IBM
Facilitation, Asset Development, and Strategic Consulting
June 2021 — July 2025
Innovation Design | Business Development
Note on Confidentiality: Due to the proprietary nature of the initiatives and contractual limitations regarding asset attribution, I am unable to publicly display raw deliverables or direct links to live products. Therefore, this presentation focuses strictly on process and outcomes. This case study focuses exclusively on the methodology, my specific contributions, and the types of work/clients I have collaborated with.
The Challenge:
How might IBM leverage close client collaboration, workshop engagements and rapid prototyping to translate complex business ambiguity into a measurable, sales enabling solution within a strict pilot timeline?
My Impact:
I delivered strategic consulting efforts and crafted/led bespoke co-creation workshops to rapidly translate complex client ambiguity into user-validated assets and sales-enabling prototypes. Additionally, I drove internal organizational consistency by executing lean UXR methodology, standardizing design assets, and curating a design community of practice.
Organizational Process
The organization's methodology is a structured-but-flexible, and human-centered approach designed to rapidly deliver tangible, validated business results. The process moves through four accelerated phases: Innovate, Prepare, Co-Create, and Transition to ensure that solutions are not only technically feasible but are directly tied to user needs and measurable sales outcomes within a tight pilot timeline.
Goals
Define the Minimum Viable Problem (MVP): Use design workshops and rapid assessment techniques to clearly scope and align the team on the highest-value problem to solve.
Establish Technical and User Feasibility: Ensure the ideated solutions align the technical architecture with confirmed user and business needs.
Prove Value: Deliver a functional pilot or high-fidelity prototype that provides clear, actionable evidence of the proposed solution's impact.
Accelerate Time-to-Market: Minimize development and design time to achieve a significantly faster path from concept to execution for the client.
Core Activities & Competencies
User Research & Framing: Enterprise Design Thinking, Needs Assessment, Workshop Facilitation, Journey Mapping, Persona Development.
Solution Alignment: Rapid Ideation, Solution Architecture Development (in collaboration with Architects), Stakeholder Consensus Building.
Agile Execution: Rapid Prototyping (Figma, PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Suite), Agile Sprint Planning, Continuous User Testing and Feedback Integration.
Advocacy & Storytelling: Case Study Crafting, Narrative Development, Data Visualization, C-suite Presentations.
Outcomes
The design process drives critical, measurable pre-sales results by producing actionable artifacts, such as Playbacks, Journey Maps, Service Blueprints, and UX Prototypes, that serve as the technical squad's single source of truth. This rapid approach delivers user-validated functional pilots and compelling case studies, leading directly to measurable outcomes and touchpoints for sales initiatives.
Example Client Work
Leading Telecommunications Provider: AI Models Governance Project
Led co-creation workshops to define the governance framework and user workflow requirements for new generative AI platforms supporting the client's internal operations. This rapid pilot successfully established technical feasibility, defined clear business necessity, and directly led to a multi-million dollar sales commitment.
Global Logistics & Freight Company: HR Process Optimization
Collaborated with key client stakeholders to organize engagements and develop streamlined critical HR workflows to eliminate redundant manual data entry and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks. The clear, quantified business value defined by this initiative resulted in two subsequent follow-on sales engagements with the client.
Major Multi-channel Video Distributor: Strategic Planning & Portfolio Consulting
Crafted and facilitated yearly strategic engagements focused on optimizing the client’s strategic planning cycle by creating roadmaps and high-level internal initiatives to be taken on by organization leadership. This allowed leadership to prioritize their teams' technical debt in key areas and focus on process driven change within the organization to address key issues moving forward.
National Grocery Retail Chain: Multichannel In-Store Associate Experience
Developed a cohesive multichannel journey map and prototype for an associate mobile tool, driving experience consistency across physical and digital customer touchpoints. This initiative focused on improving in-store operations and achieving greater associate empowerment for customer-related solutions.
Internal Design Standardization & Community Leadership
Drove organizational change by developing and standardizing core Enterprise Design Thinking workshop assets and global Mural design libraries for use across global sales and Client Engineering teams. I also led efforts to curate a design community of practice based in consistent cross-team collaboration and sharing, ensuring consistency and growth for designers across markets.
Clients
At IBM I transformed into a strategic design leader, elevating my capabilities into expert facilitation and cross-functional collaboration. This immersive, pre-sales environment honed my business acumen, allowing me to consistently work towards solutions that drove clear, measurable value and directly influenced sales outcomes.
Lesson Learned:
The high-stakes nature of Client Engineering taught me that success in sales hinges on flexibility rather than fidelity, requiring rapid pivoting to prove the core concept rather than perfecting the solution. Ultimately, the storytelling is the final deliverable, where transforming complex technical insights into a clear, engaging story is the advocacy that converts a pilot into a closed deal.
