“You’re like Monster, but I have to pay for it.”

Damn. That one hit home very hard.

This was the main sentiment consumers from across the country were articulating from focus group to focus group — 15 of them, to be exact. Every city revealed the same perception of our product and our brand: “We’ve heard of you, but it’s very unclear to us why you’re different from any other job board.”

After a brief bout of denial and incredulity, we recognized our problem statement: “We need to do MORE of what we currently do to differentiate ourselves and do a better job TELLING people about it.” Sounds great, but how do you motivate an entire organization to rally around a specific cause, focus on it for 100 days, and execute on plan and on time by the end of the year?

Design studios.

We put together what was, by far, the most “cross-functional” team ever assembled at our company to collaborate on a project. We included the usual suspects — developers, designers, marketers and product managers — but spiced things up by adding in operational folks and subject-matter experts. The latter had never before been invited to participate in product brainstorming.

All said and done, we had 50 people signed up for three days of collaborative sketching.

The first order of business was to divide the three days into themes. Each day would focus on one aspect of our product offering. This provided the team with much-needed guardrails to constrain the realm of the feasible and ensure everyone was progressing towards the same goals. Once the themes were established, the setup began. Through a series of short presentations and video clips we articulated the situation to the broader group and provided the context necessary for their collaboration.

Next we divided the room into representational slices of the competencies in the group. The only thing that mattered was that each team of 7 had representatives from each department. And so the sketching began.

At first each team was given 5 minutes to create six low-fidelity sketches around the day’s theme. Then, within the teams, each member had to present their 6 ideas and receive critique from the other members. Every team member got a turn presenting and hearing critique. With that feedback, the team then had another 5 minutes to refine the original concepts into three higher-level approaches. Again, each team member presented and got critiqued. A final 5 minutes was given to refine the three ideas into one high-fidelity sketch. This last sketch, like the others, was presented to the team and critiqued.

Then came the hard part — the teams had to take the 7 high level ideas they had amongst them and combine them down into the one idea that team was going to present. 45 minutes were provided to the teams to debate, pare down and combine their thinking into one idea that was going to achieve the day’s stated objectives.

Each team then presented their big idea to the entire room. Critique this time was open to the entire floor including the managers facilitating and sponsoring the event. The big ideas were grouped on a wall and ordered in such a way that allowed some to overlap and others to lead into each other in a physical simulation of a workflow.

We repeated this process two more times. Each day saw a different problem statement explored and new solutions proposed. At the end of the three days, we had filled up an entire wall with raw ideas generated by the team that was about to execute this work.

After much debate, feasibility assessments and high level point estimates (LOE) we pared down the ideas into what seemed like a realistic set of features to execute within our given 100-day time frame.

And we set the teams off! Two-week iterations carved the work up into manageable chunks and allowed us to release new work incrementally into the field and begin testing our collaboratively sketched hypotheses in the wild. As the feedback came in, we were able to adjust our work plan (read: backlog) to accommodate new insights gained from usage of the new features.

We spoke with the execution teams, on a broad basis, once a week and communicated progress and accomplishments as well as realistic risks and any misses for the week. These weekly “huddles” also included the week’s demo. There’s nothing quite like knowing your work will be presented on a giant screen to 50 people each week (some of whom could very well be top execs) to motivate a team to ensure high quality. But the most powerful of all of our communication strategies was the release email. This is the email that went out companywide, every two weeks, announcing what was launched that day. The email included the rationale for building the feature, but its most powerful feature was a photo of the original sketch created at the design studio followed by the finished feature.

Whether you wrote code, pushed pixels, trafficked ads or operated the call center, it was clear that, as a contributor, your fingerprints were in the work. It was all there in pictures showing the humble Sharpie-on-giant-stickypad beginnings to the pixel and interaction specifics of the final product. Everyone was connected to the work and, now, invested in its success. This was very inspiring.

Within 100 days, a 50-person execution team conceived, designed, developed and launched a significant overhaul to our consumer business. The vision was set from the management layer. Guardrails were provided and the team was freed up to solve problems within those constraints. Engaging team members from across the company helped inform the work but also get buy-in from all departments. There was an increased sense of ownership throughout as folks literally watched their sketches transform into working products. The teamwork, camaraderie and goodwill this effort generated will last a long time and, perhaps most importantly, will serve as a model for how we structure future efforts of this scale.

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