IBM Feedback

- Sichao Wu (API Connect Design Manager)

(Awarded - Entrepreneur Award 2023) Nominated by Sichao Wu and Feride Diri

"As part of the summer 2023 cohort of the Patterns program, team Open Sourcerer (made up of Sunny Babbar, Tremell Lowell, Malik Johnson and Garri Katz) were tasked with improving the overall user experience around contributing to the Carbon Design System. Carbon is the signature visual language and component implementation that is used in all of IBM's products and thrives on community contributions, however the experience of contributing is confusing and lackluster. 28 surveys and 16 interviews were conducted to understand the core problems from all angles. They offered up a creative solution with focused and engaging results looking at improving transparency, guidance and motivating users to want to do more than just contribute. They took personal ownership for the project and were praised for their thought leading solution. The idea of having not only updates to the main contribution site, but also simplifying the overall process and delivering an engaging sustainable solution that will get contributors more excited and engaged in the future will definitely add great value to the future for Carbon and help it tap into a new contribution talent pool and ultimately greatly improve a cornerstone of IBM design and user experience. Bravo team Open Sourcerer! Keep up the entrepreneurial spirit!"

Feedback #1

- Stacey Seronick

(Design Manager, Patterns Program)

"Okay, I’ve now watched easily 50 different playbacks at the end of Incubator projects and I have never seen a team do so much incredibly impressive, deeply-thought-out, and clearly presented as an engaging story as I saw your team present this morning.

I am floored, and wouldn’t say so if I didn’t genuinely think so. I am going to use your team’s work as a model with my own team as we prepare to iterate on all of the Patterns programs again. Thank you for all of the incredible effort, thought, and time you all clearly put into this work - it showed and in addition to making me look good to my leadership and peers, it has undoubtedly done much for your own eminence with your respective leaderships. And if not, tell me how I can help make this success more apparent to your leaders."

Feedback #2

- Stacey Seronick

(Design Manager, Patterns Program)

"Sunny, as I didn’t have enough of a view into your personal process and collaboration style, I can’t offer any feedback on specifics like that. I was looking each week into each Incubator team’s Box folders and watched all the playback recordings that were posted there by teams; had your team shared those recordings of your weekly playbacks, I might be able to provide richer feedback.

All that said, I did get to see your team’s final playback and it blew me away. Your team of 4, working with leaders across the DPO and testing with practitioners across IBM, rapidly developed a depth of understanding about the problem and who it’s a problem for and why, which was particularly impressive given the short amount of time. It enabled your team to not only please your (notoriously picky) client, but your team told a wonderful story about how and why your work was so delightful to your client and users, and therefore successful. Your team managed to tackle what is a very “meta design” topic for many people, and cut through many layers of ambiguity and technical limitatio - er, opportunities, to deliver a set of very clear, very adoptable set of suggestions, solutions, and deliverables. What this shows me is that you applied what know and what you learned and that application led to outcomes that are important and valuable to your stakeholders and the larger design community at IBM.

Immediately after Patterns and your Incubator project wrapped up, you jumped into the watsonx challenge with a team of local IBMers from across the business. Now I only know what your team did in order to win one of the watsonx challenge tracks from the short write-up on w3 announcing all the team winners. What your winning says to me is that you retained what your learned and grew as a designer and collaborator and communicator, applying what you know and what you learned, again. This repeatable success is no fluke - this is you, positively shining.

And what your repeated success means for me is “proof” that the programs I manage are having an impact on the people who go through and work with these programs, and that impact is in turn having a positive impact on the culture and therefore bottom line of IBM. And THAT is what contributes to keeping all of us employed, working that much more collaboratively and communicating that much more clearly, and therefore making our clients, customers, and users happier, which in turn makes the company happier and so they can help make we employees happier, and the virtuous cycle continues.

Thank you and kudos to you for having a noticeable, measurable impact on that cycle — you are not only helping the company to succeed but you’re making it that much of a better place for all of us supporting that success. Keep investing in yourself and your growth and maintain that beginner’s growth mindset while you keep growing your skills, and you’ll go far in your career. Thank you for letting me watch and help support this small stage in your overall success and growth - I have zero doubt that you will accomplish all that you desire to accomplish."

