DESIGN THINKING COURSE  FINAL ASSIGNMENT - Sara Robinson  STORYTELLING

Challenge

Coursera’s Design Thinking course made me acknowledge a useful and proven process for

the creation of innovative ideas. I will try to apply learned concepts and tools in my presales

role at work. Some of the tools such as visualization and storytelling were already in use in

my role, although I now have a better background to apply them more efficiently within the

design thinking process, defining the “What is”, “What if”, “What wows” and “What Works”.

Storytelling for technical presales

In LATAM (Latin America), customers with IT (Information Technology) requirements are

usually overwhelmed with many solutions to be analyzed for their needs. Comparing those

solutions may become a very big effort for customers and vendors. Features may not be

standardized, and business processes may require customization or a combination of two

or more technologies to cover a specific need.

Storytelling is very useful for technical presales in IT. As a presales engineer, this tool allows

me to:

● Share stories of other experiences or other success cases with customers.

● Discover many issues and opportunities in customer’s organizations (corporations,

government agencies, etc).

● Show that the project I sell can comply with customer’s needs.

Insight - Applying Storytelling for presales engineering

While customers listen to the stories I share, I also ask them to share their own problems

and opportunities for their business. I use that feedback to design a preliminary solution

that will then evolve into a successful project. The way to evolve is through an agile

methodology. So, we iterate in the definition of the solution as many times as we need, in

order to define an efficient solution that complies with each other's interests and goals.

The solution becomes our solution (not only mine or the customer’s).

I collect the information discovered in every step, plus the context information of

specialized sites (including public competition information) to develop strategies to

improve the chances of a winning solution.

Approach - Conclusion

I can now use storytelling in a more efficient way, and complement with the other tools

explained in the Design Thinking course in workshops with my customers.

Thanks a lot to Giovanna Salama and her team!

