Your Career at IBM:
The final product.
Below are the product designs delivered and maintained by the product design team (myself, 3 designers and 1 user researcher) as of April 2021. The core design team included myself and four other designers.
Keep scrolling to see the full story of how we got here!
Your Career at IBM:
How we got there.
Business context
The stage is set.
At the start of April 2019, I joined an IBM HR initiative called “People Strategy 3.0” that contained a network of multi-disciplinary teams set out to create a more productive and adaptable workforce, with the goal of elevating IBM to be an undisputed employer of choice by 2021. My manager and I lead the technology chapter in partnership with the Employee Experience design team to simplify and improve the IBMer’s digital toolkit. At a speculative kickoff workshop for the program, our collective tribes identified IBM’s goals for how we empower our people’s careers at the company:
- Transform mindsets from career ladders to skills as a currency.
- Internal movement over employee attrition.
- Re-skilling over layoffs.
- Empower managers as talent builders.
A mission discovered from employee problems.
When it comes to offering a promising career to IBMers with longevity and continued growth, there's an ocean to boil when addressing ways of working engrained in a business over 100 years old. Not to mention, for the first few months, I was the only team member on the product team! I was equipped with a vision from the workshop and was given direction to look into how we could pull from the job role and skills taxonomy already used by HR for hiring and promotion cycles—but how to turn the ideas into a new product was ripe for exploration.
I was challenged to wear the hat of designer, product manager, and user researcher until I was able to partner with a resourcing manager to staff the team. But before we could do that, we had to prove that building a new product was the right move. So before I could roll up my sleeves and start designing, I jumped in on discovery research and put together an initial product roadmap.
Discovery research
Narrowing the challenge space.
Through 6 weeks of intensive discovery research, I partnered with my manager (Dave Putterman, VP of HR Technology) to validate the need and product direction. I consolidated findings from previous research studies and career movement pilot programs run over the 2 years before, and conducted user interviews with 6 IBM employees and 6 managers to validate a product MVP direction.
By synthesizing top user pain points and pairing needs with challenge prompts, I proposed a reduced product scope to two themes: Internal career mobility and skill development.
Internal career mobility
- Employees lack trust and visibility into why resource decisions are made (layoffs, promotions) without foresight into market demand
- Limited consistency in how managers support their teams
- Employees lack trust in sharing goals with managers when deciding it's time for them to pursue their next job
- "It's all about who you know"—many of those successful at moving teams within IBM reported knowing someone on the new team who vouched for them, saying the internal hiring process favors external hires
How might we support longevity for an IBMer in their career by making it really easy to find their next exciting job or project in the company?
Skill development
- Lack of manager visibility into skills breadth and depth when validating when their employees feel ready for a promotion—Employees need an easier way to showcase their capabilities at any point in time
- Understanding what skills to develop to stay relevant or competitive is much more obscure in newer roles and roles that don't follow typical vertical progression tracks
How might we empower IBMers to build their career adaptability by evolving the way the workforce views their expertise to be focused on skills breadth and depth instead of job roles and position titles?
Garnering executive support & funding.
After presenting a read out of the discovery research, I put my product manager's hat on and drafting a roadmap of initial features, created a 30/60/90 day project plan, and crafted concept art screen designs to garner support and excitement for our pitch.
Designing the minimum delightful experience.
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“Many artist’s brushwork is essentially invisible, making it impossible to unpick; it might be better to focus computer analysis on assessing canvases or paper”
Charles R. Jones
