Reflection – Visualization     Challenge and Selection  I work as a Design Producer for an in-house agency within a big mobile gaming company. We create  free-to-play games and my department is in charge of promoting those games in the market. We have 19  live games and around 5 in prototype. Therefore, we are a large team in the marketing department. We  develop campaigns to support the company marketing objectives such as increasing game installs,  improving brand recognition or trying to attract lapsed players back into the game.  I’m in charge of the Design team and I organise the incoming workload and delegate it among the team  members. We are a team of 14 designers, some are very skilled in video animation and some not as  much. When I receive a new request I usually assign it to the designer available at that moment.  Sometimes the available designer is not the best choice for a specific game or is not experienced in  creating that type of deliverable.  So I often need to sit with them and explain what they need to do and who they should reach out to if they  have any questions regarding the game art or style. This can create a bottleneck in the flow of the team.  The main challenge here is that our department should find a more streamlined process.   As this issue is cleary human-centred we have used design thinking to generate ideas for solutions. The  selected tool was Visualization.    Application  As we are a team of designers and are used to thinking visually, it was not hard to apply this  methodology. Our department gathered in a meeting room for 1.5 hours and we divided the team into 3  smaller groups.   Using white-boards and coloured post-its we started considering the current situation which needed a  solution, the main pain points and the opportunities and options for change.  Then we brainstormed “What if” scenarios and ideas and then each participant had 3 stickers to vote on  their top 3 ideas.    Finally, we agreed to select the options with the most votes to present to our manager.     Insight & Approach   We got some interesting insights such as the idea to redefine the team-members’ roles. Instead of calling  everyone a Designer, we discussed renaming the roles aligned to their hard-skills such as motion design  or creative conceptualization. As a result, some roles where redefined as Motion Designer, Performance  Marketing Designer and so on. Also, we decided to reorganise our team and create smaller project groups  that could be dedicated to a specific game. We changed from being a large group of generalists on all  games to have each group focus on a specific product.   As a result, each dedicated project group has a strong relationship with the game artists who are  developing the game. Therefore, the collaboration between artists and designers has improved a lot and  the bottleneck related to incoming work has been avoided.   Those adjustments in the team were quite effective and now we work in a much more agile way. The  team will continue using design-thinking tools whenever we identify an opportunity to improve structures  and ways of working.

