Ford Advanced Manufacturing
Project Details
My Roles: Lead Product Designer
Tools: Figma, Miro, Jira
Duration: 11 months
Teammates: UI Designer, UX Researcher, Software Delivery Team, Client Product Owner
Overview
Ford needed help designing and building a software product that their Process Engineers could use to configure the workstations at their future EV plants. We started with no backlog, no existing tool, and a lot of unknowns. Through user research and continuous discovery, we were able to start ideating and prototyping early solutions, which we used to populate a backlog of user stories for the software delivery team. This was a highly collaborative and complicated product to create.
Business Objective
In 2021, Ford set aside $4 billion to pay for warranty recalls and one of the primary reasons for these recalls is there are so many problems that happen during vehicle assembly in the plants. Our product would greatly reduce those mistakes by enabling the users to have more real-time flexibility when configuring the tasks that occur at every workstation in the assembly line.
Continuous Discovery
To kick off this project, we had to do a ton of user and stakeholder interviews, do on-site visits to their test plant, and review a bunch of documentation to get a grasp on what the “jobs to be done” were for this product. Some of the artifacts that we initially created were: story maps, personas, and service blueprints. We continued to refine these throughout the project.
Product Design
Once our initial discovery activities were wrapped up, we then got into a normal 2-week sprint cadence with our software delivery team. I really learned a lot about the power of Figma for this project. Creating digital products is truly my passion, so this project was really fun for me.
