I recently spoke with Steve Hanna, Senior Product Manager of Datacenter SSDs at Micron, about how his team brought design thinking to the complex and abstract world of datacenter storage — an area where design thinking isn’t typically associated.

A few weeks ago, his team hit a major industry milestone by finding a breakthrough way to decrease server storage costs while increasing server speed and reliability, thanks to unexpected customer insights derived using Stanford d.school methodology. The results of the Micron team’s work have already been featured in over 100 global media articles, and business results are naturally following.

Steve launched the Micron 5210 SSD and features using design thinking methods he learned as part of the 2017 class of Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship graduates, a program that was offered both online and in-person.

Steve was kind enough to share how design thinking has influenced him, and how his time at Stanford has led to an engaging international network.

From the old to the new

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a newer type of storage drive that can access data up to 175x faster than traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and can be up to 3x more energy efficient. With these benefits, however, comes the risk of an SSD wearing out earlier than a traditional HDD if used in the “wrong” enterprise applications.

Steve assembled a cross-functional team with sales and engineering colleagues to dive into these “wrong” use cases. They started by figuring out where (and why) customers needed high-speed access, yet hadn’t been able to transition from HDDs to SSDs due to reliability and longevity concerns. Based on discovering and aggregating unexpected customer feedback and technical insights from 100+ customer meetings, Steve and his team translated these user insights into breakthrough new product features.

In turn, the team changed how data was processed within Micron QLC SSDs, which helped increase the product’s lifespan, along with a suite of other new technologies designed to help customers feel safe and secure when adopting the latest SSDs (which customers wanted to use, yet held back by their perception of the potential risks involved).

Even if you’ve never touched a server, Micron’s use of design thinking has improved the services you’re likely relying on in these COVID-19 times as we increasingly use digital services, entertainment, and work/learn from home applications. For Steve, the problem his team tackled to build a fast, safe, and reliable solution to better servers was a big challenge — and a personal one.

The stakes are incredibly high in server storage when releasing breakthrough innovations. You want to push the envelope and rapidly prototype like in software, but in hardware you also have to do more of what I’d call “precision prototyping” so that you don’t send a lot of thrash to customers and environments like the datacenter where changes can upset finely-tuned systems and you risk impacting what a customer expects and trusts.

Imagine losing access to media streaming or your family photos that are stored in the cloud, even if just for a few hours. Or losing all your businesses data or your entire website if a storage drive goes down or data gets lost. Those are the sort of stakes that we had to innovate around, and they actually provided a critical creative constraint that gave our team the parameters needed to fuel unexpected innovations.

Applying Design Thinking

Steve led his team in the design thinking methods to better capture the customer needs using the following process:

• Empathy Interviews — a cross-functional team (product, sales, engineering) spent time in the field all around the world doing user empathy interviews, which tended to be more technical in nature due to the unique market segment expectations. The research methods, ranging from the number/type of users to how data was collected) are based on best practices taught at Stanford. In these interviews, Steve captured what users said, did, thought, and felt. The “did” part of the equation was perhaps most unique. To capture what users were doing in an abstract storage product, the team had to analyze every aspect of how end-users were accessing and saving data to their hard drives (based on incoming/outgoing data traffic patterns) to then reverse-engineer what end users were doing. The team then met with customers to learn the why behind what they were doing to connect quantitative and qualitative user data and emotions, which often centered on fear and uncertainty.

• Empathy map to point of view (POV) — His team then put the interview results into an empathy map to identify common patterns and unearth a POV: the unique user, need, and insight combination that was used to change the way the drive handled data to increase its lifespan.

• Identifying features with the greatest impact — With a POV in hand, Steve and the team used analogous situation methods to reconnect with the larger product/engineering teams to identify the areas of development that would result in the greatest customer impact.

• Narrowing the solution space — after brainstorming to create dozens of ideas, the team voted on the best data processing methods that would be the most impactful to introduce in a system-level solution. (At one point, the Micron SSD and engineering teams held a worldwide summit to gather everyone’s feedback on proposed approaches).

• Returning to the customer — with the new features and methods decided upon, it was now time to take the features back to multiple major customers to determine how it would serve their needs, then iterate multiple times based on each customer’s feedback to arrive at a solution that many of today’s top server manufacturers aligned on and have now adopted at scale.

Here’s what Lenovo’s Executive Director of Data Center Infrastructure, John Donovan, had to say about the end results in Micron’s recent press release:

The new and innovative QLC wear-optimization technology engineered into Micron’s SSDs can enable customers to safely leverage SSDs for many of their workloads, addressing an important customer need as performance and capacity demands grow.

When design thinking works, customers experience breakthroughs, just like Lenovo.

Why the d.school?

This post is coming out amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when all Stanford classes have been moved online until further notice. The program Steve was enrolled in at Stanford was geared for business industry leaders, with a combination of online and in-person curriculum. Steve also shared a few thoughts with us about why he is so passionate about design thinking as well as his online experience.

Jao: What’s been the biggest change between how you work now compared to before adopting design thinking among your team?

Steve: Before learning design thinking, I’d either do what the customer said (follow their orders) or try to intelligently intuit what I thought they needed (a dangerous place to be, as the assumption is you know what’s best and what the customer needs, when many times, you don’t). Now with design thinking, I embrace problems and the unknown, and use the d.school process as a proven path to arrive at a destination that I don’t know even exists at the outset of the journey. The unexpected final destination is almost always better than anything I or a customer could have possibly envisioned. The methodology is that powerful!

Jao: You mentioned that now you are talking more with customers. What has that process allowed you to find out?

Steve: What design thinking gives you is a proven system and process to seek customer feedback on things you want to learn, synthesize it against what they’re saying, doing, thinking, and feeling, and then translate the insights you collect in the field into low-resolution prototypes that can be quickly modified based on more user feedback until you arrive closer and closer to a true solution to the user’s problem. Then, only when you get really close, you invest the R&D to test and refine and create something at the final product or service level.

Jao: Many of the I&E courses you took were online (including design thinking), yet you’re part of a very active group of alumni. How did you build this global network despite being in an online course?

Steve: Both the in-person and online classes are highly interactive and the activities and exercises are so unique and memorable that they make for great bonding material, no matter where you are in the world. From applying design thinking and prototyping [at Stanford] or in our own companies, you learn by doing and by collaborating and hearing stories of everyone putting things into practice and changing and transforming their industries all around the world, which is incredibly inspiring.

While many classes are online, our digital class and networking tools today make it very easy to stay in touch, and I have personally visited international friends from the program while on trips all around the world. The bonds you form can be that strong, and I often call fellow alums to seek their advice on issues that naturally arise when leading innovation efforts, as they have the training and background to uniquely dissect issues that emerge on the frontlines of the future.

Jao: What advice would you give a new design thinker to increase the likelihood of success?

Steve: Assume nothing. And empty your mind of everything you think you know and go back to the beginning, back to when you knew nothing and had to learn with an open mind. To create our latest enhancements and breakthroughs, our team (world leaders in storage) had to go back to knowing nothing about storage and to seeing our space as if we were seeing it for the very first time. Only then were we able to listen, really listen, to what customers were saying, doing, thinking, and feeling and then translate their unique insights into something we (and they) never would have arrived at on our own.

Interested in bringing design thinking into your life? The Stanford d.school has more information about course offerings to help you navigate these uncertain times.