McClatchy Innovation Collective

Goal: Build a user-centered culture from the production floor to the boardroom.

The McClatchy Innovation team facilitated design-thinking programs across McClatchy’s corporate departments and 30 newspaper markets. Our programs ranged from a two-day design-thinking bootcamp to a five-month product accelerator program. I worked on a lot of exciting projects, from developing human-centered AR/VR experiences to helping launch a racial-equity journalism event series. Ultimately, however, I worked to make a formal ‘innovation lab’ unnecessary through building user-centered systems and processes across McClatchy. I launched two new programs, developed workshops on everything from diversity & inclusion to business model development, and worked with McClatchy leaders to reshape internal processes. Three years later, I’ve seen user-centered methodologies impact almost everything we do as a company, from our editorial strategies to our digital sales approach.

Programs:

McClatchy Innovation Academy brought cross-functional McClatchy teams together to tackle shared challenges during a 10-week design sprint.

Spark Series is a two-day “design-thinking-in-a-box” program for current and rising McClatchy leaders sponsored by McClatchy’s CEO. I designed and delivered segments on business modeling, diversity & inclusion and UX fundamentals.

Ignite is a five-month intrapreneurship program in partnership with Matter, a media-focused accelerator and V.C. firm.

Program Materials:

We used a combination of Stanford d.School, Google Five Day Sprint, IDEO and our own methodologies in our design-thinking programming. I partnered with our team’s design lead to create templates, guides and prompts to help cross-functional teams across McClatchy.