Design Podcast

The DesignOps team could not seem to improve upon their engagement rates. This was particularly important since Dell Technologies' newly formed Design organization was seen as a vision of change that would propel the company further into our CEO's mission to quicken our software development teams' implementation and development rates. Many things had been tried before. Workshops and training sessions required too many resources, required an excess amount of coordination, and was difficult to sustain the needs of international teams. Slide decks and PDF documents got very little movement. They were out of ideas and I was tasked to find a new way to improve engagement rates.

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I began a process of research and benchmarking with external and internal sources. I then conducted a multitude of discovery sessions with stakeholders to explore requirements further. I presented the different communication options to stakeholders and it was unanimously decided that an internal podcast was the preferred avenue for the project that I was to lead. 

After choosing my team of designers and interns, I defined goals and success metrics for our team to reach. We brainstormed topics, assigned roles, and acquired licensing and equipment for production. I then lead my team through discussions to determine a standard of operations that would guide the team's success of content creation from topic ideation to interview methods.

The first episode featured a professor from the College of William and Mary to speak. They discussed designing for accessibility, the power of neurodivergence, and how to wield these traits to optimize our teams. In the week of the podcast's premier, we reached nearly 70% of our target listeners. In 3 months our podcast team doubled in size.