TL;DR
- Product
- Internal people management platform for remote-first tech company
- Goal
- Fix low adoption by redesigning around real workflows
- My role
- Solo product designer: research, IA, design system, prototypes
- Team
- Me + stakeholders across ops and engineering
- Constraints
- Inherited broken IA; visual language misaligned with culture; heavy and light users sharing same system
- Shipped
- Redesign + prototypes + design system (handoff-ready, pending eng resourcing)
- Result
- Unified platform concept connecting people, rituals, and work; clearer adoption pathways
→ Core Challenge
Redesign an internal people-management platform that suffered from low adoption, unclear workflows, and a visual language that didn’t reflect the company’s technical culture.
The company had fast-growing teams, strong rituals (1:1s, quarterly rocks), and a remote-first environment—but the existing tool wasn’t supporting any of it.
→ Process
- Workshops to understand rituals, team mental models, and friction points
- Definition of design principles aligned with technical culture
- Complete redesign of information architecture
- Dual-experience model for heavy and light users
- Design system and visual language built from scratch
- High-fidelity mobile + desktop prototypes for alignment
→ Key Decisions
- Replaced the inherited structure with a new system organized around actions, rituals, and journeys rather than pages and categories
- Defined design principles: fast retrieval, low cognitive load, developer-friendly density
- Split experience between heavy users (managers, ops) and light users (new joiners), allowing high-density dashboards and simplified onboarding to coexist
- Created a bold, developer-friendly visual identity that finally matched the internal culture
- Emphasized clear hierarchy, subtle motion, and predictable patterns to reduce cognitive load
→ Key Insight
The platform was failing because its mental model didn’t match how teams actually worked. Reframing the IA around rituals rather than modules fundamentally changed how intuitive the product became.
This allowed both heavy and light users to share the same system without compromise.
→ Outcomes
- A unified platform concept that finally connected people, rituals, and work into one coherent home
- A design system that repositioned the tool from bureaucratic HR software to a developer-friendly internal product
- Stakeholders aligned around a clearer product direction with defined adoption pathways for both heavy and light users
- A reframed product vision strong enough to guide future implementation once engineering resourcing becomes available
Product name changed for confidentiality
