Develop Your Talent: Empowering better coaches
Description:
Develop Your Talent is a tool used by fortune 500 companies to develop their people to be better coaches and customer experience professionals that lives inside a larger AI centered Customer Experience Platform.
Why you should care:
Reimagining the tool and integrating proprietary AI to speed up the coaching process enabled unparalleled process improvement to already busy coaches and service agents. While the newly updated product is in a rollout phase as of Q1 2022, the early results are drastically improved productivity and adoption. (see bottom of page for performance metric updates).
My Roles:
- Product Strategy and Research
- Refining the PRD (Product Requirements Document)
- User Testing
- UI Design, Building Component Library
Client:
United Airlines, American Express, Toyota & Internal User Base
Goal:
Create positive business outcomes by converting a time intensive painful process into a self-service performance management tool that automated otherwise tedious responsibilities.
Outcome:
Test user base created widespread internal recommendation and painful drawn-out processes were streamlined. Actual success metrics forthcoming post product rollout between Q1-Q2 2022.
Discovery and setting the stage for an MVP
While the internal stakeholders and customers had big dreams and big requests, the product development team needed to create a set of established criteria to work off of and implement a new solution to find out what was working and was not.
After several months of in-depth customer and user research, interviewing power users and people who could not stand the current solution, I was able to form a functional spec sheet and help refine the product requirements document to align business goals with extensive pain points. With the help of internal stakeholders and the development manager, we built out a roadmap for what was needed now and what would be needed later.
Who are we building for?
As the product design lead I was able to get hands-on with user interviews to identify important pain points, how their lives would improve if we knocked it out of the park, and general notes to identify the next step in improving the user experience.
One of the ways we on the product design team leveraged user research findings was to build out a persona that would serve as a visual reminder for the development team and as an artifact to bolster the approach to internal stakeholders. As an ever-evolving document, the persona served as a vehicle for user-centered design advocacy and established design thinking across the product development division.
Pen to paper - wireframing to align the vision
Wireframing is obviously a vital step in the user experience process, especially when there is a major functionality change on the horizon. My team and I fleshed out pen and paper wireframes during a design sprint and then built them out in Axure to present to internal stakeholders.
After securing the ideas that would be most likely to succeed and weeding out the vetos we implemented a review process utilizing a tag system for existing, ideal, and future-state functionality.
The first release, MVP
Through a series of design sprints and rounds of customer feedback/iterations, coupled with internal subject matter experts input, we began to realize a more tangible solution that would revolutionize the way people developed coaches and improved business outcomes. Some of the core features and improvements were:
- Integration of proprietary AI engine
- A new and improved user interface with an embedded media player
- General performance improvements
Design never stops
While the testing phase begins and the users begin to poke holes in the new solution, the design team embarked on the next phase of the journey. The V1 solution required a new perspective and an outlook that would enable users to self assess, be given real time feedback, and establish short-long term goals.
These feature upgrades would take the tool from being a stodgy corporate waste to a program that would enable team members to feel heard, gain valuable insights, and improve with achievements set by their manager. Gone are the days of moderated performance assessment. Here to stay is the natural improvement of skills with key focus areas to measure outcomes.
Included in this version 1 would be UI and UX additions like:
- Automated coaching scheduling and self assessment
- User profiles with dashboard functionality to visualize their status with the system
- Real time analytics to create a habit-forming product that would improve productivity
Measurements and Key Results
Overall, this extensive process has yielded tons of new business, allowed new client relationships to form, and provided value to the people who use it. Actual analytics and performance metrics that track the products tangible success are forthcoming and in progress as of March 2022 and expected to be posted here as soon as the results are made public.
UPDATED JULY 2022:
- 2 additional enterprise clients (3 million in added company revenue)
- Increase in product specific user base of ~50 to over 2500 active users
- In several user studies, productivity increased as much as 75% in a given workday