Tag: Business

Just like many other large, established companies, AT&T finds itself in an interesting situation of needing to deal with a world of dramatically increasing scale and complexity. For decades, experienced company veterans have been able to address these challenges manually with the knowledge, skills, and intuition they have built over a career in their roles.

However, we are now reaching a scale where this is no longer feasible, and we are facing a host of problems that cannot be manually addressed. By building intelligent systems, we bring radical efficiency changes to how AT&T operates. These are orders of magnitude improvements, where something that may have taken months manually, may now take only an hour.

Along with my user experience research and design skills, my team built one such intelligent system to manage this complexity for network capacity engineers as they decommission legacy machines on the network. Our tool was extremely well received by our colleagues in the field and is currently being used in decommissioning to save unnecessary hours of labor and costs.

AT&T’s legacy telephone wire system is made of automated, interconnected switches on a nationwide scale and has been around for decades. Maintaining this vast network requires a significant amount of money spent towards power. Naturally, AT&T is interested in finding equipment that can be decommissioned or replaced with newer, more efficient equipment in an effort to reduce this large footprint, all with an active, live network that must remain fully reliable through this process.

Currently, decommissioning a machine requires weeks or months of tedious, manual planning by highly experienced and trained engineers, each with their own personalized workflow.

We created an assistive tool for network capacity engineers to reduce this time to hours by recommending better alternatives to free them for their other responsibilities. Our tool helps discover and recommend plans for removing equipment from the network.

Our project focused on two primary objectives:

1. Evaluating network equipment to establish a priority order for decommissioning.
2. Creating and recommending a valid circuit reassignment plan for operators to take into consideration.

While my colleagues were developing the machine learning aspects to this project, I conducted user interviews to better understand the needs of a network capacity engineer to inform our product decisions.

As themes in their workflows arose, I developed quick mockups to encapsulate the needs I was hearing.

I continued to iterate on them as our understanding of the user needs evolved.

As we were on a short timeline, my colleague quickly began implementing a working web-interface prototype as per my designs to connect the command line into a more user-friendly experience. Within a few days, we had a fully functioning version of the tool that we could share with our users.

Through usability testing with network capacity engineers, we identified tens of changes to our working prototype and continued to iterate.

Today, this internal tool is used by network capacity engineers across the company and is radically changing the way AT&T works. This product was so successful in creating an efficiency disruption within the company that more work of this nature is being requested by internal teams. I found this highly impactful project extremely gratifying. With just a few months of applied work, we were able to disrupt an internal process to save costs and significantly change how the company and employees operate day to day.

I joined the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry in Fall 2015, and my experience has been extremely diverse and fulfilling. My work spans a number of disciplines and industries as we work to create innovative solutions to challenging problems.

The AT&T Foundries are a network of six innovation centers across the world–Palo Alto, Atlanta, Houston, Plano (2), and Israel, each sponsored by a different company or internal organization. In Palo Alto, we are sponsored by Ericsson and jointly innovate with team members from both AT&T and Ericsson. As a member of the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry, I serve as a bridge between the two companies.

The Foundries were originally created several years ago as an open, collaborative environment to inspire and promote the rapid invention and innovation of strategic ideas from concept to commercialization. Foundry team members drive their own projects and champion them to stakeholders, much like entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Projects emerge from personal passions, business unit needs, external partnership opportunities, and our employee crowdsourcing platform.

As one of the top internal brands to AT&T, we are highly regarded internally as the reliable source of all types of innovation, with a special focus on efficiency and disruptive innovations.

I was hired to lead design at the Foundry, and since then I’ve led numerous design projects, trained up team members, and worked on initiatives to bring design thinking to all of AT&T. I am frequently consulted on how to apply design to products, teams, processes, and business models. My work ranges from exploratory research to ideation to prototyping and implementation.

Projects

For instance, since 2016, I have collaborated with my teammate on the design portion of building a highly trafficked, enterprise product to provide a complete, seamless, self-service experience to incubate and validate any virtual network function against AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Architecture as part of the release of ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy). Check out some press on this project and how we are in the process of open sourcing it in 2017:

Has AT&T ICE’ed VNF Onboarding?
AT&T ICEs Vendors of Virtual Network Functions

In 2015, I immersed myself with our key enterprise customers to understand their needs and expectations around our new Network on Demand product. My research uncovered key product strategies and features that our team was able to champion both companies.

In 2016, I led design for yet another engaging, enterprise design project, though for an internal tool this time. Our efficiency innovation reduced the time for network capacity engineers to plan out how to decommission legacy network machines from several weeks to hours.

