BIM 360 Design Collaboration: Creating Autodesk's Fastest Growing Product
My Role
I led and managed the design organization on the senior leadership team, in close collaboration with my peers in product management and engineering. I set the design vision, established research processes, and built the cross-geo alignment infrastructure.
Led design organization on the senior leadership team across multiple geolocations
Impact
BIM 360 Design Collaboration became Autodesk's fastest growing product at launch.
Vision
Transform the architectural design and engineering project delivery process by putting data at the center and coordinating the teams, people, and activities necessary to deliver a project.
Background
I challenged the design team to leverage new ways of thinking about large-scale data to shape the overall user experience, and to map the overall information architecture to the customer mental model for how data is exchanged and contracts paid.
Challenge
Grounding everyone in the customer problem from the start — across a distributed team being built from scratch — was a shared priority for design and product management. We needed a vision concrete enough to guide and inspire product development before a single line of engineering code was written.
Obstacles
The large majority of our product teams across design, product management, and engineering was pulled from civil engineering products to deliver a zero-to-one project delivery product in the architectural, engineering, and construction market. Building shared customer understanding across different domain backgrounds and geolocations was the core challenge.
My Approach
I established design sprints to create a vision early, before engineering started work. I set up a round-robin, small-batch research process to build understanding across geolocations and create shared knowledge in the team. I established a dual-track design approach to ensure generative research stayed aligned with the business strategy while keeping pace with the needs of the SCRUM teams.
Measures of Success
Success criteria included: creating a vision that leveraged the customer's and industry's mental model of data exchange and collaboration; aligning design teams across geolocations; and understanding how our customers operated from one geolocation to the next to ensure we weren't building for isolated use cases.
Results
BIM 360 Design Collaboration became the fastest growing product at Autodesk. Based on the user-centered vision and processes we used to create that vision, the product resonated with customers immediately.
Key Learning
Vision set before engineering starts isn't a luxury — it's the only way to build alignment at scale. The dual-track design approach proved that generative research and delivery pace aren't in conflict when the process is designed intentionally.
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