summary

RiseSmart is a career development platform owned by Randstad, one of the largest HR companies in the world. RiseSmart provides career development services to employees of our client companies through human career coaching and our technology platform. Our primary business line is “outplacement” where we help employees affected by layoffs find their next position. Our new and growing line of business is coaching for current employees at client companies, focused on career growth, satisfaction, and success.

Highlights

• Lead the product design group across multiple products (internal / external), platforms (iOS, Android, and Web), and lines of business.

• Hired to conceptualize and bring greenfield career development offering to fruition – launching a new line of business with new brand and design system for mobile app.

• First design leader at RiseSmart – built out design team, including new user research function, creating processes around sprints, critique sessions, working with stakeholders, career progression / development, and design systems.

• Led a design-driven redesign of the onboarding experience resulting in a 2.5x conversion increase to a revenue event. Process included user research, ideation, validating prospective solutions with look-a-like audiences, and delivering multiple solutions with a phased approach back to product and engineering.

• Drove design to engage with adjacent teams to identify opportunities to support a great user experience outside of technology product itself. For example, supporting product, marketing, coaching, and outreach teams by identifying the need for and creating a single document that shows the end-to-end user experience through emails and other communications they receive from our business. When a design group helps other teams more clearly see and think about the end user experience, the whole business benefits.

• My legacy has been creating a highly valuable design organization that is not just a service of product; not just proficient in visual design; but an independent and business-driven group that proactively identifies UX opportunities (including service design), designs potential solutions, tests with real and look-a-like users (no code needed), and delivers complete product packages back to the business for further refinement.

Selected Project: Worklife Coaching

Introduction

I was asked to lead the design team to launch a new line of business for the company, expanding our offering from “outplacement” (helping people find new jobs after they are laid off) to “career development” (helping currently employed people grow in their role and company).

product overview

For this product, we needed a different approach and an independent application to better address the needs of worklife coaching user versus outplacement users, even though we still use the same underlying technology, coaches, etc.

The main difference, apart from providing an experience focused only on the relevant product features for worklife coaching users, was discovering a brand that would be more aspirational and personal. In outplacement, we often engage with end users at one of the toughest times in their lives – right after losing a job. That brand needs to bring a sense of calm and stability with a focus on clear next steps to help people get back on their feet. Worklife coaching is much more open-ended and aspirational, with a focus on discovering user’s needs, as their needs often are for long term development as opposed to urgent needs.

Another key opportunity for our team was to develop something much more consumer focused rather than enterprise and sales focused. RiseSmart didn’t become a true product design team until the beginning of my tenure because of this new line of business. This is because individual engagement and repeat usage was not a driver of business success or revenue for outplacement. However for worklife coaching, we had a pay-as-you-go model for clients which meant we got paid when, and only when, users had calls with their career coach. Obviously great design would have had benefits for the outplacement line of business as well, but it took this new line of business for the company to invest in building a world class design team.

Below are images from the app store listing that do a good job describing and showing the product: