I’ve been directly involved in the planning, organization and execution of Developer focused events. The goal of these events is to create awareness of Design Thinking and User Centered Design practices that promote a wider understanding of the user, their needs and context, during the product development process. Tech Talks, Design Forums and hackathons have been great tools for inspiration, learning, practice and fun. And our teams love them.

#ROCKtheSPROCK
Design Thinking Hackathon
2017


#ROCKtheSPROCK was a hackathon where designers, developers, marketers and participants from other disciplines  came together for 2.5 days to innovate on ways to make the Sprocket (new portable HP printer) more fun and exciting using HP APIs and SDKs.

For this event, we brought in 10 end-users, for three days. For two hours each day, the users provided feedback to the teams on their ideas and the teams had two opportunities to iterate between rounds of user feedback.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Event goals:
• Develop experiences bringing together HP’s technologies, face recognition and external APIs
• Exercise HP developer tools for public exposure at hp.io
• Evangelize Design Thinking/User-centered design methodologies
• Build community at the San Diego site and drive cultural change
#BizWizHACK
Design Thinking Hackathon
2018
#BizWizHACK was a 2.5 day hackathon where cross-functional teams rapidly iterate and prototype new software solutions. Part of hp.io’s Connect The Tech hackathon program. Idea/challenge: “Help home and micro business customers solve their business problems with innovative, smart, secure workflow solution.
Teams: 8 teams, 48 participants, 7 judges
Customers: 9 Small and Micro Business Owners
During this event, I decided to have fun and joined a team to help small business users solve common problems. I am proud to share that our team won the first place.
We created a functional app that allowed business owners to scan/take photos of receipts, and automatically identify and extract key information that make the organization and filing easier. The app was able to extract the dollar amount, merchant, date, address, and it was possible to capture notes via voice.
I’ve been also focused on establishing the processes and technical infrastructure, tools, equipment and resources needed to adopt user centered design methods throughout our product development process.
To do this, I led multiple efforts necessary to acquire technical infrastructure to enable on site usability testing sessions and user interviews, that could be recorded  and streamed, so our dev teams and stakeholders are able to observe and participate in real time. This has proven to be very successful to ensure the teams are aligned towards common goals and objectives, where the user is at the center of our product development activities.

I’ve also enabled ongoing internal skills training & mentoring within the design team to help the designers acquire the necessary skills needed to perform the job and grow in their own careers.

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