Role: Design Manager
Year completed: 2023
Problem
Mable was going through a rapid period of growth having scaled the company from 50 – 250 staff over 12 months following financial backing. A company-wide restructure saw a revised C-Suite team join Mable and kick-start a transition to lean practice.
At the core of the change was driving up delivered care and expanding our client and support worker customer base to reach more Australians needing and providing care.
Approach
The new approach included product, design and engineering teams across 3 tribes. The leadership team engaged in a 2-day off-site to redesign our ways of working to focus on lean practice and agile delivery.
Over this time, we set the foundations for the tribe’s vision, metrics and processes from scratch. We worked in teams across disciplines across tribes and developed an approach that aligned with the company strategy defined by C-Suite.
We aligned our strategic pillars to tribe opportunities and the key metrics we’d need to be successful. We focused on a 6-month timeframe intending to regroup to course correct based on learnings. The key focus was to seek out ways to empower and lead our teams to do their best work.
With the support of product, engineering and data leads, I headed the vision and empowered our squads to create their own. We used a variety of approaches and frameworks.
Setting up our metrics was key to understanding whether our approaches and solutions were working; if were we accurately defining what good looks like.
We defined engagement across the customer journey and tracked key events for specific segments to help us understand the impact of features.
Empowering our squads meant supporting them to adjust to new lean ways of working. Our lean framework (Problem, Explore, Validate, Build, Measure) allowed us to engage in rapid, small-batch user testing along with tried and true frameworks like the lean canvas and jobs-to-be-done, giving our squads accountability and ownership over what they were working on and how that feature or function contributed to their squad metrics and mission.
Outcome
Experimentation allowed us as a tribe to connect and align. Allowing space for failure and for the process to evolve and change based on individual squad and project needs empowered our teams to take ownership of their deliverables.
Using data combined with trust helped us learn how to deliver at a rapid rate and be more strategic with buy-in across the organisation.
One of the first features one of our squads delivered using this approach increased overall engagement by 6 percentage points in one month.
Since 2014, Mable’s online platform has connected Australians looking for disability and aged care support to independent support workers. Mable is where people provide and receive the kind of support they want, enjoying more choice, control and flexibility.