Our Team
Our team is made up of a diverse group of product managers, engineers and developers, marketers, UX designers, researchers, subject matter experts in automation, cognitive computing, and other disruptive technologies, and relationship managers who work with users to understand their challenges. We share a common vision of how emerging technologies can help solve the world's most pressing problems.
We believe that technology will be at the core of every organization for years to come — because it has become an indispensable tool for innovation and growth. Moreover, we believe that every company needs technology to innovate faster than ever before — because life moves quickly these days and the competition, both for capturing the market and employee talent, is fierce!
As innovators and new product designers, we rely on input and feedback from our market to improve the user experience. We know that having real insights from our end users is the only way we will build a solution that addresses real needs, exceptionally.
We have found that one of the best ways to get this kind of information is through an early adopter program (EAP). The idea behind an EAP is simple: we give direct access to the team building the product, early and/or advantaged access to the product or services to gather direct responses from people who are actually going to use them. The advantage of creating an EAP in addition to other types of market research approaches is that it allows us to see what happens when you actually put your product in someone's hands and let them play around with it for themselves—rather than asking them how they think something might work out if given half a chance.
At IBM, we assert that the future of work is a collaboration between human and technical intelligence. A future where human workers will partner with digital employee teammates to get work done. To set this future in motion, we seek out ideas for use cases and new digital employee skills by adding sponsor users to the team researching, designing, and building the product. In this way, sponsor users can help us bring their own unique perspective on the future of work while working side-by-side with our researchers, designers, and developers. In addition, they have access to all of the same information as our internal teams—including research findings from surveys and studies conducted. The goal is for them to think about how their jobs could be made easier through AI and automation technologies like IBM watsonx Orchestrate.
Our Role
Our role is to understand where markets are headed—often with insights from industry leaders—and anticipate what people will need before they even fully realize it or know how to ask for it. We've been doing this for many years and find the greatest success when we make users part of the design and build journey. We work with customers at the forefront of digital transformation, helping them identify opportunities where digital employees could partner with their teams to accomplish work.
We have even embraced this approach internally. For example, we partnered with the IBM HR team, who needed help to improve their manual promotional cycle work. Through our collaboration, we were able to develop a digital employee to assist the HR team members responsible for administering IBM's quarterly promotional cycle activities, allowing them to accomplish work together. The result? IBM saved about 12,000 hours per year and accelerated the promotions process by 50% while reducing its workload significantly.
Bringing in domain experts, like the members of the IBM HR team, to help the product team understand the nuances in the pain points and needs proves invaluable to the team building the product. For this reason, we start every project by meeting with our users or clients – people who are already facing the challenges we are trying to solve – as well as subject matter experts who have first-hand knowledge about related topics or domains.
We then identify the biggest pain points for these stakeholders and design a solution around them. We use our own cognitive tools to gather data on users' preferences through surveys and interviews, which help us understand what they want from their products or services. To help us figure out how to deliver on those needs, we turn to our internal innovation teams with deep expertise in the fields of user experience design, automation, AI, machine learning, and integration technologies.
This means interviewing real people and working with our partners in the industry to validate assumptions early on in the process. We also invite users into early versions of the product and ask them to allow us to observe their experiences, making it easy for us to see where we still have work to do in order to make the product more usable and where we have nailed an experience, delivering immediate value. This iterative approach means that we can move quickly from an idea through development and testing until we arrive at a solution that truly solves a problem for our users.
By getting feedback at each stage of a project, we can make sure that our products reflect the needs of real people and validate that what we bring to the market delivers the necessary value for adoption and engagement.
This is especially important in a market like retail, where many factors contribute to hiring and staff shortages. For example, reaching prospective candidates for an open position in this domain may require SMS / text messaging rather than email. Had the product team not prioritized working with real users, the SMS mode of communication would not have inherently seemed worth prioritizing.
The Future of Work
The future of work is a future where humans spend more time on the things that they enjoy and do best - work that leverages higher-level thinking, creativity, empathy, and collaboration. And in order to achieve this future, we will lean on our digital teammates, those digital employees that partner with us to take on the routine, mundane tasks. The possibilities are endless! So, we at IBM have decided that the best way to carve the path to tomorrow is to partner with real people to determine those items to tackle first. Might you want to participate in this effort? It's fun! Reach out and let us know.
This is an exciting time for you and me. In fact, it's a very exciting time for us all! The world has changed a great deal since the pandemic, and I feel like it's time to change again. It feels like there are limitless possibilities out there just waiting to be explored, so why not start today? You can help by sharing your thoughts on how you would like a digital employee to help you accomplish work. Also, if you'd like to be more involved as a sponsor user, let us know that too!
I hope that this blog post has given you some insight into how IBM works with users to build a groundbreaking product. Our team is made up of a diverse group of product managers, engineers and developers, marketers, UX designers, researchers, subject matter experts in automation, cognitive computing, and other disruptive technologies, and relationship managers who work with users to understand their challenges. We share a common vision of how emerging technologies can help solve the world's most pressing problems.
As innovators and new product designers, we rely on input and feedback from our target users to improve the user experience! Our goal is to build solutions that address real needs exceptionally well—which means having real insights from our end users at every stage of development. This enables us to understand where markets are headed—often with insights from industry leaders—and anticipate what people will need before they even fully realize it or know how to ask for it (like adding sponsor users on the actual team that is researching design building IBM watsonx Orchestrate). By getting feedback at each stage of project development, we can make sure that our products reflect the needs of real people and validate that what we are bringing out to the market delivers the necessary value for adoption engagement.
Thank you for your time. I hope you join us on this journey to build more groundbreaking products!