COVID-19 Innovation Sprints

challenge & outcomes

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact the economy, our business partners in affordable housing quickly realized that Fannie Mae had a role to play in sustaining homeownership. In addition to forbearance programs and ramping up consumer awareness programs, our partners asked us to lead three innovation sprints to help Fannie Mae reach historically underinvested communities with targeted support.

At the end of the sprints, we collaborated with over 70 people across the company, generated over 100 ideas, and delivered 19 concepts that informed strategy for Fannie Mae's Duty to Serve plan, COVID-19 messaging campaign, and future mortgage products.

my role

I led the Mortgage Product sprint and supported the Duty to Serve and COVID-19 Messaging sprints. Specifically, I:

  • Developed, facilitated, and synthesized two collaborative sprint sessions

  • Led the compilation of internal and external research to make the case for targeting historically underinvested communities and single-family renters (traditionally outside of our target audience)

  • Designed a three-slide storytelling structure to more effectively pitch final concepts

  • Led development of 12 concepts

Yvonne Tran managed the project and Molly Reddy led the other two sprints. Ayangbe Mannen supported all of the sprints.

sprint structure

Our team developed, facilitated, and synthesized three collaboration sessions for each innovation sprint. Before and after each session, we worked with our primary business partners to move the process forward. The entire process is outlined below, with collaboration sessions bolded:

  • Research Brief and Scoping: Compiling existing internal and external research, creating guardrails for each sprint

  • Problem Framing: Building a shared understanding and identifying gaps in knowledge

  • Writing Problem Statements: Synthesizing outputs from Problem Framing, conducting additional research, identifying problems to focus on

  • Ideation: Using problem statements and enablers to ideate potential solutions

  • Concept Development: Refining outputs from Ideation and developing ideas into more detailed concepts

  • Concept Refinement: Reviewing, critiquing, and iterating on concepts

  • Identifying Next Steps: Further refining concepts, presenting to leadership, identifying stakeholders to own the concepts

impact

When the innovation sprints were complete, we delivered research compilations, short pitches for 19 concepts, and documentation of each sprint process. Our partners chose to pursue the following steps, and we continued to support them in each work stream.

  • Duty to Serve 2021 plan: In 2020, Fannie Mae updated their Duty to Serve plan to include goals about sustaining homeownership during COVID-19. (Duty to Serve is a federal mandate that requires Fannie Mae to support manufactured housing, rural housing, and affordable housing preservation.) Due to concepts from our innovation sprints, our partners set goals to engage rural small financial institutions to learn more about their particular challenges and provide training on Fannie Mae's products and processes. We continued to support our partners by helping them make sense of their data and make connections around the company.

  • Explored partnerships with housing counseling agencies: Several concepts from our sprints included making better use of our existing partnerships with housing counselors. Our partners held several conversations and demos with housing counseling agencies. We supported by attending those meetings, asking guiding questions, and contributing our feedback.

  • Racial equity initiatives: Our sprints intentionally focused on designing for historically underinvested communities. We created research compilations that highlighted racial disparities around home buying and sustaining homeownership. This research informed enterprise-wide racial equity initiatives and contributed to the Black Homeownership Journey, another project our design team completed.

learnings

  • Close collaboration with and buy-in from business partners is crucial to success

  • Make sure business partners and eventual business owners have ownership in the process so they are prepared to take them forward

  • Tight scoping at the beginning can be helpful, but also need to know how to pivot

  • True co-creation was difficult remotely, but we got great buy-in when we took more leadership and developed short pitches for each concept vs. expecting workshop attendees to create the concepts and pitches themselves