Driving vision work across StubHub
Background
When StubHub unveiled its 10-year vision, a.k.a. the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), we all knew the ‘definition’ of the vision—but no one really knew what this vision looked like from a customer experience perspective. I had a small group of designers from my team create two video narratives set three years in the future to depict the StubHub fan experience. When the videos debuted at a company all-hands meeting, they inspired the entire company because they now had a crystalized picture of where we were headed. We knew that we were on to something powerful here and wanted others to participate in envisioning the company’s future. So we came up with the idea of the BHAG-a-THONs to have people across the company do design thinking with us.
Role
Chief instigator as well as content creator and facilitator.
Process
The BHAG-a-THONs were all-day workshops that were sponsored, created, and facilitated by the UX team where we brought employees from all parts of the organization together to collaborate and write their own BHAG stories and then share them in a visually compelling way. The goal was to get several small teams to accomplish what that first small team of designers did over the course of months – but in just a single day. We held the events off-site to get folks out of their office mindsets and eliminate all distractions. We designed a full day of activities and exercises that walked the teams through the process of generating ideas and writing stories one step at a time. We branded the events “StubHub BHAG-a-THONs”.
First, individuals did a rapid brainstorm of concepts they associated with “fandom” and the BHAG’s goals – anything that came to mind was fair game: Tailgate Parties, Rural Fans, Extreme Sports, Video Games, and Travel, were among the ideas that formed the pool of concepts the teams would eventually draw from to write their stories. Teams followed this up with a character creation exercise, using blank empathy map templates to flesh out qualities of the characters they would base their stories on. With some broad concepts and characters defined, the teams did a third exercise focusing on specific features and services that StubHub might offer their characters, based on the concepts they’d selected.
Finally, the teams brought everything together and wrote stories about their characters, based on their selected concepts, and included the features and services they’d come up with. Teams presented their finished stories in various formats, including performing skits, creating comic-style slide shows, and PowerPoint presentations.
StubHub leadership came to judge the presentations, and teams were awarded trophies for “Best Overall”, “Cutting Edge” – best imagining of future technology, and “Fans First” – the team who best put fans front and center in their story. The winning team also had their story made into the next BHAG animated video.
Results
The BHAG-a-THONs was successful in bringing design thinking to the entire StubHub workforce. It allowed people to get out of the weeds of their day-to-day jobs to imagine the big picture and contribute to the realization of our BHAG. We brought people together from all parts of the company who might not have known one another to roll up their sleeves and work together to create inspirational narratives that could translate into product ideas. This exposed our colleagues to different perspectives they might not have considered within the organization previously. It gave them insight into how design thinking works and how the UX team at StubHub explores problems & opportunities to come up with meaningful experiences that are user-centered.
The events had a deep and broad cultural impact that not only created a shared understanding but led to empowerment and a sense of ownership because each one of us was playing a key role in helping to achieve our BHAG.
We funneled the great ideas that come out of the BHAG-a-THONs into our product and business teams to not only inspire them but to make sure that the viable ideas were actually incorporated into our roadmaps.
“Excellent day, a great way to not only learn more about how we can execute the BHAG, but how talented our colleagues are.”
”I’m very impressed with how well everything was organized. I’m thrilled I could participate.”
“Please don’t let this be the only BHAG-a-THON!”