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Business Need
Business Need
For a global hi-tech leader in Silicon Valley, staying at the forefront of enterprise product offerings requires continuous innovation. A Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems wanted to create spaces for generating new product ideas from the ground up. Brenda, an embedded Agile consultant, was invited to design and execute the company’s first customer-centered ideation workshop.
Challenges
Challenges
Technical mindset: Engineers traditionally focused on technical solutions; the workshop needed to shift focus toward customer needs.
Time and cost constraints: Engineers would be pulled from daily responsibilities, so activities had to be highly strategic to generate tangible outcomes within a half-day.
Cross-functional collaboration: Balancing participants across Product Managers, Technical Marketing Engineers, and Software/Field Engineers from Wireless, Switching, Routing, and IoT required carefully sized groups for productive ideation.
Organizational culture: Cisco valued top-down directives, but Brenda needed to foster a bottom-up, inclusive approach to encourage engagement and creativity.
Approach
Approach
User-centered personas: Each group created fictional customer personas to guide ideation and ensure solutions addressed real customer needs.
Lean & Kanban methods: Workshop activities incorporated visualization, dot-voting, Work-in-Progress limits, and a retrospective to maximize value and minimize wasted effort.
Optimized group structure: Worked with VPs and directors to select 3–5 participants per group, ensuring a balanced mix of roles for effective collaboration.
Bottom-up facilitation: Introduced non-directive guidelines and fostered a safe, inclusive environment, empowering participants to self-organize and contribute ideas freely.
Results
Results
40 new customer-centered product ideas were generated in a single half-day workshop.
Top 3 ideas were identified by cross-functional consensus among 20 participants, aligning with organizational goals.
Ideas were documented in the Innovation Portal for Proof of Concepts, Hack-a-thons, and further R&D.
Introduced a new model for ideation that engineers found productive, engaging, and fun, paving the way for future workshops.
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