Beyond features: How I led a team to reimagine Talent Development

TLDR;

Led a cross-functional team to pivot ServiceNow's Talent Development product strategy from feature-matching competitors to a user-centric, engagement-focused approach. Through strategic vision, data-driven insights, and effective stakeholder management, we developed a transformative UX strategy and vision prototype. This product strategy resulted in a lasting impact, influencing future product roadmaps and establishing a platform-centric approach across the organization.

The problem: copying the competition wasn't working

Imagine you're building a product to help people grow and succeed. Sounds great, right? But what if you're copying what everyone else is doing? That's where we found ourselves. We were trying to compete with giants like Workday and Oracle by mirroring their features, and it just wasn't resonating with our customers.

Our customers told us, "We've invested so much in our current systems. We don't want to rip them out!" But they also admitted their employees weren't using them. Does this sound familiar?

We had a lightbulb moment. We realized we had a unique opportunity with our ServiceNow platform. Instead of replacing existing systems, we could create an "orchestration layer" that unlocked engagement and made those systems more valuable.

The pivot: from feature-driven to user-centric

I took my findings to our senior design director, and to my excitement, she saw the potential. She formed a "tiger team" and put me in charge. Talk about a dream project! We were tasked with diving deep into the problem space and crafting a long-term UX strategy.

Leading a team of nine talented designers, both internal and from an external vendor, we embarked on a Design Thinking journey. This process was new territory for many of the team and even some stakeholders. So, I took on the role of coach and educator, ensuring everyone was aligned and excited about the process.

The deep dive: uncovering user insights

We went deep! We conducted a thorough competitive analysis, which revealed a shocking truth: our feature set was nearly identical to Oracle's. (It turns out some of our product executives came from there!) This insight confirmed that we needed to diversify our approach to compete in the crowded HR marketplace.

We also conducted stakeholder interviews, uncovering that everyone knew about the engagement problem, but it wasn't a priority. Plus, many unvalidated assumptions about our customers' and users' problems were floating around.

Next, we performed a deep dive into user research by mapping the employee and manager journeys. One significant insight that we discovered is that we were designing for these roles in silos, ignoring the natural interactions that occur between manager and employee. We also realized we had little idea what employees did outside our HR tools. Employees aren't spending their workdays inside HR platforms, yet we lacked insight into where they are working and how to engage them in their workflow. One of the key reasons employees fail to engage with HR tools is that they don't reside within their natural workflow, requiring employees to be pulled out of their stream of work to engage.

Defining the future: a comprehensive UX vision

Using our research, we developed a comprehensive UX strategy outlining our vision, goals, and how we'll measure success.

One key challenge in crafting this strategy was that no team at ServiceNow had done something like this before. Our design organization is skilled at building beautiful demos that sell our products. Still, those demos typically sit on a shelf collecting dust rather than providing a real strategy for how we'll achieve them. Without existing examples, I relied on my prior experience and external resources, such as the Nielsen Norman Group, to guide the process.

Despite the lack of precedent, the team excelled by collaborating and building off each other's strengths. Together, we created a robust strategy that covers how we aim to achieve our goals through user experience, visuals, content, and the integration of AI.

Our vision focused on three main areas:

1. Engaging employees contextually by integrating highly valuable, contextual experiences into their workflow.

2. Guiding employees towards organizational outcomes by linking individual contributions to organizational goals.

3. Simplify the experience by simplifying HR terminology and information architecture.

Engaging employees contextually

We aim to engage employees by directly integrating valuable, contextual experiences into their workflow. While that may sound simple, it's pretty complex. Effective engagement requires a deep understanding of when and where it's appropriate to interact with employees.

Since this was a vision, we wanted to provide thought-provoking examples to help our designers consider how we might be more thoughtful in how and why we engage with employees.

For instance, we were initially excited about reaching employees through their smartwatches and mobile devices. However, we quickly realized that most employees don't want to be engaged that way. While others on my team and I are passionate about our work, most employees primarily focus on their jobs to support their lives outside of work. As a result, they typically don't want to be interrupted on their devices, especially outside of work hours.

