Bringing Ideas to Reality with Discover’s Innovation Framework

Robert Del Prado at UXDX Community: Driving Innovation & Collaboration in Product Design. Video: https://youtu.be/g1r0XyqGIQQ

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction: what innovation actually means

[00:00:07] Thanks everyone, and thanks everyone for joining here. My talk is around the innovation framework that we have at Discover Financial, at the financial organization. You'll see that I have my disclaimer at the bottom, so we have to be much more formal around here, but we also ensure that we are innovating.

[00:00:32] A little bit about, I'll go through a little bit of an outline here. Sophie had a great presentation. It's interesting because she's putting those ideas to work, and what we're going to do is try to develop those ideas, and that's what we try to do at Discover in those initial phases. So we'll do about me, a little bit on innovation generally and at Discover. This is a slide that used to be an activity, but we won't be doing that, but I will walk through a few pieces here, examples of how we do that, and we'll do Q&A at the end.

[00:01:03] I am Robert, I am currently an expert innovation design facilitator for Discover. That is a very long title that I almost always have to look up because I never remember it. I've been a UX strategist for well over a decade. Worked in various industries, was a nonprofit exec back in a former life. And I'm from New York originally, with a layover in Philly before landing here in Los Angeles.

[00:01:27] So, innovation. It's like the word unprecedented. We live in this world and people just say it over and over again, everything's unprecedented. Innovation also means nothing and it means everything. So what is innovation? I like to say, if you want to hear how many times do you hear innovate or innovation, take a shot, you can make it into that drinking game. But let's dig into it.

[00:01:52] Is innovation around technology? Is it around new AI systems or technology or software you use? No. In a world of AI where everyone wants to use this latest technology, and that's great, but innovation isn't driven by technology or the software you use. It's driven by discipline. And it's hard. That's why everyone wants to say they do it and say they want to be innovative, and everyone wants to be innovative, but sometimes the work kind of ends up being that boulder that you're just trying to move through, and it's hard to change things. It's the same in my work, and that's why we're always trying to drive this through difficult challenges and sometimes difficult times.

Design thinking and workshop recipes at Discover

[00:02:39] So what does innovation at Discover look like? My background is in UX, but I'm also the facilitator of our design thinking, so we do leverage design thinking and that's one of the pieces that is core to what we do. Design thinking, again, it's kind of been overused in a sense, and has had its day to some level of being cachet, but in the end it's all about problem solving. So how do you approach it? Design thinking, there are strategy approaches, but that's core to any kind of innovation work that you end up doing.

[00:03:16] So at Discover we leverage design thinking, and we also develop things, we have recipes, and we develop workshop recipes where we might use various techniques. Some of them can be things that are more design thinking driven, like something like a creative matrix. But then there's use cases or user story mapping, things that are used around product and just around prioritization and product strategy. So it's not just design thinking but it's developing those workshops, and what we generally try to do is we customize it for our internal teams, or we might have predefined workshops.

[00:03:57] So it could be a predefined workshop where we try to focus on aligning and defining around that, so making sure people are on the same page and are solving the right problem. Building empathy with users, so how do we approach that? I've done talks around this internally and externally around how we do customer empathy, and a lot of things that we know as core to us in being in UX and being in product. But again, getting people together and getting that focus on the users within the workshop environment and developing that out is huge.

[00:04:33] Ideation. Sophie mentioned visual, we try to do that in our work, getting everything on a Miro board. We use Miro as our whiteboard because a lot of our workshops are done online. Sometimes we do in person, like this one, but a lot of them are done online. So we think through those next possibilities, sometimes thinking about the prototype, starting there and going from there and building from there, and getting back to that empathy phase.

[00:05:01] And then planning for the worst case scenario. We have a premortem method that we have, where it's essentially, we talk about what does success look like, but what does failure look like? What if the worst case scenario did happen? Determining what that might look like and how we would respond, and if it's recoverable, is one of the pieces there. So different types of approaches, some of the predefined ones, but we also customize for our users, which are internal teams.

