BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

It was a humid morning as I strolled to my new office in Tokyo for one of our clients largest markets. I was brought on to help design 266 pages of their website to align to the new design system created at the company's headquarters in Switzerland. I was in a new country with the same client but a completely new set of stakeholders. I arrived and was badged and immediately sheppard into a conference room where I was partnered with a front-end developer and a project manager from headquarters. Teams started stopping in to talk about their users, site pages and frustrations with the amount of time or the lack of time they had. This first day was so chaotic that the impact of one day lost was stressful. I decided to build a relationship with my two colleagues in the conference room by doing an impromptu workshop to map out how we could make this happen. We put on some music, ordered some food and became flexible. We decided that we needed to audit the entire site map, count the pages and split out for the next 7 weeks what could be done.

We decided in the morning we'd interview the main stakeholder of their section of the site, I'd then design it, create a presentation to share in the afternoon with a stakeholder in Switzerland, share with the stakeholder of the section of the site the next morning, hear their iterations, I'd adjust and send off for sign off. Rinse and repeat every single day for 7 weeks. Technically most of these were reskins of the existing experiences. However, they spanned marketing, physical product detail pages, technology, eComm and retail stores. With the sheer volume of work, we welcomed each stakeholder into the conference room making sure we understood their needs, concerns and process. It was incredible that establishing a solid plan and bringing them in at the very start to identify risks...led us all to find mutually beneficial solutions together. In the end, we hit the 7 week mark, together. Listed below are the key takeaways of why we were successful.