Instead, we found that employees prefer receiving relevant, contextual messages on their work computers via their company's preferred communication platform, which, in our example, is Teams.

Our following finding was that once you have encouraged an employee to engage, landing them on a page overloaded with content without clear context or purpose fails to engage them. In our vision, we propose showing Peter a highly personalized growth plan, using a mountain metaphor to guide him. Our research showed that employees resonated strongly with this metaphor, sparking immediate interest and a desire to engage, as they saw it as a clear path to achieving their goals.

Our initial excitement about smartwatches wasn't entirely unfounded. We just hadn't found the motivation to engage on a personal device. Our research showed that many employees appreciate micro-learning opportunities during their commute or while on a walk, as they help them conveniently work toward their goals.

What about our managers? A consistent theme we heard from them was the need for support in meaningful, often challenging, conversations with their employees. Our vision addresses this by providing personalized talking points integrated directly into Zoom to help managers have constructive discussions celebrating employees while guiding their growth.

Guiding employees towards organizational outcomes

One surprising insight for my team was how much the typical employee focuses on connecting their contributions to organizational goals. They had assumed that only managers cared about this. I'm glad the team recognized this key finding, as it's also central to driving engagement. Employees aren't motivated to use HR tools unless we clearly show what's in it for them. We address this crucial motivation by aligning their growth with organizational goals and celebrating their achievements.

Employees told us they lacked clarity on their progress toward goals throughout the year. Our vision proposes a progress report that employees can access anytime. It emphasizes their growth and clearly shows how their skills and projects align with company OKRs.

Managers expressed a need to ensure they're assigning the right people to projects to meet company goals but often lack confidence in their choices. Our vision addresses this by using employees' skills and growth goals to guide assignments. At the same time, we assure managers that these initiatives align with company objectives.

Simplify the experience

The information architecture for the implemented Talent Development product represents Conway's Law in action. With five levels of navigation on the page, it became apparent quickly that the organization of the information in our product is directly influenced by how ServiceNow communicates and collaborates.

I challenged my team to forget how the company organizes our product teams and instead focus on how our users want this information organized. I also encouraged them to explore alternative ways to present the navigation—it doesn't always have to be horizontal.

After several different ideations and guerilla testing, we landed on a simplified navigation that consolidates the global product navigation into the left-hand pane, which a user can collapse to increase real estate.

The individual product navigation appears at the top, and we use way-finding signals, eliminating the need for breadcrumbs.

The challenges: skeptics and silos

Of course, it wasn't all smooth sailing. Some stakeholders were skeptical, seeing our methods as time-consuming. I addressed this by focusing on the business value by researching how our vision and strategy would reduce time to market, increase customer satisfaction, and drive sales. I also focused energy on influencing our strategic partners who were more bought into the work and encouraged them to help us shift others in our direction.

We also faced issues with silos. We did not typically engage with the Sales and Go-to-Market teams to incorporate their valuable insights into what truly resonates with our customers. I took the initiative to bridge those gaps, resulting in additional insight into our strategy's problems. These teams were also excited to have the opportunity to contribute to the long-term plan.

The impact: lasting change

All of this vision work was intentionally designed to inspire the future. We purposely didn't answer every question or think through every scenario, as our goal was to spark curiosity and creativity. This approach proved highly successful. When we unveiled the vision to our design team and stakeholders, it generated excitement, raised insightful questions, and encouraged deeper thinking about designing and implementing these experiences.

Additionally, my guidance toward a platform-based approach helped break through silos and turf wars by establishing a platform-centric navigation that isn't tied to the org chart. This platform-based approach is being built into the next-generation AI assistant.

This project is also now a case study for new initiatives, highlighting the importance of user-centered design and holistic thinking.

My takeaways: leadership in action

This project reinforced my belief in the following:

• Challenge the status quo: I'm not afraid to identify flaws in our strategy and collaborate with partners to drive meaningful change.

• Cross-functional collaboration: Break down silos and build bridges across teams.

• Scalability through platform vision: Maintaining a holistic view of the product platform to ensure future growth.