The innovation framework: idea, concept proposal, proof of concept, dossier

[00:05:35] Our innovation framework, we have a few different approaches. We do our work around supporting teams, and we can do workshops around design thinking and problem identification, and then people also will come to us with ideas, things that they want to develop. My team, we're Discover research and development, and we designed this innovation methodology to take an early stage idea and develop it. Now where that can end depends on the idea. Some concepts may not be sponsored internally and may fall to the wayside, but that's how we approach it initially with that idea.

[00:06:13] The first step is to create and submit that innovation idea, and then we help teams and individuals develop a concept proposal, which represents an executive brief that conveys the key descriptive elements of an idea. Concept proposals are used to find that sponsorship. We'll work then to develop a proof of concept after getting that sponsorship. We'll be able to start working to produce that and create it during these defined developing stages. So that proof of concept could be various things. It could be an actual built out or MVP prototype, it could be various concepts, and I'll give an example in a moment.

[00:06:55] And then we end up at the end with a project dossier, which serves as the blueprint for the product teams to templatize innovation projects at scale. So what this could end up being, it can end up going into that Jira, we do use Jira, life cycle of an idea, and creating that initiative and actually making it part of either a new product or new process. It could end up being something that's built out that ends up being open source. It could also be something that's patentable, which, I worked on a project I'll talk a little bit about, which was all those things.

[00:07:31] And we have this kind of BAU we talk about internally, business as usual. What we're trying to do is not work that way. We're trying to change it up a little bit, approach things in a different way and rethink our structured and standard approaches that we've done in the past. But we still have a structured approach, it's just different than what people have done in the past.

The OCR project: how might we build it in house?

[00:07:57] So what does that innovation look like in action? A project that I worked on was these offerings around, well, it's a SaaS product which required sending image data to a remote service, which introduced both security and availability risks, which, our personally identifiable information, PII. So the challenge there, the HMW, is how might we build technology in house to review this data and minimize the risk inherent with vendors and the inefficiency of manual review? Because what was happening, these checks sometimes would be sent analog style, they would be skewed, account numbers and checking account numbers, and it would be difficult to read without requiring someone manually to go through it.

[00:08:56] So stepping back a bit, optical character recognition. We use this technology and we decided to use it. Why? Because OCR, or optical character recognition for short, is critically important to our business and customers, and OCR is the process of extracting text from images. So when done well, it improves customer service, customer experience, reduces costs and prevents errors and resulting losses.

[00:09:27] So what did it actually look like? It's a check like this, where you would see where an account number would be, a routing number would be skewed, and a signature would sometimes cross over. And so we had to create a technology that allowed us to do this, allowed us to actually review these checks and actually be able to break up these numbers, to chunk them so that they were readable. This was not readable without going through a manual process until we worked on this technology.

[00:10:00] So the questions that came up around this were, what were we responding to, and how do we minimize the manual work that is error-prone without relying on a vendor, which can affect business continuity? Being a bank and in finance, risk and compliance is paramount. So having vendors work on these problems, we obviously have vendors that support us, however at times these are things that we want to try to keep in house. How do we do that and continue on and not affect the business, create and manage that technology?

[00:10:34] So can we do this? Could we create it in house? Many times when we approach challenges, the innovation method is around build versus buy. Obviously there's always an option to buy it from a vendor, but what can we do? What we're trying to do in this process, in this example, and just in general, is, can we do this internally? Can we build this internally? Does it make sense? Is it feasible? Is it viable? And is it desirable? And could this be reusable internally and beyond? Anything that we try to build, and support the building process, is a technology that we try to think about, where else can we apply it? And this was something that we felt could be applied in various use cases across our organization.

[00:11:24] So what did the results look like? Scanning accuracy was 97% in only five months. The numbers were pretty low, we were having probably maybe 70% or 60% accuracy during the manual process, so it really increased greatly. We reduced that risk and cost. We brought it internally, it's an in-house service now, and something that we did to improve that accuracy. Now we can use it on other pieces, which led to avoiding those vendor costs and removing that vendor from what would have been something that could create some risk, and address that business continuity piece.

[00:12:05] And there are two patents now, filing for patent pending, for this work. And we've also opened this up to other financial organizations around open source, so that's starting up as well. So these pieces came together and we created this product that really worked for us internally, but also it's something that we open sourced across our industry.

