mckinsey & co
senior design & strategy lead //
professional development platform
McKinsey's flagship internal HR platform to help associates and partners on their journey through the Firm. A trio of unified products to automate associate feedback, evaluations, and staffing.
my role
As Design & Strategy Lead, I was tasked with bringing a new vision and energy to the years-long project. The three segments of the platform were working independently and lacked a unified vision. I led the comprehensive effort of unification via a singular design system and an internal organizational transformation.
subaru
vision
"How do we shift the Firm culture from evaluative to growth? How can we see (and positively impact) a colleague's trajectory over time?"
Guided by our design pillars and by employing our principles, the vision for the Professional Development Platform is intended to create an efficient and convenient experience to facilitate high-quality, thoughtful, genuine, and insightful feedback aligned with Firm values and the LDM.
The experience should instill a desire to give and receive deeper and more personal feedback and evaluations. It will do so by being simple and engaging. Responsive, scalable, and extensible. All while enjoyable and uplifting.
A personal and personalized experience, with resources to help our users follow their journey through the Firm and to allow those users to help their colleagues as they travel theirs.
goals
- Effectiveness: More quality. More impact.
Provide users an effective tool to generate higher quality, more authentic, and impactful feedback for and evaluations of colleagues. Efficiency: More simple. More faster.
Make it easier and faster to "get the job done", while increasing the quality of evaluations.Growth & Impact: More people doing more good.
Shift Evals from being merely an evaluative tool to one that promotes the growth and impact of our colleagues.Product Longevity: More for longer
By utilizing the latest relevant technology and planning for the long term, we create a tool to last for years.
challenges
take over and start over
Each of the three product teams was working completely independently from the others. There was no overarching guidance or oversight to ensure synchronicity.
re-kickoff
learn, plan, go, re-learn, re-plan, go again
Once we had an agreed-upon vision and strategy. we began conducting in-depth analysis and engaging stakeholders for buy-in, ensuring alignment with the company's goals. We crafted a strategic roadmap with clear and established OKRs and KPIs, detailing specific milestones and deliverables.
At this time, I worked with the PM to create a customized agile workflow in Jira that was tailored and more conducive to the new strategy, scope, and timeline.
approach & process
unify / reframe / reshape
Unify: The first order of business was to bring together the three product teams. No one knew what the others were doing despite the interconnectedness of the products and teams. Once we became a triad, work began on how we all thought about the products as a single experience.
Reframe: Through cross-functional sprints and workshops, we created a culture of innovative groupthink and fostered creative solutioning guided by established design pillars and principles. With these pillars and principles as our codec, we shifted our mindset toward rapid iteration and continuous improvement.
Reshape: Once we became a single team with a single goal, we had to work very differently; with increased communication and greater efficiency
- ​Set the team rhythm: Clear team norms combined with a formal cadence act as the guardrails for the team
- ​Establish clear roles: Clearly defined roles that will help make decisions quickly, without additional overhead
- Visualize the work: One source of truth for the work the team is doing to bring alignment to the progress
- Limit work in progress: Limit the work in progress, so the team stays focused on the goal ahead and doesn't multitask
- Process and methodologies: Clearly defined governance, established tooling, and simplified cross-functional workflows.
Get Tactical: Roadmapping, implementation of agile methodologies, research and testing, iterative workshopping, and interactive prototyping to make it real.
results
just keep going
The Good:
We made huge strides with many accomplishments. From a barely functioning group of disjointed products to a highly regarded, unified platform in 18 months. Along the way, we created a fully-fledged design system that became the foundation and jumping-off point for the internal organizational McKinsey design system.
All three products, originally functioning as independent projects, came together and created the professional development platform. Not just as a product but, as a team and culture.
The Bad:
We consistently faced pushback from stakeholders and operated under the constant burden of highly compressed timelines. We also had a high rate of turnover in design and engineering due to the "time spent on project" policies of our overseas vendor.