Leadership

Over the years as the head of design at the Foundry, I have trained my teammates in design thinking through collaborative projects, coaching, mentorship, and workshops. In turn, my colleagues are now applying design thinking to their work and even leading training sessions of their own.

One such instance occurred in 2016 when my colleague and I conducted interactive design thinking workshops for middle school and high school women interested in technology. Read more about our contribution here: AT&T hosts Girls in Future Technologies (GIFT) Day

My design team has found success identifying and solving difficult problems they could never have imagined in short periods of time through my guidance. One team member dove into understanding the needs of Uverse and DirecTV installation and maintenance technicians for several weeks. His research uncovered so many high impact opportunities that when we presented our work to the Senior Vice President responsible for these teams, the SVP allocated millions of dollars in resources to addressing these findings immediately.

While at the Foundry, I have had the pleasure to engage with hundreds of startups working in emerging technologies. In early 2016, I became especially curious to learn more about augmented and virtual reality and identified it as a high potential path to new revenue streams.

With my market research, I educated, championed, and began the dialogue within AT&T to apply these emerging technologies to our business strategy. As concrete demonstrations of strategic AR/VR plays, I sought out and developed strong partnerships with leaders in the industry to create cutting-edge projects.

In one such project, my partners and I created an augmented reality, spatial tagging tool for camera teams and film production crews using the Hololens in collaboration with FOX Studios.

In another, my partners and I developed hands-free, interactive, virtual reality entertainment experiences for hospitalized children and tested immersive entertainment as a form of distraction therapy.

Along with our numerous technology and design projects, marketing, partnerships, and thought leadership are similarly top of mind. I have contributed on visual design, information architecture, content strategy, startup partners, and developing marketing and brand collateral for several key initiatives, some of which are elaborated below.

Specifically, six times a year, we host the Futurecast Series, where we invite an honored guest to participate in a deconstructed panel where the curated audience is invited to participate in the conversation between the guest and moderator. Before the discussion, we also invite relevant startups to demo their latest and greatest to attendees. All our past and future events can be found on our website.

In 2016, we also began the Futurist Reports. In this series, we dig into technologies and trends while highlighting key insights that are reshaping entire industries and our world-at-large. Each report includes an industry-wide view from a diverse array of leading experts and features select startups at the forefront of technology. We delve into broader business implications of these technologies and explore indicators such as collaborations, investments, market demands, and technology advancements. Check out our latest reports on the Future of Drones and the Future of Entertainment.

In early 2014, I joined a small smart home startup called Leeo as a Product Manager leading our expansion into Enterprise Internet of Things (IOT). As the rest of our team worked on building and launching our first product, the Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight, a consumer, plug-and-play remote Smoke and Carbon Monoxide alarm monitor, I worked as a team with our co-founders to translate our company vision into our product suite, business, IP, and partnership strategy. In addition, I product managed our launch website, where I led the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners.

My time at Leeo was a huge personal growth experience. Before Leeo, I had primarily worked as an Engineer and Designer. However, at Leeo, I played significant roles in Business Development, Partnerships, New Product Exploration, Product Marketing, and Strategy. I joined looking to work on high-level problems and expand my skills and experience. I am fortunate to say that got exactly that, beyond what I had even imagined.

As the sole employee out of our small team of twenty responsible for expanding from consumer to enterprise, I set the path for how to approach our growth. I began with a market survey of enterprise IOT and discussing our company vision with the Founders. Once I had a solid foundation of our goals, the market landscape in several enterprise IOT industries, and our existing partnership base, I selected a few high potential industries and dove into qualitative user research.

I interviewed 100+ individuals in the course of a few months to learn about various industries, different roles, and what their needs were in the IOT space. With our executive team’s wide-ranging contacts in Real Estate, we especially dove into all forms of that industry from Hospitality to Multifamily Residential Housing. This research spurred countless conversations with our leadership to determine company strategy for the coming months and years, resulting in numerous patents (see below).

What started as exploratory user research transformed into so much more as well. We began to form strong partnerships with individuals and companies who wanted not only to help us with our research but also to collaborate on projects with and even invest in us. For instance, after our meeting with one utility company about product collaborations, they invested and joined our board. Thus began my first experience leading Business Development and Partner Relationship Management, reporting directly to the Founding team.

As the value of my work shined, I was soon able to grow my team. I hired and managed a colleague, and together we accomplished deeper market landscape analysis and research. Our work served instrumental in securing investors down the line when asked for our due diligence.

