The Politics of the Artichoke

Selling your ideas in an organization, one stakeholder at a time.

Prepared by Dorothy M. Danforth for Danforth Media

About Dorothy

Dorothy M. DanforthPrincipal, Danforth Media Inc.

Software Design & User Experience Consulting

● 15 years software design, usability research, and systems development for Fortune 500and emerging technology companies.

● Has made a career out of working with startups and developing new product concepts. Spearheaded web design and usability processes and standards. Led numerous R&D efforts for venture funding.

About Dorothy

Doesn’t think like a politician!

• Thinks like a designer…

• Thinks like an engineer…

• Not much room left for politics!

• Need to learn how, to sell ideas and get to do interesting work

Presentation

The Politics of the Artichoke?Italian phrase describing a shrewd plan that deals with your “opponents” one at a time

1. Peel off one leaf at a time

2. Take care to avoid the thistle!

Politics of the Artichoke

High Level Agenda• Project History

• The “Big” Idea

• Project Approach

• Results

• Critical Success Factors

• Questions

Case Study

(Researching faceted search for Comcast)

Project History

Connecting the DotsConsultant to Comcast, working with a small internal team exploring On Demand navigation for an existing web product.

● How do people decide what to watch?

● How can we best support users when deciding what to watch?

The “Big” Idea

What if we offered users faceted search to sort through movies and show?

• Common use on eCommerce sites

• Helps users sift through large amount of data

• Can adopt “natural language” for how people search for entertainment

• Surprise, it wasn’t already in widespread use for media browsing

Concept Challenges

Sounds good, isn’t that enough?

Just a seed idea, there were many open questions…

• Can we translate this approach for media browsing?

• Will people want to use it for media? (much lower investment than a purchase)

• If yes, what should it look like? How should it interact? and What would the best facets be?

Organizational Challenges

Getting the go ahead to exploreComcast has a large interactive service group full of bright people working on many different initiatives at any given time…

• With a complex idea that will require multiple areas of buy-in, where do you start?

• How would we get anyone to even look at this through all the “noise” of competing ideas?

• Oh, and by the way, there’s no official project or budget for this!

Our Approach

(One little baby-step at a time)

Plant the Seed

Informal conversations to test the water,many “pop in” meetings

• Got a feel for issues, what any push back might be and associate ourselves with the idea without making it a formal cause.

• Based on informal feedback did some more research then started to preempt questions and concerns

• Locate potential advocates and blockers

Write it Down

Document the concept and a basic approach to due diligence

• Put intuition on paper and sent it to the people we informally discussed the idea with (even the blockers)

• Kept it simple, a one page data sheet outlining why it should be explored

• Indicate at a high level what the exploration might entail including a general starting scope

Legitimize

Seek Executive Sponsorship

• Be persistent. The idea will die without a budget and basic executive support.

• Seek out a potential advocate who will benefit from your success but not be too hindered if the idea does not pan out

• Start small, minimize risk and only ask for go ahead for the next step

• Be flexible, try to find another project that ties into your idea and see if you can piggy-back

Strategize

Craft a detailed research plan

• Consider how you will incorporate feedback from others, and evolve the idea based on new findings

• Identify each significant stakeholder area and address their needs & concerns in your plan

• Use multiple forms of research, iterate and only progress if you get positive input

Balance

Involve others in the plan, but with clear limits

• Balance flexibility to allow the idea to evolve with mitigating design by committee issues

• i.e. Clear roles and structured inputs

• Promote various stakeholders to talk with each other. Have them meet and present what they are working on that’s related to the idea

Make it Happen

Implement the plan

We conducted a series of iterative tests to evolve the idea

Communicate

Keep people informed of the project’s status. No surprises.

• Offer updates and interim presentations

• Soft sell some of the more unexpected or counterintuitive findings

• Give people time to process findings and let them see the progression you see.

Road Show

Document, present & evangelize your results

• The presentation should be clear, concise and portablei.e. people should be able to get all of the relevant information if they are looking at it without a presenter.

• Be objective in your analysis—let the data do the advocating

• Take the show on the road, schedule formal & informal read outs of the presentation, answer questions

Let it go…

Step back and let others do their job

• The goal isn’t to finalize the idea—its to give it a life of its own with as much chance of success as possible

• Leave plenty of room for ownership, recommend next steps for others to take the baton

• For me, as a consultant, I moved onto other projects with another clients

Others continued the process…

Results & Impact

(A steady evolution)

Research Results

Faceted search for media tested very well…

• The model lent itself well to media browsing with surveys & card sort exercises indicating potential facets

• User testing with an interactive Flash prototype lent insight into how it should interact

• Users indicated that it was a significant improvement over existing sorting options

Ongoing Impact

Comcast.net

Within about six months the Comcast.net product team launched a first phase version of a video player that was in line with many of our research findings

This functionality is in production and evolving…

Ongoing Impact

Fancast.com

Within about one year, the Fancast.com team released a first phase version of the faceted search for On Demand

This functionality is in production and evolving…

Questions Anyone?