Branching Design
Innovation Workshops
See things differently, get there faster.
Whether it’s deciding on a business direction, defining a product or customer experience, or working out a process, introducing new ideas is challenging. Large organizations have specialists to guide innovation. Branching Design provides this expertise for smaller organizations and nonprofits.
Branching Design helps clients see things differently through facilitated innovation workshops. Together, we frame and explore your goals and problems in highly collaborative structured sessions. In as few as three sessions, clients arrive at insightful observations and ideas that inform better decisions and solutions.
Facilitation + strategic activities = rapid results
Based on your needs, we custom design a workshop of one or more sessions tailored to meet your goals.
In facilitated sessions, clients (the experts) work with a neutral facilitator who guides them through activities and keeps things moving along. Each time-limited activity provides output to the next. Over the course of a workshop, clients revisit their output several times, looking at it through different lenses as they iterate on it.
Workshop activities are rooted in design thinking, which puts people — customers, users, other stakeholders — at the center of the process. Design thinking shines as an approach to understanding customers and users, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and creating innovative solutions. Design thinking is a superpower for exploring poorly defined and unknown problems.
Workshops are ideal for:
Customer experience & service design:
Defining a new customer experience
Capturing an existing customer experience to improve on it
Product & UX design:
Brainstorming and vetting ideas about a new product or feature
Defining a product's users and use cases
Design sprints
Strategy & operations:
Deciding on a major business decision
Defining a team or project charter
Defining a new process or redesigning an existing process
Putting workshop output into action
Branching Design can work with you to act on the output from your workshop. A workshop paves the way for:
Creating a service blueprint to visualize current and future-state customer touchpoints, behind-the-scenes activities, and system inputs
Prototyping a software product
Articulating software product features and user stories
Developing an experience strategy — what research to conduct and which design pieces to create. Design pieces, or artifacts, include research findings reports, personas, journey maps, storyboards, conceptual prototypes, wireframes, etc.
“Heather is an excellent facilitator with strong interpersonal and design-thinking skills. She was able to help us go from confusion to clarity of solution with a structured, disciplined approach and ensured that we progressed to our goals in an efficient way.”
What clients say…
“I have witnessed Heather lead collaborative workshops with difficult and sometimes disparate teams and help them realize their common goal. As a leader and guide, Heather has my highest recommendation.”
“What truly sets Heather apart is her exceptional ability to foster collaboration. Whether it’s uniting stakeholders, designers, and engineers or championing human-centered design principles, Heather excels.”
“Heather demonstrated a clear talent for facilitating interactive workshops and was very disciplined about ensuring good use of stakeholders’ time and input. She was also highly perceptive when it came to underlying business problems/needs and fluent in multiple ‘languages’ at our organization including business, clinical, data, and technology.”
Let’s have a conversation about your goals
I’m Heather Lum, and as founder and CEO of Branching Design I draw on 20+ years of design-thinking practice and leadership when I develop and run innovation workshops. The power of collaborative, human-centered design methods to focus workshop participants and engage their analytical and creative minds is amazing. It is personally rewarding to support leaders and their teams as they innovate to solve problems and enjoy the process of arriving at solutions.
I’ve honed my skills through employment and volunteer work with companies and nonprofits in industries including software development, healthcare, insurance, human services, and education.
I would like to meet you and learn more about your goals. Let’s discover how an innovation workshop can help your team see things differently and get to better solutions faster.
Heather’s certifications include:
Facilitator Program,
LUMA Institute
User Experience,
UX Management Specialty,
Neilsen Norman Group
Product Owner,
Scrum Alliance
SAFe 5 Practitioner,
Scaled Agile
heather@branchingdesign.com412-983-4213
Pittsburgh Metro Area