The Challenge

Public-private partnerships are foundational to USAID’s strategy for achieving development objectives around the world. While these partnerships represent billions of dollars in funding, the Agency lacked an enterprise solution to document, manage, and report on them. The result? Ad hoc and disorganized documentation, knowledge loss, a lack of strategic coordination in partner communications, missed opportunities to identify trends in aggregated data, and difficulty identifying internal experts to collaborate with. USAID knew it needed a new approach to relationship management, and kicked off a broad effort to develop the systems and frameworks needed to support and enhance the partner experience.

My Role

I joined the project as a senior service designer and quickly took on a leadership role, spearheading international discovery research efforts that resulted in a realignment of our roadmap and priorities to better meet users’ needs. Along the way, I was able to launch a formal UXR strategy, recruiting users for a user panel and standing up a brand-new workflow to ensure that our design and development lifecycle was laser-focused on customer experience, delivering high-value features that promoted adoption and retention.

I designed and facilitated workshops that resulted in a refreshed value proposition to inform the project’s new acquisition and communications strategy, developed new messaging and positioning, and played a critical role in the successful refresh of the rollout and training strategy.

Outcomes

The launch of the partner management system was hailed by USAID’s Administrator as a successful example of the overall strategic importance of public-private partnerships, and hundreds of staffers from around the globe completed training and obtained licenses. The system is widely seen as a single source of truth for data on partnerships and has improved the visibility, transparency, and timeliness of information available to USAID staff while eliminating thousands of work hours spent conducting research and creating documentation. Native reporting tools offered portfolio-level visibility into trends and opportunities for the first time, enhancing the Agency’s ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities.

Activities

• Discovery and research: Led discovery efforts for both specific features and broader product roadmap and vision, formalizing processes around data capture, analysis, and synthesis to ensure traceability of results and recommendations.

  • Individual in-depth interviews: Conducted generative research with USAID staff in various roles and locations to understand current state, pain points, feature wishlists, goals, and motivations.

  • Discovery workshops: Designed and led 12+ virtual, hybrid, and in-person discovery workshops with groups of stakeholders to understand requirements for new features and functions.

  • Research panel: Secured approvals and conducted recruit to create a pool of internal users for design research.

  • Evaluative research: Introduced frameworks and process for early-stage research, conducting a series of remote, unmoderated evaluative studies to validate design concepts.

• Product vision and feature prioritization: Synthesized research and discovery results to provide actionable recommendations on new features, development sequencing, and UX. Drafted requirements, wrote business cases, and delivered recommendations to Agency stakeholders.

• Measurement framework development: Collaborated on metrics strategy and identified opportunities for data collection.

• Communications strategy: Key stakeholder on refreshed value proposition and associated messaging, marketing, and positioning strategy.

• Acquisition and adoption: Led successful refresh of training materials and overall strategy for engaging new users.

Deliverables

• Insights and recommendations: Created compelling presentations for discovery and research findings and associated recommendations.

• Service blueprints, journey maps, and process maps: Documented current and ideal state for complex processes including transaction and deal management, internal customer support workflows, and engagements with partners.

• Personas: Developed a set of personas for a diverse group of employee types and roles in order to inform design, development, and communications efforts.

• Development roadmap: Key stakeholder in re-sequenced and re-prioritized development roadmap, which served as a North Star for project direction.