MENU BRAD J. BERKNER

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Navigating complexity & building solutions

Building enterprise internal apps for IBMers, it was critical to connect the dots between the products we built and IBM’s top line OKRs. I provided strategic direction to ensure these goals were met. Connecting the dots to OKRs meant, having a detailed understanding of customer insights, influencing stakeholders, defining a clear product strategy with a well defined roadmap, and precise feature specification. Ensuring the team was informed and engaged was essential for tackling gnarly problems and delivering high quality products.

“Good design is good business” - former IBM CEO, Thomas Watson Jr.

My role

  • Research and analysis
  • Strategic planning
  • Facilitate collaboration
  • Align teams
  • Design end-to-end experiences

UX Design Lead

  • UX Design
  • UI Design
  • Design thinking
  • Strategy & roadmaps
  • Agile development
  • Design for sustainability
  • Usability testing
  • Design for AI
  • Project managment
  • Facilitation
  • Cross-disciplinary collaboration

For over 15 years, I’ve bridged UX design, development, project management and guided stakeholders through digital transformations. I’ve worn many hats but kick-starting digital transformation through UX design has been a constant in my career. While at IBM, I've defined UX design leadership as part of the Digital Sales & Sales Enablement team by facilitating IBM Enterprise Design Thinking sessions, cross-disciplinary collaboration using IBM Garage™ methods, and demonstrating the value of UX design.

I’ve been known to…

  • Bring people together as a team-first design lead
  • Mentor designers at IBM and beyond
  • Identify opportunities and develop strategies to achieve goals
  • Facilitate design thinking sessions and align teams
  • Guide cross-disciplinary collaboration because collaboration creates the best experiences

IBM Marketers Playbook

As part of the Digital Sales & Sales Enablement team, we build products internally for IBMers. Our team won the bid to build the IBM Marketers Plabyook. As a lead ux designer, this project touched on everything illustrated in the graph above like influencing people, product strategy, customer insight, and product execution.

Collaboration and open communication was the key to the success of this project. Facilitating IBM Enterprise Design Thinking workshops, brought our team and the stakeholders together. Out of the workshops we established communication guidelines and began crafting the product vision. We continued to clarify the problem (opporunity) statment. A final sign-off was needed by the Director, Marketing and Engagment experiences. I worked with product owner and stakeholders to create documentation that would explain vision and persuade the Director, Marketing and Engagment experiences.

IBM Marketers Playbook journey

Section of an artifact used to persuade executive stakeholders about our direction

Building the experience

The application had to use the IBM Carbon Design System and a CMS. Our team had prior experience building with the Wagtail CMS. This included a React front-end using the Carbon Design System so we chose this approach. We used Wagtail previously but we didn't use it as a traditional CMS where content creators would need to build pages so for this project that was something we needed to consider. How would the Carbon Design system integrate with page building and content creation? There were also a other technical considerations like how would the components work within the Carbon grid using a CMS? Once I found the solution that fit all of these parameters, I connected with our developers to confirm that the solution would work.

old and new version layout

The image is a guide for marketers to illustrate how the old version of IBM Marketers Playbook pages could translate to the new version

Functionality

The solution needed to be dynamic and flexible which also made it necessary to build in a ton of functionality. The landing page included an Instagram like story feature, an IBM Your Learning integration, and a Facebook like news feed with filters and sorting that included likes and commenting capability. These were all complex custom design and development solutions meaning we had to be in constant communication with the stakeholders to hit our deadlines.

Marketing Strategy

Summary & Impact

IBM Marketers Playbook was one of the most successful projects I have worked on. I attribute a majority of the success to open communication between the stakeholders and our team. The content creators and marketers visiting the site provided feedback that was positive and insightful which helped improved the overall user experience (UX). We were able to iteratively improve the UX across the platform from the content creation in the CMS to the live page.

Highlights

  • 665 Average weekly visitors versus averaging 615 a month on the old solution
  • 936 Average page visits +66 (mtm)
  • 587 Average unique users +27 (mtm)
  • 4.24k Average user interactions +1.33k (mtm)
  • 6.5 Average page views per session +1.1 (mtm)

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