SCIPAB: structuring an idea

[00:12:35] Normally we were going to do this in person, and I was going to run an activity here, but we can't do that here. So we're just going to talk a little bit about maybe some of the ideas, and we'll just have you, you're there, just think about an idea. Usually, like I said, remotely I run this in Miro and facilitate it. If we were physically there I would have had you guys maybe get some post-its going and get you out of your seats. So feel free to stand up if you want to and stretch your legs, but we'll talk a little bit about what are the methods we use.

[00:13:09] So the SCIPAB is what we kind of structure when an idea comes through, and how we actually ensure that we have thought through what the pieces around the idea are. So it's situation, complication or challenge, implication, position, action and benefit. You start by clearly writing that problem, what is that situation? The complication, what's impacting the situation. As well, implication of failing to act on the problem, I talked a little about premortem, this is getting a little bit into that piece. You want to position the problem, what is a proposed approach to solving that problem at stake? You start getting those necessary steps that need to be taken, and then you clearly state the benefit and expected results of implementing your proposed solution.

[00:14:01] So there's a little bit of a hypothesis approach, experiment design here, where you're kind of like, okay, this is what you're testing out, this hypothesis, and then these are the benefits that you expect from that solution. So that's the steps of what we generally use to start building out ideas.

[00:14:18] So what does that look like? This one's an example of potty training a dog. Probably should use this for my kids right now, because I have toddlers and this is a fun time in that regard. So what's that problem? Our dog, in the process of potty training, doesn't want to go outside to use the bathroom. Okay, that's a situation, got it. What's the complication? You can't trust her alone in your house, and winter's coming and it would be cold outside. So this is causing us not to trust her, we can't go anywhere, the weather might make it harder to go outside.

[00:14:58] Implication: stuff gets ruined, odor, we can't even get a dog sitter. If our dog doesn't get potty trained our floor will keep getting ruined. And then what's the position? We can hire a dog trainer to come and do that work, so we propose that we hire a dog trainer. Action: understanding our budget, how much you can afford, and research trainers and dog training afterwards, and to understand that budget we need to understand who's available. And then the benefits: saving money on carpet cleaners, and really the peace of mind piece.

[00:15:37] So obviously this is a funny kind of example, but as you can see you kind of build out that idea and you start thinking about, okay, what is the action that you can take? This is why, whether it's in work or personal, it's a way to start thinking through approaches.

Other methods: Wow Now How, value proposition design, scoping canvas

[00:15:54] Beyond the SCIPAB, we use other resources and methods. We actually have published internally over 80 or 85 or so and continue to grow them. Some of these are cleaner and can be done in very brief activities. So something like a Wow Now How, which is, what's new and exciting ideas that could be created, now, what elements or variations can be accomplished today, and how, how can we implement our idea ASAP?

[00:16:25] So there's an aspect of, here's a wow, here's the aspect of what can actually be done now. And I referenced the presentation again, it's that good piece of, well, we need to ship, like, now. So that's where we're kind of looking at and seeing what can be done there, and then what can be implemented. This is a really quick activity you can do a lot of times with product teams, get some good ideas out and move it forward.

[00:16:55] And then if you want to get a little deeper, value proposition design, I really like it. Those who've maybe used other Strategyzer business methods will recognize this, but this focuses on the jobs to be done, and uses pains, frustrations, gains and motivators to drive the solution offering. So this is when you get in depth. I also like this in regards to when you're building out your personas. You kind of link this a little bit with an empathy map. And if you are building out an actual idea, this can be coupled very well with a lean canvas for an initial business plan. And there's a lean canvas, and there's empathy mapping.

[00:17:45] And then there's a scoping canvas. So this is where now we're talking about getting desirability, feasibility, viability, that's a piece there. So what claims, beliefs or open questions need to be resolved? So now, yeah, you can make something, you can create something, but is it desirable, feasible or viable? Then what are the deliverables and what is that exit criteria, assumptions that are being made, and then dependencies, stakeholders. So walking through these steps, it has you go deeper around your user needs, and it goes a bit deeper than maybe you take your lean canvas and then you build on this. So all of these methods are standalone approaches and resources that you can use, and also ones that you can couple and work together.

