Summary
Julie recounts her experience evolving the design culture at Citrix from a largely unknown, small team to an integral part of the company's customer experience and innovation processes. Starting in 2010, she navigated a distributed enterprise environment with limited design awareness. Collaborating with leaders like Catherine Tudor, Julie expanded design thinking beyond products into business functions such as HR, legal, and marketing. She describes bold visibility strategies like customer conference booths and creative pop-up design studios to build internal empathy and engagement. By partnering with cross-functional teams, including facilities and HR, her team introduced interactive, human-centered activities that influenced real projects like cafe remodels and onboarding programs. Julie emphasizes integrating quantitative metrics such as Net Promoter Score and time saved through improved compliance training led by Peter Conner to tangibly show design impact. She reflects on blending design thinking’s front-end creativity with Lean Startup’s hypothesis-driven iterations, stressing shared goals and language with engineering and product management. Her lessons stress making a splash to get noticed, educating broadly, embracing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and embracing risk and trust in the design process.
Key Insights
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Design was initially invisible at Citrix, with many employees unaware a design team even existed.
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Participating in Stanford’s d.school inspired expanding design thinking beyond products into business areas like HR, legal, and marketing.
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Creating a design booth at a major customer conference helped build internal and external awareness and empathy for customers.
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Design thinking workshops and pop-up studios made design approachable and embedded it into the company culture.
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Partnering with non-design teams like facilities and HR enabled human-centered design solutions for physical spaces and onboarding.
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Redesigning compliance training with lawyer Peter Conner saved nearly 10,000 work hours annually, quantifying design’s business value.
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Integrating Lean Startup methods complemented design thinking by enabling measurable testing and iteration post-ideation.
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Net Promoter Score (NPS) became a key metric to demonstrate improvements in user satisfaction and loyalty.
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Having engineering, product management, and design share unified goals fostered collaboration and collective accountability.
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Trusting the fuzzy front-end of the design process is essential, even when outcomes are uncertain or workshops fail.
Notable Quotes
"When I first got to Citrix, people didn’t even know we had a design team."
"At Stanford’s d.school, we got the religion: design thinking could be bigger than just about products."
"Our customer conference booth was strategically located by the men’s room to catch traffic from hardcore enterprise IT folks."
"We reached about half of Citrix’s 10,000 employees worldwide through workshops and education."
"We created a pop-up design studio in the cafe to trade coffee and cupcakes for employee input."
"Peter Conner, our lawyer, redesigned compliance training so people took fewer courses but more relevant ones."
"We calculated nearly 10,000 hours saved in one year from redesigning compliance training, equating to three million dollars in opportunity cost."
"Design thinking works great in the front end when you don’t know what you want to do; Lean Startup helps when you have a direction."
"Net Promoter Score is just one question, but it’s a powerful way to measure loyalty and customer experience."
"We aligned engineering, product management, and design with the exact same goals so no one could succeed while another failed."
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