The UCD group was located in Hillsboro, Oregon, at Intel’s Hawthorn Farms, HF3 campus. Image | Intel Oregon Site Photos
i n t e l c o r p o r a t i o n
For decades, the world’s leading, semiconductor chip technology producer—with revenues over $70 billion and well over 100,000 employees in 2019—had entrenched itself in supplying ever smaller and faster micro processors to computer manufacturers who then sold their products to end user consumers. Although a highly profitable revenue model, the inherent disconnect from end users themselves constituted a blind spot in Intel’s foresight.
So, around the turn of the millennium, as the dot com bubble burst and the world market for top price and top performance, personal computers was saturated, Intel’s sales plummeted. They then realized their own, internal need to better understand end user consumers as the actual demand drivers to influence the company’s technology development roadmap.
To facilitate this strategic insight, the User Centered Design group (UCD) was formed as a multi disciplinary team of about 40 user experience researchers, designers and engineers who discovered and translated end user value into tangible solutions that generated commercial impact for Intel.
UCD investigated and proposed futuristic, end user usage models in various markets, also designing conceptual, digital devices that fit those scenarios. They would then build working prototypes of the devices for Intel’s executive decision makers to interactively experience and assess the concepts for themselves. This delivered a palpable sense of a technology’s market potential—far beyond a product requirements document—allowing the most well informed, business planning choices to be made.
A team member’s early, Carecom concept sketch.
p r o j e c t m a n a g e m e n t
Although hired into UCD as a Senior Industrial Designer, I also served in a Project Manager position for a unique program in which Intel itself intended to bring a consumer product to market. I led our group in the development of a home medical device, involving nearly all UCD members in six professional disciplines across seven locations, and including the activities for an external client that desired multiple, product SKU differentiation.
The Carecom program was originally incubated as a pilot exploration by the UCD group into the future needs of health care for the aging population of the United States. The findings revealed an opportunity of such scale, that Intel chose to create an entire new business division to pursue it, the Digital Health Group (DHeG). This group’s charter was to develop a technology platform that would address the needs of in-home chronic disease management by enabling greater independence and confidence in quality and efficacy of care for patients and their families, while increasing the accuracy and immediacy of patient care.
During the first year and a half of development, the partnership between DHeG and UCD was managed on an informal basis, which was adequate at that stage. But, as DHeG and the program grew in scope and complexity, UCD was involved at a growing rate as well, which eventually strained the ideal implementation of the program deliverables and the strength of the partnership.
Following attempts by three different UCD project managers to bring cohesion to the alliance, ambiguities and dissatisfaction still remained. It was then that I was invited to take up the challenge of leadership, with several years of combined experience in product development and project | personnel management, and being new to Intel without preconceptions about past issues.
In that role, along with directing conventional aspects of project coordination, I identified program inefficiencies and developed and implemented near and long term response plans to improve partner interactions.
Through receptive and supportive, consensus building conversations and collaborative exchanges, all team members were constructively held accountable for relational issues to bring about productive resolutions and program success.
Documents were prepared and shared to clarify roles and responsibilities, to outline an inter and intra organizational communication structure, and to set scope of work.
And, along with authoring an itemized, product development proposal, requisite improvisations were made in design research and software development to reduce delays and optimize outcomes critical to engineering progress, user interface demo presentations, and marketing engagements.
With new partnership dynamics in place, our teams were able to deliver outstanding results for our partners and wellness to potential end users.
A team member’s Carecom concept CAD model rendering.
Bringing continuity at a project and program partnership level amid a unpredictable, product development landscape.