Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Catherine Courage by Hugo Sarrazin and Hyo Yeon for the McKinsey Quarterly (February 2015), published by McKinsey & Company. Catherine Courage champions user-centered design—not only for the benefit of the software company’s customers but also for its employees. To read the complete interview, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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As senior vice president of customer experience at Citrix Systems—which develops a range of cloud-computing and enterprise-software solutions—Catherine Courage is in her fifth year of permeating the company’s products and functions, such as IT and sales, with the user-centered approach known as design thinking. In this interview, she shares lessons learned during the ongoing transformation.

What is design thinking?

It’s interesting: when we really started to pursue design thinking four years ago, one of the biggest hurdles was that people tend to think of design as being about aesthetic qualities—colors, pixels, fonts, and the like. Absolutely, the aesthetic appearance of products is important, but design as a “big D” word means more than that. So we’ve invested a great deal of time to help people understand that design is about simplicity and delighting customers and other users. It’s about an absolute focus on the user, and it’s about constant innovation.

Traditionally, many of our product organizations would start with a problem and then—based on intuition about what our customers want—race toward a solution. Today, they actively engage customers along the way, with an iterative process of failing and learning fast as part of the journey. Getting to this point has required big process changes and a new mind-set across the company.

Why did you choose the design-thinking approach to get closer to your company’s customers?

The main purpose of my team’s charter is to ensure that we’re delivering a great experience across all customer touchpoints—from the website to trying our products, using them, and all the way through to support and renewal of contracts. This requires a company-wide focus on the customer.

Design thinking is an ideal framework for us to use because it focuses on developing deep empathy for customers and creating solutions that will match their needs—as opposed to just dreaming up and delivering technology for technology’s sake.

How did you get started?

We started by training our product organizations and built a team of design professionals and researchers who could go out and understand what was on our consumers’ minds and the opportunities that we had in the areas where we compete. However, we soon found that a customer-centric approach was applicable to everything we do, and we wanted to scale it across the business. As we started to do that, we realized that Citrix, like many companies, has different subcultures, and the approaches that we tried in the product-development area didn’t necessarily apply to other parts of the organization. This was an important lesson as we started working with different teams across the business. To date, we’ve trained almost half of our 9,800 employees in a customer-centric approach to problem solving that makes design thinking meaningful and relevant to everyone, regardless of division.

IT is often not that used to experimenting to deliver new enterprise applications. How did you get the IT function on board?

It’s important to bring design to life by giving people many examples of how it works—not just the principles but also examples throughout the company where colleagues are exhibiting design-thinking behavior. What helped us be successful with IT was that we did have these proof points where IT staff could see the successes their colleagues were having. As a result, IT was quite keen to engage in this new approach.

For example, when we’re choosing what products to procure and deploy to our users, IT does trials and proof of concepts. That’s critical, because IT can’t simply deploy technology. It needs to understand its users. Our IT department has also taken to heart that design thinking is not only about products and services; it can be about processes as well. For example, IT has transformed the way it does project retrospectives. The department now has a redesigned process that uses a different framework than before. There are subtle changes in how questions are framed that reflect empathy for the person next to you—who may have given the project his heart and soul even though things didn’t go as planned. This approach has made a positive change in how team members learn from mistakes and do a better job the next time. Being open to failure, learning, and iteration is a critical part of the process.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article and the videos that accompany it.

Catherine Courage was in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. She holds a master’s degree in applied sciences, specializing in human factors, from the University of Toronto. She was vice president of product design (2009–11) and currently is senior vice president of customer experience at Citrix Systems (2011–present); previously, director of user experience at Salesforce.com (2004–09), and principal usability engineer at Oracle (2000–04). Catherine is co-author of Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements—Methods, Tools, and Techniques (second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, March 2015). Also, she is executive sponsor for the Citrix Women’s Informal Network and the Institute of International Education’s Women Enhancing Technology initiative. She appeared on Forbes list of “10 rising stars at the world’s most innovative companies” in 2013.

Hugo Sarrazin is a director in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office and leader of McKinsey Digital Labs, and Hyo Yeon is a digital partner in the New Jersey office.