Takeaways

[00:18:33] So, high level takeaways. Innovation is all about starting with an idea, not technology. I think many of us know that inherently, but sometimes we go down that rabbit hole of like, oh my god, this new technology, oh crap, what did OpenAI do today, let's drive with that.

[00:18:54] Internal methodology applicable to any ideation process. There's nothing here that, we try to develop something based on a lot of different resources and practices that are out there, but it's nothing that can't obviously be applied to any of your work and to something in your life. Leveraging design thinking and all the UX tools that you already know. And honestly, any kind of product strategy tools, business strategy tools, those are pieces that all should be incorporated in your thinking around this.

[00:19:24] And not all ideas lead to innovation, but all ideas can be tested. I think that's one of the pieces around it, where not everything is innovative, but you do have an idea. It could be something that could just be a feature change or change request, or something that can be a better experience for your customers or your users, but not necessarily a game changer and innovation. And that's okay, because that's the majority of our work. It's just more changing the way you potentially think or approach the work.

[00:19:59] And that's all I have. There's a Q&A, I know we'll talk with Marne. And if anyone has their phones out, I'll put that up there if you want to connect with me, but you can also find me on LinkedIn. And I appreciate it, thank you.

Q&A

[00:20:14] Marne: Thanks, Robert, that was really great. Thank you for sharing that. We do have quite a few questions here, we'll try to get through some of them. Everybody wants all the resources you shared, so if there's a way...

[00:20:29] Robert: Let's figure something out afterwards and we can do that.

[00:20:33] Marne: Okay, that sounds good. Yeah, I think the audience is interested in getting some of those templates so they can use them in their work. So yeah, if there's a way to do that, that'll be great. One question from the audience is, what is the hardest part of that funnel to get by? And I think they're talking about that reverse pyramid image you showed.

[00:20:56] Robert: What's the hardest part? Well, first off, the hardest part is, I think the majority of organizations that you're going to work in in your career are not necessarily innovative organizations. And I think everyone wants this, that's why I make the joke about innovation, because everyone's like, oh, I'm innovating. You know, like, okay.

[00:21:13] Robert: But part of it is just, you're always pushing against what we talk about, the status quo, within organizations, and because we all have work that has to be done. There are backlog items that have to be knocked out, no matter what your role is. I think that's one of the challenges, like, how do we just step back? I'm scheduling a couple of different workshops right now with internal teams and I'm like, well, this will be a two-hour workshop, we can split it into one hour, let's just fit it into one hour, because nobody can even get two hours together with people. And the reality is, taking that step to start thinking in a different way, or approaching the work in a different way, in itself sometimes is a lot.

[00:21:59] Robert: So I think, when we talk about our workshops, we talk about the beginner's mind. Come in with a beginner's mind and just be ready to absorb and be involved. And I think, again, with organizations, if you're the person who's trying to drive the innovation, you also have to be empathetic around the fact that, we talk about being empathetic to users, we have to be empathetic to our colleagues that we're trying to innovate with, saying, we recognize the work that has to be done that you have to knock out, and we're here to support that. And our team kind of works as that extension of a team, almost like internal management consultants, to support it. I don't know if that answered that question, hopefully it did.

[00:22:37] Marne: That's great. We had another question, this was something I was also interested in, which is an interesting part of your sort of R&D role, but the idea of building over buying, and how do you sort of think through that? So the question exactly is, how do you choose build over buy, or, do you choose build over buy where you can?

[00:23:01] Robert: Well, we have different kinds of innovation groups within Discover, and one kind works on those that want to buy something. So for example, if you want to add, like every product now has a new AI component, GenAI component, right? So that is kind of like, oh well, you're buying that, you want to add that, you're going to go through this process. That's not necessarily innovation, and that's why I talked about technology and things like that. Even that team is under an innovation umbrella, and they're like, it's not really innovation.

[00:23:33] Robert: But again, the reason our team exists is, when you have an early stage idea and you're trying to truly understand if it makes sense to build versus buy. And that's why we'll build out those early proofs of concept, to see if it's something that's feasible based on what we're looking at. There's a lot of vendors out there and a lot of times people just want to buy something, and I think that's really what it is, and we welcome that. Please go to that other team and have them help you buy that. But if you really want to think through a way to potentially build something internally, without having a vendor, and a lot of times risk and compliance come into play, and that's sometimes where people come to us like, we have to do this internally because it's going to be a problem if it goes externally, if we rely on a vendor. Or we've had a vendor and it's gone to hell because information has been released. Wait, that didn't really happen, sorry, might be recorded here. Or something might have happened that shouldn't have happened and now we have to respond.

