Case Study
Making Business Partnerships Strong, Resilient, and Effective
Product & Project Overview
Company/Client: BMC Associates
Product: Design Your Partnership
Project Goal: Make a tool that facilitates the creation of an exhaustive business partnership charter that clarifies both the business and interpersonal sides of their partnership
My Role and Team: I was a contractor in this role and I served as Principal Product Designer with 1 mid-level designer making up my team
Key Stakeholders: Founder, Product Manager, Lead Developer, Psychologist
Product Environment: Browser-Based
Duration: October 2019 - March 2022
Status: On Production
Product Description: The Design Your Partnership tool is made up of 3 parts: Discover, Discuss, and Document.
In the Discover phase, each business partner answers a series of questions about themselves, their partners, and their business.
After each partner has completed their Discovery questions, the partners come together to review each partner’s answers and assessment results. This is the Discuss phase.
And in the Document phase, the partners work together to create a comprehensive Partnership Charter that becomes the foundation of how the partnership operates in every function.
The Problem The Product Solves
Say you and a couple other people work together at a large corporation. You are all good at making widgets and you have a good rapport. So you decide you want to start your own business together.
However, if you've never owned your own business—especially shared ownership in a partnership—you are likely not aware of issues that can destroy your business and leave you vulnerable to being sued, sacked with massive debt, scarred with deep emotional wounds, and potentially wreck the livelihood of you and your employees.
Design Your Partnership™️ facilitates a process that business partners, or potential business partners, can address these issues at the outset and determine if you want to continue or start a business partnership together. It's also an exhaustive charter for how to move forward as partners.
The Challenge
My client has been a psychologist who specialized in resolving business partnership conflicts as a mediator. Before creating this product, my client had developed the content over several years working with their clients mediating partnership conflicts. They had developed a workbook using Word and this is how they facilitated the process.
My job was to turn their content into an interactive tool that significantly made their job easier. The other big requirement, I needed to create an experience that could be licensed as a SaaS to other mediators and business advisors.
My Approach
As the Principal Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end product creation from discovery through implementation. This included:
Scoping, defining and scheduling the work to be done over 3 years
Converting technical and business requirements into UI needs
Identifying user personas and determining permissions
Facilitating ongoing stakeholder workshops
Establishing a design system
Accounting for 3rd party assessments to be integrated as seamlessly as possible
Determining the architecture of the experience with UX artifacts such as a site map, wireframes, and user-flows
Designing a high fidelity prototype that passed rigorous reviews with stakeholders and users
Handing off the prototype to the development team fully annotated for interactions and accessibility
Conducting a comprehensive design QA on staging and production
Architecture and Simplifying Complexity
I identified and categorized the experience into 3 major phases of the Partnership Charter process: Discover, Discuss, and Document.
In the Discovery phase, an individual partner works alone answering questions about themselves and of each of their partners. The questions are broken up into 14 topics (Units) such as 'Conflict-Handling', 'Ownership', 'Scenario Planning', and 'Personal Values'.
Typically the Partners will complete one to three Units and their Guide will facilitate a discussion between the Partners about their answers in the Discuss phase. The goal is to have one unified answer that later gets applied to the Document phase.
The Document phase is the actual Partnership Charter they are working towards. It works similarly to most document editors. The output is a comprehensive documented charter.
Varying Users Tasks and Emotional States
There are 5 distinct users all with varying permissions and roles.
Also the emotional state of the different users can vary so I had to account for that. For example, some partners are going into business together and are excited about it. However, some partners are going through this process as mediation to resolve conflicts. And sometimes these partners are family members. This difference meant I had to keep the design and UI copy neutral. I didn’t want to have this ‘congratulations woohoo’ moments in the experience as it may turn off partners who view mediation as incredibly stressful no matter how pleasant the UI.
Some partnerships go through this process with a business advisor which is called a Guide.
Individual Questions (Discovery)
The Discovery phase is where the individual partners worked to thoroughly examine their values, commitments, expectations. It's also what they expect from their partners as well as what they think their partners expect from them.
Since there were so many questions, I used a variety of input methods to keep Partners engaged so they did not fall back on automatic behavior.
Discuss (Meetings to Agree on 1 Unified Answer)
Once all the Partners have completed their units, the Guide facilitates a meeting where they all discuss the Partners' individual answers and agree on a unifying answer.
The design challenge here was fitting so much relevant and varying content into a small space. The Guide uses this interface to lead the Partners through a collective meeting where they review each partner's answers and draft a combined answer on the right. That data goes towards the Partnership Charter (Document).
Drafting the Partnership Charter (Document)
This is the phase where the Guide edits the raw data from the Collective Meetings working towards the final draft of the final Charter.
Business requirements made this phase of the project quite the challenge. It seems there would be a great editor plugin that we could have used. However, Partners were not allowed to see their partners' comments nor were they able to edit the draft. We had to design and develop our own to accommodate this use case.
Results
Feedback from testing with real users has been overwhelmingly positive. Business partners now have a way to clearly communicate expectations of each other. And partnership mediators have a simple way to guide their clients through resolving conflict.
Partners have confidence they've thoroughly addressed the issues that create partner conflict.
Also, Partners have a document capturing their understandings, commitments, and agreements, which they can refer to whenever necessary.
Now partners have a systematic way to align on the future: where partners headed and their endgame.
Key Learnings
It’s import to design for different emotional states and varying complex user needs.
I regret I wasn’t as in tune with WCAG standards when I took on this project as I have been the past few years.
Working with a small team meant I had to cover a lot of tasks. I greatly increased my skills in project and stakeholder management on this project.
I enjoyed making something that hadn’t really been done before. Or at least I could not find anyone that was doing this kind of product when I was on the project.