10 Mar 2023

Inside cxpartners’ bootcamp: empowering our team in a hybrid world

To be able to deliver exceptional results for our clients and their users, we first need to make sure that everyone in our team understands – and is empowered to use the design techniques that enable us to do great work. That’s where bootcamp comes in…

  • Adam Newson

    New Business Executive

At cxpartners ‘we exist to help our clients to solve the biggest problems facing society today: lack of sustainability, uncertainty, and inequality. In doing so, they’ll become more resilient and more valuable’.

Every year, we like to bring together all of our new starters for a bootcamp so that everyone can get to grips with how we apply our lean, agile, human-centred approaches at cxpartners. The programme enables new practitioners in the team to learn the techniques and ways of working that are specific to us, and gives non-UXers working elsewhere in the company an opportunity to learn more about user-centred design (UCD). It’s especially useful for people like me, who have never worked in UX before!

Before we had the session, I knew it would be beneficial, but not to the extent it truly was. It’s always a pleasure meeting colleagues that you don’t work with on a regular basis, but for me personally, it was so helpful seeing how other people go about problem-solving and what they value the most. The bootcamp really demonstrated why it’s so important to involve different professionals throughout every phase of delivery.

So, what did we do?

Getting to know our process

One of the main aims of the bootcamp was to give everyone a taster of our process, which involves Discovery, Alpha, and Beta. In the Discovery phase, we explore the problem space to gain a deep understanding of the users’ needs, behaviours, and motivations and how they are all intricately linked together. In the Alpha phase, we test options with hypotheses and gather feedback from users to refine our ideas. Finally, in the Beta phase, we build and refine options to create a final product that meets the users’ needs, providing an improved solution.

A photo of a group of 7 people sat around a table looking at a big screen and talking
Communicating and collaborating

Communicating and collaborating

Another important aspect of the bootcamp was to create a shared understanding of the user-centred design (UCD) process and encourage everyone to use design to solve big (and small) problems in and around cxpartners. We believe that UCD is not just for design teams, but for everyone in the organisation. By embracing a human-centred approach, we can create products and services that meet the needs of our users, whether they are internal or external. The bootcamp was a great opportunity to learn from each other and collaborate across different backgrounds and roles to ensure we are always bringing different views and expertise into our ways of working.

A man and a woman presenting information on a big screen
Leo and Katie presenting to the group

Meeting in real life

As our team is growing and we are based in two different locations (with lots of people always on the move), one of the highlights of the bootcamp was the chance to meet everyone in real life. We got to mix with people based in different offices and teams, interact face-to-face and build relationships with our colleagues who we don’t necessarily work with often. It was a great way to bring the team together, create a strong team culture and foster creativity and innovation. And as lots of the team have very different experiences, it was very refreshing to see how people went about solving a solution in their own ways!

A photo of 5 of the cxpartners team sat down having a conversation
The cxpartners team sat down having a discussion

Stuart Tayler, our Director of Practice, was one of the team members leading bootcamp. When asked why he thinks bootcamps are useful for new starters in particular, he replied:

I think it’s beneficial for consultants to understand a loose framework that we typically use so that they can then build upon and adapt to their needs. And it’s useful for everyone at cxpartners to get first hand experience of our research and design process – it helps us have a shared understanding so that we can all communicate better. It also gives people some design thinking skills that they can apply to whatever roles they do at cxpartners.

Our HR, Culture & Ops Director, Tamlyn Driver also commented:

Running bootcamp for all of our new starters is a fantastic way to share our knowledge but also to establish and develop our company culture and ways of working. We want everyone who works at cxpartners to share our passionate belief in the power of user-centred design to help make the world a better place and this is a great way to communicate the importance of it.

Client bootcamps

In addition to bootcamps for our internal team, we also deliver client bootcamps. These help kick-start customer centricity programs to transform our clients’ User Centred Design capability.

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss this further.

Learn more about Inside cxpartners’ bootcamp: empowering our team in a hybrid world

Alix Vaughan

Reach out to Alix Vaughan

Sales Director

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