Data & Analytics
Role: Design Lead, Research, Product Design
Overview
When I joined AstraZeneca early in 2019, the team was hard at work on building Dashboards in Micro Strategy. Like most companies, someone (usually an executive) declares "we need a dashboard", and people run off to build something... but rarely do people stop to ask what should be an obvious question, why?
And asking why matters, because if not, you end up overwhelming people.
By reframing the work, it's pretty easy to move from "we need a dashboard" to "we need a tool to improve decision making", and that one simple change opens the door to a world of possibilities... so we set off to better understand what decisions people make...
We traversed the globe and met with people across the organization, including workshops in our core locations.
We immersed with Study Teams, we ran ideation sesions, and most imporantly, we ran experiments.
We ended up with eight core focus areas...
Then the actual design work began... the first thing we needed to do was offer a better alternative then the MicroStrategy dashboards...
While we were designing the site, we also began working on the experiements we could run to deliver better trial performance, and one of the areas with the highest leverage points is driving better site performance...
We hypothesized that we could drive better outcomes if we proactively delivered notifcations via email instead of hoping that people visited the site, so our initial work focused on creating tools to help nudge teams into closing poor performing sites with a series of updates across the site management lifecycle.
We tested different messaging and different designs to determine what drove the behavior change and impact we were looking for.
The success we achvieved with the operational work caught the attention of some executives and now we're working on transforming decision making at even higher levels in the organization.