[00:24:33] Robert: So that's why we try to get people in those early stage ideas who really are interested in potentially building something. Again, one of the things I'm just scheduling right now is people who are actually interested in redesigning and building something that's currently an external application.

[00:24:48] Marne: Just a quick follow-up to that. Are you on the patent for this awesome product you worked on?

[00:24:52] Robert: I am, I am. What's good about working in this team is that I got to be on two different patents, because I'm around a lot of smarter people. So I'm thankful for that, and I'm thankful for my team in that regard. One is around this particular optical character recognition image processing one, another one around accessibility, which is around dyslexia.

[00:25:15] Marne: That's got to be a life goal. Yeah, that's great, that's really cool.

[00:25:18] Robert: Yeah. Well, Discover, what our team is really focused on is patents. We actually just did two weeks of helping people develop patents, like sessions internally, and we're getting a bunch of disclosures, as they say, where our legal team really works through and kind of supports and helps out.

[00:25:32] Marne: That's amazing. Let's do one more question and then wrap up. I know you kind of touched on this earlier about, everyone has their regular thing that they have to do. So can you share some best practices or tips, like how do you get partners and teams to pause what they're doing, or the BAU that you describe, and to really try to think and innovate? I'm sure you have some hurdles with that. So how do you convince them to carve out time to actually do this work?

[00:26:06] Robert: Our biggest hurdle. I came to Discover two years ago and I felt like I became almost like the account manager, salesperson internally, to try to sell our services. I feel like I'm one of those management consulting companies, I'm the person who's the account person trying to get people to know who we are. So I think part of what we try to do is we try to get out there and just connect and network, just like everyone networks internally and externally. We do it internally to try to get people to understand what we do.

[00:26:37] Robert: We create these methods and put it out there for self-service. They're out there, they can go on one of our sites and just pull it down, download a template from Miro and go to town. I work with teams on coaching. They want to do self-service, I'll help coach them. It's just a lot of getting out there. And it's not the most fun answer, because like I said, I think the default is, we have work, we have a job description, we have things that need to be completed.

[00:27:07] Robert: There are certain people, and we've been in a situation where they're like, no, we're good, we'll do that, and I'm like, okay. And there are certain people that really just want the help, want the support, want to approach things differently. And in the end it's going to depend on the organization you work in. It's largely going to be the minority, those people who are really willing to rethink the way they work.

[00:27:27] Robert: And I think when you want to, you've got to reach out to those designers, those product people, those strategists around the organization, those marketing people, like all the people that are at UXDX, like that pie chart, are the people in your organization you want to reach out to, because those are the individuals. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir a lot of times. The people on this call are the people trying to rethink the way we work, trying to do things a little differently so we can work better.

[00:27:56] Robert: And again, there are some organizations that might slot out, here's your free time to structure that work. Maybe that exists in your organization. Maybe use that to see if you can partner and really reach across the aisle. I feel like that's not the right term, or maybe that's too much of a term I shouldn't say right now, but reach across teams that aren't within just your team and not within just your discipline.

[00:28:21] Marne: That's great. Yeah, I think it's awesome, and it's fun when you find a partner who really does want to work with you, because then you get to do great things.

[00:28:28] Robert: It's so fun. I love doing this when we get, like I said, I'm so excited about scheduling some of these that I was just emailing back and forth, and it's just exciting because when people are of the same kind of mindset around, how do we do this but do it better? And so that's what we try to do. And honestly, working in a place where, everyone knows we're going through a merger, so a lot of that stuff kind of halts innovation, like, oh wow, we have to make sure we're just doing the things we have to do. And those are the things we're pushing against, and every organization has it. We're always pushing against the work that needs to be done, but how do you do this work better is the question. And that's why I say, how might we? HMW, how might we? And that's the question you want to bring up when you're in these discussions.

[00:29:21] Marne: Yeah, thank you for sharing your perspective.