One month to earn a bank's trust

Context: Palo IT, a Paris-based technology and design consultancy, was in the process of winning BNP Paribas as a client. What the pitch needed was not another slide deck but evidence: a design practice the bank's teams could sit inside and feel working. The mission was to design and facilitate that discovery programme around an internal product for the bank's employees, and to make the first month so useful that the engagement carried on without question.

Constraint: one month, no ramp-up time, and an audience of bankers rather than designers. Every session had to produce something a stakeholder could stand in front of and understand immediately. That constraint shaped the whole toolkit: physical walls instead of software, handwriting instead of decks, and artefacts that accumulated in the room where decisions were made.

Format: full-day workshops on site with the bank's employees and managers. Kraft paper covered the walls; blue notes captured environment and context, yellow captured the users themselves, pink captured expression and goals. Participants wrote, clustered, and dot-voted their own material, which meant the findings were theirs before they were anyone's recommendation.

Persona and context mapping: one veteran arrived announcing the workshop was probably a waste of a morning, then wrote eleven notes, more than anyone else in the room. The user landscape was messier and more honest than an org chart. Clusters ran from disenchanted to enthusiastic, new joiner to twenty-year veteran, manager to high potential, each crossed with remote working, activity peaks, and crisis periods. Mapping that spread stopped the product being designed for an imaginary average employee.

Day-in-the-life mapping: employees mapped their entire day across six stages, night shift, before work, transport time, work time, free time, and after work, rather than just the hours spent at a desk. The point was to find where an internal product could genuinely earn a place in someone's routine, instead of assuming attention that did not exist.

What the wall showed: night-shift workers named their own pattern, the “shower effect”, for the ideas that arrive once the shift is done. The moments that mattered sat in the transitions: the commute where people actually read, the handovers where information went missing, the after-work window where feedback finally got written. None of that appears in a requirements document; all of it was on the wall by the end of the session, dot-voted and prioritised by the people who lived it.

Discovery groups: alongside the mapping work, smaller discovery sessions dug into specific populations surfaced by the personas, from head-office managers to night-shift operations. The bilingual format mattered here: people describe frustration precisely in their own language and diplomatically in their second one, and the honest version is the useful version.

Usability testing: straightforward, unglamorous, and effective. Employees walked through existing tools and early concepts while thinking aloud; friction was logged, patterns were counted, and the findings fed straight back into the prioritised opportunity areas on the wall. No lab, no mirror glass, just users, tasks, and notes, which is most of what usability testing ever needs to be.

Outcome: by the end of the month the engagement was won and running. The bank's teams had personas they had built themselves, journey maps that reflected real days rather than assumed ones, and a prioritised set of opportunities validated through testing. The research walls stayed with the client; so did the momentum.

The shape of the work: consulting at this pace is its own discipline. There is no time to become indispensable, so the goal inverts: make yourself unnecessary as fast as possible, and leave behind artefacts that keep working after you have gone. When the services were no longer needed, the mission was over, which is exactly what a one-month stint is supposed to look like.

What it left behind: the confidence that a discovery programme can be stood up from nothing in weeks, in a conservative industry, in two languages, with nothing more sophisticated than kraft paper and three colours of sticky note. That muscle has been reused on every engagement since, and the night shift's shower effect still comes up in conversation years later.