One of Germany's leading specialist publishing houses approached us to enhance its digital offering. In order to remain fit for the future, the client wanted to develop a new, innovative product solution for their multiple newspaper brands. Not only did I work with them to create a one-off solution, but I also empowered an in-house team to bring more of an innovation mindset into the company.
Over a period of twelve weeks, I facilitated weekly digital product innovation workshops (roughly based on the double diamond process) for an interdisciplinary team of employees, ranging from juniors to seniors from different areas, up to a publishing director. In between the workshops, I provided coaching and feedback to guide the team towards their first successful digital product development.
The aim was to create a new digital storytelling template for all the publisher's brands. The other was to equip the team with the right methods and a user-centric mindset to become ambassadors and shapers of the publisher's future digital strategy. The curriculum therefore also included agile and new work methods.
The workshops covered all the steps of digital product creation – from user research and ideation, concept and prototyping to business modelling and working with external partners (such as the agency that actually designed and implemented the new solution).
Covid changed everything: remote-first innovation workshops
The covid situation at the time brought up a new challenge: about halfway through the 12 weeks, I had to redesign all the workshops from one day to another to suit a remote environment. This not just worked well but we were able to complete our sprints successfully. In addition, we even made a good use out of digital tools and kept the team spirit high, including digital team building activities.
Strengthen the culture of innovation – generate a lasting impact
The coaching enabled the publisher to initiate design and product development processes in the company on a permanent and independent basis. The final product (a multimedia storytelling template) is still being used today by journalists across many brands to tell compelling stories. In this way, we helped the publishing house to continue to innovate in the future.
One of my biggest impacts, though: At least some of this new mindset has stuck until today – even if it's just that one department now uses Slack instead of email, and the director and the junior are being on a first-name basis now.
My role in this project
- Overall execution
- Process planing and management
- Preparation and design workshop facilitation
- Sparrings partner
- All stakeholder communication