Feedback #3

- Jeannie Servaas

(Design Director, Carbon Design System)

(Incubator project sponsor Carbon Design System)

"I met Sunny when I got involved as a reviewer for his Patterns cohort at the beginning of 2H. It was absolutely amazing to see the problems of the Carbon ecosystem through fresh eyes, and watch Sunny’s team tirelessly iterate toward fresh solutions. He’s a natural leader and really brought his previous experience as a researcher and a project manager to bear. He was generous with his knowledge and helped educate and elevate the contributions of those around him as well.

Sunny is also a great presenter and can walk stakeholders through complex issues while maintaining their engagement and eliciting their participation. This is no easy task. As evidence of the cohort’s amazing contribution to the design system, they got an innovation award in Q3. In Q4, the core Carbon team took the cohort’s advice to heart and refactored the Contribution section on their website. The team also built a Github triage bot, greatly reducing the time it takes for contributors to make a proposal and get it triaged, accepted and staffed. Sunny will be an invaluable resource wherever his path takes him at IBM.”

Feedback #4

- Lauren Rice

(Senior Visual Design Lead, Carbon Design System)

“Sunny has helped the Carbon team revamp our Contribution documentation on our website and was a crucial player in developing many new innovative ideas for how the Carbon team could gain more contributors. When working with Sunny on this project, he always displayed a positive attitude and was receptive to constructive feedback. Sunny has a natural passion for design and helping others and is wonderful to work with overall. Thanks, Sunny, for helping us tackle these hard problems!”

Feedback #5

- Aubrey O'Neal

(Senior UX and Content Designer)

(Incubator project sponsor Carbon Design System)

“This year, Sunny joined Patterns, an intensive education program for designers to tackle a business problem within the space of 5 weeks. In the first week, I presented a business problem to his team: improving the contribution and triage process for the Carbon Design System. Sunny immediately stepped in to lead his team—his prior experience in running user research interviews, synthesizing results, and playing them back to stakeholders set a great example for his team to learn from and grow in their own design research practices. He also showed project manager skills, in helping his team schedule time with interviewees and Carbon stakeholders, and helped his team achieve stellar playbacks. As evidence of his team’s success, they were rewarded with an innovation award in Q3. At the end of Patterns, Sunny and his team provided prototypes and advice for how the Carbon team could improve contribution. In Q4, the Carbon team took this advice into consideration and completed a new Github triage bot, overhauled their website contribution docs, and continue to improve the process. Already, we have seen a reduction in the time it takes for a contributor to submit an idea, have it triaged, and gather a team of volunteers. Thanks, Sunny!”

Feedback #6

- Aubrey O'Neal

(Senior UX and Content Designer)

(Incubator project sponsor Carbon Design System)

“Thanks for sharing, Sunny! Hope you can add this as further evidence of the impact your patterns group had on our direction.”

Feedback #7

- Jillian Byra

(Product Designer)

(Patterns Enterprise Design Thinking Coach)

“From the beginning of the Patterns experience Sunny emerged as one of the stand out leaders of the group. One of my personal worries going into this experience as a coach was that my group would not do well with self organizing. This worry was immediately put to rest as Sunny went right into action working with his team to get working sessions and playbacks scheduled as well as setting up murals. I was very impressed with his level of organization and the long hours he put into this project. Especially considering what I know now that he also participated in the WatsonX challenge and was one of the winners! He was working on two huge design challenges at the same time and had excellent results with both. He was well spoken and professional in playbacks as well all communications with the sponsering team. My one area of constructive feedback would be in the future on projects like this, I would try to balance timeline/schedule better. There were a few times the other coaches and I wanted to try and nudge Sunny and the team along as we felt they had done sufficient work in an area (ex: all the research they did) but they were stuck or continued to spend precious time on it. I do recognize though how difficult the timelines are in projects/challenges like these! Overall, he clearly has a passion for research and design and I hope to get the chance to work with him again! I cant wait to see what else he does at IBM, great work Sunny!"