As the only team member who had ever shipped a consumer electronic product before, I was also often tapped to give advice on hardware product design. It was an honor to leverage my strong hardware engineering experience to be a resource to the team as they navigated contract manufacturers in Asia and industrial designers in San Francisco.

Three months before we publically launched our first product, we were in need of a Web Product Manager who could reliably deliver in a short period of time. I took this opportunity to step up to product manage our launch website.

I led our teams through the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners to ensure that we had a fully functional, responsive, product launch marketing page, e-commerce store, blog, support forum, and community forum to showcase our company and product in time for our mid October launch date.

This was yet another new growth opportunity for me. So far at Leeo, I had already had a significant impact in my roles in Business Development, Partnerships, and New Product Exploration. Now, I was offered another chance to play a leading role, this time in Software Product Management and Marketing, and I owned it. Our entire launch was seamless and it was rewarding to see how my work directly led to sales.

WO 2016040378 A3: Environmental monitoring devices and methods
US 20160071196 A1: Systems and methods for transferring data and revenue
US 20160072891 A1: Sensor-data sub-contracting during environmental monitoring
WO 2016007680 A1: Fault diagnosis based on connection monitoring
US 20160071219 A1: Dynamic insurance based on environmental monitoring
US 20160070614 A1: Identifying fault conditions in combinations of components
US 20160071184 A1: Service-improvements based on input-output analysis
US 20160071183 A1: Environmental monitoring device with event-driven service
US 20160071148 A1: Alert-driven dynamic sensor-data sub-contracting
US 20160070276 A1: Ecosystem with dynamically aggregated combinations of components
US 20160070920 A1: Constrained environmental monitoring based on data privileges

WO 2016032465 A1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9092060 B1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9304590 B2: Intuitive thermal user interface

WO 2016018269 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic
US 20160034010 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic

US 8967855 B1: Electronic device for determining external temperature
WO 2016028295 A1: Electronic device for determining external temperature

WO 2016032457 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20160061640 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20170038233 A1: Fluid-flow monitor

US 9213327 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9372477 B2: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20150268205 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9170625 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
WO 2016010529 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9116137 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20160018799 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions

From March 2010 to June 2010 as part of Stanford d.school‘s prestigious Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class, I worked with a diverse team of four, including Engineers and MBAs, to help rural Indonesian farmers earn fast cash from the weeds in their farms and simultaneously minimize deforestation.

With The Easy Steam Machine, rural Indonesian farmers can increase their income. The Machine provides them an efficient way to produce steam for their home essential oil distillation units. By reducing the time to produce steam from hours to just a few minutes, The Machine enables farmers to process at least 25% more biomass per day! Time is saved by (1) increasing surface area, (2) heat insulation, and (3) including a continuous water flow through system. As a $230 plug-and-play replacement for the traditional batch drum, the Easy Steam Machine ensures durable, hassle-free steam distillation.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Traditional Batch Drum Distiller

The Easy Steam Machine

We worked with IBEKA, our NGO partner in Indonesia, to identify the core need of these farmers. For one week, two of my teammates visited, observed, and interviewed these farmers in their fields. We noticed that these farmers were battling with lemongrass as a weed in their farms, and as a result, expanding into fresh rainforests as they struggled to keep their farms going so they could support their families.

Interestingly, most farmers had systems in place to convert their lemongrass into crude lemongrass oil, which they could easily sell for fast cash. However, these distillation systems were left unused, because it took them three hours of valuable time to boil the water necessary to begin the distillation process.

Subsistence farmers in Indonesia need a way to process all of their lemongrass and patchouli into higher value essential oil. Currently, farmers leave up to twenty-five and seventy-five percent of their plant material unprocessed because their essential oil distillation device is too cumbersome and time-intensive. Given the short harvest period and the low throughput of their device, farmers must leave potential income in the field, unprocessed.

In order to increase the quantity of oil output, we focused on increasing both the throughput and the yield, i.e. doing a faster job and doing a better job. The Easy Steam Machine is a replacement, plug-and-play device that fits directly into the traditional system — which makes it less expensive than purchasing an entirely new device. It also lowers the barriers to adoption because farmers will feel familiar with the design and user interface.

Inefficiencies with Traditional Distillation

The Easy Steam Machine

There are four problems with the existing system that lower throughput and yield: stifled fire, biomass heat loss, poor water-to-fire interface, and high water maintenance. We address each of these with our system by designing a more efficient fire, biomass insulation, higher surface area, and water flow-through.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Check out a prototype in action:

We handed this project over to our partner IBEKA to execute and distribute this among their served communities.

Read our implementation plan here.

Read our final presentation here.

Read more about the d.school class Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability here.