Turned a fractured employee-engagement debate into one shared framework and design direction
Overview
A people organization wanted to reduce the burden on managers and improve how they engaged with their teams. Existing HR information was distributed across multiple systems, and stakeholders held different views about what meaningful engagement should even include. I designed and facilitated a human-centered strategy process that turned those diverging perspectives into a shared experience framework. Then I designed the manager-facing experience concepts that put that framework into product form.
The challenge
My approach
I structured a Design Thinking engagement to move the group through divergence, pattern finding, convergence, and prioritization.
I used a Creative Matrix to generate a broad set of ideas across employee-experience touchpoints, then synthesized the output into four recurring pillars: relationships, career development, wellbeing, and recognition.
I facilitated voting to help stakeholders identify where to focus first, turning workshop participation into a shared decision rather than a list nobody owned.
Beyond facilitating the strategy work, I designed the manager-facing experience concepts that translated the four pillars into an actual product direction, defining the manager-facing purpose and experience framing that the later initiative built on.
Key deliverables
Selected artifacts
The screens and diagrams below are redrawn with neutral labels and synthetic data to protect confidential specifics. They're recreations, not real screenshots — the structure and logic shown are accurately represented.
Jane
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Outcome
The workshop produced four engagement pillars: relationships, career development, wellbeing, and recognition. They were used to structure later engagement initiatives and manager playbook work. A later pilot update reported feedback from approximately 1,000 managers: roughly 90% rated the overall value of monthly insights high or very high, and roughly 90% rated data quality high or very high. The same update states that the project followed feedback from more than 200 managers in 2021.
What this demonstrates
What I'd validate next
I'd want to trace specific manager-playbook decisions back to individual pillars, to see which of the four is actually driving the ~90% satisfaction number and which are along for the ride.
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If a product's structure has stopped matching how people actually use it, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
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