Replacing the end-of-year review
Clients would not buy a performance product without an end-of-year review. Reflections gave them one worth doing.
- Company
- Workhuman
- Sector
- HR software
- My role
- Principal Product Designer
- Sales pipeline expanded by 24, with two new clients and five retentions
- Product engagement up 74% month on month
- 5% increase in monthly recurring revenue
- More than a million reflections created
Conversations was built for continuous use. Our sales teams kept hearing the same objection: many clients still needed a formal end-of-year review, and would not buy without one.
The traditional review is a checkbox exercise with little value to the employee. Reflections uses the check-ins, feedback and priorities an employee has gathered all year, so that the review becomes a moment to pause and plan what comes next.
The first answer was wrong
A solution was proposed by stakeholders before the research was done. It was hard to use, hard to extend, and clients did not respond to it.
I co-led research into jobs to be done and ran workshops with clients to draw out what an ideal review looked like to them. I then took the team through an iterative design process. The result went well beyond what those clients had asked for.
Getting it built
I built a high-fidelity prototype to win agreement from clients and internal stakeholders. With engineering I scoped the features, wrote the user stories and added design QA to the sprint process. My team and I defined a small component library so that developers could move faster.
In parallel I worked with customer success, learning and marketing on messaging, onboarding and launch, and defined the measures we would track after release.
Launch
The feature went through usability testing, client acceptance testing and accessibility testing by an independent third party. It launched at Workhuman Live and rolled out to every existing client.
What I learned
Because the first vision failed, the second had to be far better. That took persuasion as much as design. It also forced me to delegate, and the designers who reported to me are better for it.