At FordLabs, we partner with Ford businesses on a journey to discover new solutions to existing problems. Our teams involve users throughout the iterative process to create highly usable and accessible products.
Each FordLabs product team has three crucial roles represented – product manager, product designer, and software engineer. Pairing with product owners from engaged Ford businesses allows the team to balance critical skills and knowledge to increase probability of success. Learn more about our team roles where business, user, and technology intersect:
Product managers use lean methodologies to reduce the risk of building the wrong thing and comfortably change direction. Through lean software experiments and data driven decisions, they lead the team toward building a viable business product.
FordLabs not only strives to deliver valuable products but aims to share best practices with product teams across Ford. Successful products have a culture in place to enable the product teams to trust, collaborate, and learn.
Our mission is to empower business owners and team members to continue practicing human-centered design and bring back new tools and techniques to their organization.
Though the types of problem we work on vary greatly, there are certain common traits that all FordLabs products embody that allow us to move fast, experiment, and iterate until we create the right customer experience.
Before day one, our teams prepare for success by making sure we have a willingness to challenge our assumptions, get access to users, and can work in a real-time environment.
Flexibility is our strong suit. We value making decisions based on user feedback, empowering teams to pivot the product direction based on that data.
Working in areas of high uncertainty, we employ agile practices to incrementally add value through continuous feedback loops and derisk assumptions as we go.
I’ve seen so many tools failing because they’re designed for managers. I wanted our tool to be designed for working-level teams.
Each product at FordLabs iterates through a double diamond framework. There is no linear path - we get feedback at every step throughout the process and pivot as necessary. Click through each step below to learn more about our process.
Each project starts with a scoping session where the balanced FordLabs team and business owner align on the product’s engagement goals and how we measure success. We use scoping sessions to create shared understanding. Everyone on the team brings their own perspective and skills to identify the value and risks associated with the problem to solve.
Whether you’re interested in working with us, shadowing us for a day, or just have an idea you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Just fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.
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