↓ Problem
↓ Insight
↓ Idea
↓ Implement
↓ Impact
[ 1 ]
02x User Researchers
User-Centered Research & Insights
Team Management & Mentorship
DesignOps & Cross-Functional Processes
20% reduction in status inquiries due to visibility
The Problem
“I don’t care if it’s due to COVID, a supplier who can’t deliver a part, or any of the other countless disruptions that come with it. What we need is transparency—so we can tell a customer their vehicle will arrive in two weeks, ten days, or even four months. And more importantly, so we can update them when that changes.”
Danny Wilson, Head of the Toyota National Dealer Advisory Council
Insight
In response, Toyota engaged an outside firm to help define a digital strategy focused on improving visibility.
While the engagement provided helpful insight into current priorities and surfaced key pain points, it ultimately left the organization with a long list of fragmented capabilities and no cohesive experience vision to connect them.
Toyota began standing up individual product teams, each owned by different parts of the business, to execute on key visibility capabilities. However, it quickly became clear through our initial assignments that many teams were solving similar problems with significant overlap and dependency.
With multiple teams moving in parallel and no unifying framework, the risk wasn’t just redundancy. It was the likelihood of making inconsistent decisions that pulled Toyota further apart at a time when unity was critical.
We identified this as an opportunity for design to lead by shaping a cohesive experience strategy that could bridge silos.
We knew our practices in enterprise design thinking, systems modeling, and cross-functional facilitation could help teams connect the dots and create solutions that were stronger together than apart.
To further understand the root of the problem, my team conducted over 100 interviews across 20+ roles, surfacing a clear pattern: Toyota didn’t just have a visibility problem; it had a communication problem.
Illustrative user types based on roles and qualitative themes.
In parallel, I lead process mapping the end-to-end across Toyota's vehicle supply chain to uncover the full operational ecosystem. We documented key actions, dependencies, existing tools, and areas of friction across phases and roles.
This mapping effort gave teams a shared understanding of how things worked today and laid the groundwork for prioritizing and designing a more seamless, cross-functional experience.
We mapped core capabilities across the vehicle lifecycle to understand when and where each function plays a role.
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
We traced cross-functional dependencies to visualize how workflows interact and where coordination is most critical.
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
We surfaced key points of friction to reveal bottlenecks and high-impact opportunities for improvement.
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
Teams operated with different frameworks for how concepts and relationships are defined. These misalignments extended beyond data to fundamental disagreements about how the supply chain itself was understood.
For instance, one group might define a vehicle as "in transit" once it leaves the factory, while another only after it's loaded onto a railcar. These disconnects made it hard to coordinate actions, assign ownership, or surface issues.
- Without a shared language or data model, reconciling records was slow and error-prone.
- These mismatches strained communication and fragmented visibility.
- Cumbersome legacy tools compounded the problem with poor usability, manual data entry, and inconsistent accuracy.
These insights validated our perspective that Toyota’s visibility issues were rooted in a deeper communication breakdown. This breakdown stemmed from ontology drift, where teams used the same terms but with conflicting meaning.
The findings gave us the evidence needed to align stakeholders around this idea and begin designing a unified platform for shared understanding.
We didn’t just need more features.
We needed better communication.
Idea
Workshops and Shared Problem Statements: Bridging Gaps in Data and Dialogue
Toyota engaged IBM to introduce Enterprise Design Thinking principles and drive a user-centered approach to solving these challenges.
I lead facilitation for a series of design thinking workshops across Toyota’s Plano, TX campus, bringing together teams from Logistics, Supply Management, Quality, and Regional Operations:
- Teams co-mapped workflows and surfaced tensions in communication.
- We validated role-specific personas to keep needs top of mind.
- Cross-functional problem statements emerged that shaped MVPs.
Warning, obligatory workshop montage forthcoming...
For each initiative, we established a ‘Golden Thread’—a user-centric future-state product vision that defined our north star capabilities. This structured approach ensured alignment across teams and provided a clear direction for development.
The monument site served as a living artifact of our process from research insights to experience-based product roadmaps.
- Process & Research: Documenting our methodology and insights, including user personas.
- Experience-Based Roadmap: Outlining phased development aligned with user needs and business goals, creating our initial delivery plan.
- Future-State User Journey: Showcasing initial wireframes and expected user interface interactions.
- Data Requirements: Defining necessary data inputs and integrations.
- Hypothesized Impact: Defining anticipated business and user value.
High-level illustrative schematic – full artifacts available under NDA
Sample slice of the Golden Thread for the future “Awaiting Build” phase.
The capability helped teams quickly identify exceptions, bottlenecks, and capacity constraints across facilities. Visualizations surfaced operational pressure points for faster coordination.
I was embedded with the product team to deliver the MVP and shape future product evolutions, working side by side with logistics stakeholders across import/export, rail, truck, and processing operations.
I led design thinking workshops to ensure the tool reflected real-world needs across roles and surfaced opportunities for continuous improvement.
Toyota Logistics Services pinpoints affected vehicles using geolocation data and real-time yard visibility.
Teams can assess facility conditions and view total inventory.
Vehicles at that facility can be viewed and used to generate vehicle reports.
The evolving UI shell supported a growing information architecture and allowed for multiple contextual panes, all while keeping core page content visible and accessible.
This POC aimed to bring route-level data into the existing logistics pipeline experience, enabling users to layer route flows on top of facility-level insights. The goal was to expand the platform’s utility beyond monitoring and exception management, allowing route strategy and planning teams to leverage it.