption habits and media innovation theory
Pre-evaluation form for team members to understand their views on the project’s strengths and potential weaknesses
My passion for design comes from the opportunity to continually learn about diverse fields. Engaging in research and insightful conversations during this onboarding phase allowed me to discover a whole new world of community radios and software development.
Project Roadmap Workshop Series
My role was to help the team understand where their processes were getting stuck. Often, sprints passed without certain tasks being completed, causing them to be pushed from one sprint to the next. This psychological paralysis was something I worked to uncover with the developer team by visualizing the processes together.
Design Process Analysis: One of the toughest challenges was still developing the concept while navigating a rigid, linear development process dictated by the funding structure, which limited opportunities for iterative refinements.
Future Scenarios: We discussed probable, preferable, plausible, and possible future scenarios for the team and its project. We then clustered the actions and subtasks required to achieve these different scenarios.
We Have - We Can - Funding: We gathered our available knowledge and human resources, identified the efforts needed to be taken, and explored possible strategies for securing additional funding to cover the efforts.
One of my favorite aspects of my work is analyzing development and design processes and identifying areas for improvement. As the only designer on the team, one of my key responsibilities was to support thinking and collaboration through visual tools. This visual approach not only provided a framework for the endless meetings and valuable discussions but also served as a stimulation and an excellent record-keeping tool.
Workshop 1: Team Alignment
Format: 2-hour online workshop using Miro
Purpose: to align the team by establishing a common understanding of the current situation, exploring motivations, setting team goals, and agreeing on a desired future state
Participants: 5 members
Activities
Current Situation vs. Desired Situation: Mapped out the developer team’s relationship with the project and the radios, from current to possible ideal states.
Team Members’ Positionalities: Members positioned themselves within the project according to their roles and their levels of temporal, financial, and emotional investment to better understand each other's perspectives.
Individual Goals - Team Goals - Project Goals: Team members shared their personal goals, identified overlaps and synergies, and established team goals in relation to the project goals.
Project Goals Hierarchy: Based on the pre-evaluation form, the team developed an exciting and potentially monetizable direction that aligned with project deliverables and team goals, which elements they organized into a hierarchical structure similar to Maslow's pyramid.
One of the challenges I faced was balancing my dual role as both a team member and an external facilitator. This tension became apparent during workshops when the team rightly expected me to contribute while I was also leading the session, requiring me to navigate between impartiality and personal engagement.
Workshop 2: Team and Project Profile
As the project evolved, a potential direction emerged, providing a broader interpretation of the project and a future vision for the team. However, this often got mixed up with the current project focus, creating mental blocks during meetings. To address this, it was essential to clearly distinguish between the future plans and the current focus.
Format: 2-hour long online workshop using Miro
Purpose: Define and articulate the team's and project's core values, branding personality, and unique attributes to enhance both internal and external communication.
Participants: 5 members
Activities
Personality - Identity Attributes and Behavior: Imagined the project and team as a person and described their characteristics.
Emotional Attributes - Core Values, Logo, and Brand: Explored values that define the project/team, identified connecting words, and examined how these values are reflected in daily work and dynamics.
Rational Attributes - Promises, Slogans, and Messages: Identified competitive advantages, promises, and how they are communicated both internally and externally.
Differences and Similarities: Compared the results for the team and the project.
I particularly enjoy approaching branding questions collaboratively, using design challenges as an opportunity for the team to iteratively redefine themselves. I view design as a journey of self-discovery, guiding the people and organizations I work with along the way.