StoryJam
Collaboration tool that protects independent judgment before group decisions converge
Delivered a collaboration system that delays visibility until participants commit independently. By changing interaction sequence rather than adding process, the tool reduced anchoring and hierarchy effects across distributed Ford teams.
A showcase brief with a bigger problem underneath
As part of a FordLabs create-a-thon, I helped build a story pointing tool — a way for distributed team members to submit their estimates before anyone else's response was visible. Before this, teams were running these sessions over Webex and Slack, where responses appeared in real time and influenced whoever hadn't weighed in yet. FordLabs leadership liked what they saw and asked us to determine whether there was a wide enough audience to justify building and scaling it — and whether it could demonstrate the quality of product their process could produce. That was the brief. The prototype already aligned with FordLabs' inclusion values, but the broader participation problem it could solve hadn't been named yet.
[VISUAL: Before/after sequence diagram — two flows side by side. Left: "Open session → early responses visible → anchoring → narrow decisions." Right: "Private input → signals hidden → simultaneous reveal → independent perspectives surface." Simple, no tool UI needed. Recreate from scratch.]
Good intentions couldn't fix a structural problem
Through research and synthesis with my team, we found that distributed Ford teams appeared to have open participation — but decisions didn't reflect it. The problem wasn't facilitation quality or intent. It was timing. When early responses were visible before others committed, influence leaked predictably. PMs were working hard to manage this manually, and it still wasn't enough.