↓ Overview
↓ Problem
↓ Insight
↓ Idea
↓ Implement
↓ Impact

Brendan Appe

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...

Rather than building siloed tools, we focused on uncovering shared needs and overlapping opportunities across the supply chain.

How We Aligned Teams Around a Unified Vision

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.

A key artifact in this process was the Monument Site, which centralized our vision and helped bridge misaligned expectations across logistics, IT, and operations teams.

By grounding decisions in real user journeys and system insights, I helped shift engineering conversations away from feature outputs toward outcomes and transforming the roadmap into a shared product strategy. It included:

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

The Golden Thread defined our future-state vision across the supply chain—capturing desired user experiences, functional and technical requirements, and value hypotheses for each key stage from order to sale.

Sample slice of the Golden Thread for the future “Awaiting Build” phase.

These narratives became our north stars. Every team could reference them to align decisions, validate solutions, and stay focused on impact. It allowed product, engineering, and operations teams to move from shared vision into phased delivery.

Designing for high-stakes operational systems, I centered around three tenants:

Surface Uncertainty: Make invisible states (e.g., hold reasons, ETA gaps) explicit to enable proactive response.
Reduce Manual Coordination: Replace fragmented spreadsheets and emails with system-driven alerts and collaboration.
Build for Cognitive Load: Prioritize clarity, progressive disclosure, and scanability to support decision-making under pressure.