Feedback #8

- Viddhi Mathrani

(Technical Program Manager)

(Patterns Enterprise Design Thinking Coach)

“Sunny, it was a pleasure to work with you on the Patterns project on improving the Carbon contribution experience. I myself did not have too much experience working with Carbon, and much less with Carbon contributors themselves, so I learned a lot about the open-source community and what they find valuable. Your dedication and contributions were instrumental in making it successful.

I was very impressed with how well you and your other teammates functioned as a cohesive unit. There was positive synergy among the team members and it felt like everyone was empowered to share their unique ideas and perspectives. You self-organized very well by setting up meetings and conducting your own working sessions, wether or not the sponsor team or coaches were able to attend. I noticed that you each had your own unique set of skills you brought to the table, which fostered a healthy and productive working environment.

This also resulted in thorough, insightful, and organized research during the entire user research process. Furthermore, I loved how much time, effort, and ideation was spent dedicated to the users' journey. It is difficult to gather such concise research in such a short amount of time, but I was very impressed how motivated you all were throughout the entire process.

I understand that it must have been difficult to effectively time manage for each iteration/playback, with so much work having to be done in a short time and with fewer teammates. I wish you would have had more time set/dedicated to research, so that you would be able to begin prototyping and designing sooner, or at least have had more bandwidth to delegate tasks effectively and get things moving quicker. That being said, those things were out of your control and I think you did great with the time and resources you had.

Overall, you and the team excelled at researching, storytelling, ideating, and creating prototypes that were impactful to the user. I hope you have been able to apply your successes and growth to the projects you are working on now, and I am more than confident that you will make your users happy!

Feedback #9

- Amy Millett

(UX Designer)

(Patterns Enterprise Design Thinking Coach)

“Hey Sunny! Thanks for reaching out for feedback. Please excuse my late reply to this one.

In general, I was really impressed with everyone on the “Open Sourcerer” Patterns team. I was originally anticipating very involved coaching and found myself pleasantly surprised with how quickly and efficiently the team was able to get focused around the goals.

You did a great job keeping everything organized and up to with your master Mural. I know there was a lot of effort and time that went into maintaining that, especially with the large amount of research from interviews. You were also receptive to our design thinking exercises, quick to provide input, and helped drive working sessions forward.

I think my only critique would be that there seemed to be a little bit of a struggle during the “ideas” phase and it felt a bit like everyone was waiting for the Carbon team to lead the group in a certain direction. I think we could have been a little less focused on fitting ideas in with existing IBM processes and strategies and went a little bit bigger or outside-the-box with the ideas.”

Feedback #10

- Tremell Lowell

(UX Designer)

(Patterns team member)

“Sunny I enjoyed our time working on the Carbon patterns project from start to finish. I know our project would not have been as much of a success as it was without you! Thank you for willing to working the long hours with me when our other teammates were not available. The long hours during the week to working over the weekend together compiling research and building decks. Your detailed and organized approach to the project accumlated to Carbon Champions being implemented. We also won the Entrepreneurship award! Thank you Sunny! The best partner ever!”

Feedback #11

- Garri Kats

(Patterns team member)

"First of all, thank YOU for being the organizational maestro of this project. I deeply respect your skills and commitment to taking our work seriously. Your exceptional ability to organize and synthesize our findings and information played a crucial role in the project's success. Your dedication and expertise truly shine through your work.

• Ability to prompt next steps and keep the team on task.

• Amazing ability to organize and reorganize our information via Mural.

• Effective Communication of research findings and users.

• Great respect for everyone's time and opinions. Really giving space to all the team members to express themselves.

• Excellent patience and willingness to iterate and refine research methods and hypotheses.

• Knowing exactly when to push back and stand up for what you think.

• Your sense of empathy and humor made the time-constrained process a joy to work through.

As for constructive feedback there is very little that comes to mind as I would do this over with you without hesitation. Even though it was helpful, sometimes there was a bit more information on the mural board than my brain could handle. An example would be a section of the board copied and pasted for convenience and data security distracted me a bit.

With the insight and stability that you brought to the team you let me do my thinking and ideating that freely and allowed me to feel comfortable expressing myself. For this I am appreciative and I hope to be able to find more opportunities like this in my work."