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CASE STUDY

GLOBAL HR DESIGN DIRECTOR

CHALLENGE & ROLE

PRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER/DIRECTOR
  • Directed remote design team to transform managed service into world-class SaaS
  • Created consistency across the entire org
  • Streamlined all onboarding & global expansion flows

ANALYSIS

  • Spearheaded workshops and empowered cross-functional groups
  • Used research to identify key personas & tasks

ACTIONS

  • Directed & mentored design team to serve product UI, sales, help & marketing needs
  • Led team to many successes with UCD process: research, wireframes, design system, user flows, prototypes

RESULTS & ITERATION

  • Transformed antiquated product into super-usable & leading-edge design.
  • Many qualitative & quantitative product wins
  • Simplified 89% of onboarding & global expansion tasks.
  • Reduced time to expand into a country: weeks to minutes.
  • Slashed time to hire/onboard globally by ~300%.

Bill provided incredible knowledge & vision when leading the user experience development. I appreciated his organic & collaborative approach in our cross departmental projects. His work has made incredible advancements to our product. I highly recommend Bill & his next employer will be lucky to have him!

Meredith Hendler

Director of Global Operations, Globalization Partners

Bill is a super dedicated product design manager & UX leader. He’s approachable, thorough, easy to talk to, and truly cares about the product and well-being of his team. He makes every team member feel like a valued contributor to successful product designs. He continually empowered me & other colleagues to transform complex problems into elegant solutions. He's extremely hard-working & put in the hours needed to keep projects on track. If you're looking for consistently great UX guidance & encouragement, go get yourself a Bill!

Manny Flores

Senior Product Designer, Rocket Insight

Bill was a great design manager who always supported me & looked for ways to help me grow as a designer. He truly cared about his team & we made huge improvements to the product. Bill has great energy & helped us solve a lot of complex problems with elegant solutions. As design lead, Bill was great at strategizing to plan for the big picture while keeping track of all the details. I'm happy I had get the chance to work together and miss being on his team.

Rachel Cowles

UX Designer, Globalization Partners

Bill was a a great colleague & an absolute pleasure to work with. Bill did the proper research to understand the users perspective to minimize risk & friction in new designs. His work was key to how new systems behaved, looked and felt. Bill managed stakeholder expectations & had a great way of plannning, developing and curating not just a solution, but the right one.

Reginald Clairville

Head of Support, Globalization Partners

Details? Read the design story

  • product design director
  • ux manager
  • global HR
  • transformation
  • onboarding
  • ux strategy
  • global hiring

THE CHALLENGE
& ROLE

DIRECT DESIGN TEAM TO TRANSFORM SAAS PRODUCT

Globalization Partners offers legally compliant global hiring, payroll, and benefits in 170 countries. My challenge was to transform a people-powered service requiring thousands of emails and phone calls into a premium self-serve product that empowered customers' global ambitions, slashed timelines 300% and boosted profitability and scalability across the board.

PRODUCT DESIGN DIRECTOR/MANAGER

I was responsible for building and directing the design team to transform an antiquated service into a world-class SaaS product. I led cross-functional collaboration on product strategy, research, ideation, and design of features to transform the power, scale, and usability of the product. I also directed design consistency across the organization with big contributions to empower sales, operations, helpdesk, creative, and marketing.

ANALYSIS

OUT-OF-THE-BOX REDESIGN OF MANUAL PROCESSES

ESTABLISH TEAM PURPOSE: Empower clients to do fast, automated, humane hiring around the world. Rethink a product to enable customers to expand into new countries in minutes and compliantly hire great workers in any country in a few days instead of weeks or months.



Gap & Value Analysis:
  • Collaborated with C-suite management, Operations, Support, Finance, Legal and product to research the problems and led ideation and strategy sessions to chart a path forward.
  • Orchestrated and empowered design/product + cross-functional team to contribute to ideation, sketching, problem refactoring, and iterative design
  • Bootstrapped a design system and led established best practices for remote design team collaborative iteration. Empowered content specialists, marketing, sales, operations, and creatives to work and communicate through remote design tools and design thinking. content.
  • Collected research from around the globe to understand and optimize flows for global differences.


Research: Personas, Context & Tasks
  • Spearheaded persona analysis. Led the research to collect and analyze customer information to produce and stack rank the key personas.
  • Managed the stack-ranking of key tasks for each persona with business value, feature, time, and effort analysis.
  • Directed design strategy and developed the information architecture.
  • Created client and professional employee KPIs, user journeys and did a competitive analysis.
Pre-mortem & how to measure (what would success & failure look like?)
  • FAILURE POINTS: information overload. There is currently too much information conveyed by emails, PDFs, word docs, and phone calls for customers to be able to act quickly. Customers need progressive disclosure ie. tell me only what I need to know, just when I need to know it
  • SUCCESS POINTS: We must simplify and automate as much as possible without losing what is essential. Put the customer in the driver's seat, and allow them to act as quickly as they wish, but alert them to anything important along the way. Focus on the essential to deliver maximal business value.
  • MEASURE: Plan to know how well we're doing. Which features are used the most/least? Where to customers stumble? How often can automated help solve a problem? How can we offer better human support that solves problems quicker? Determine which features affect customer revenue, profit, costs?

ACTIONS

MENTORING & DELEGATING DESIGN / RESEARCH TASKS

  • Unified the work of product owners, Operations, Development team, visual designers, QA & support as design collaborators to quickly understand, rethink and then solve problems.
  • Mentored design and broader team on research methods, rapid prototyping & design methodology.
  • Managed global design standards & style guides and design system. Introduced contextual help as a better way to help customers with the most complex features.
  • Orchestrated research and design of super-fast and automated global hiring, focused initially on the top countries where ~90% of the business was located.
  • Directed iterative design and testing of optimized self-service client onboarding.
  • Led research, ideation, and iterative design of automated sales features empowering customers to expand into new countries in minutes.

Cross-organizational Contributions
  • Composed, scripted and refined a killer product demo that impressed analysts and served as a powerful sales tool.
  • Served as design director influencing the company branding, marketing, messaging, product videos, and web site.
  • Directed design of automated help desk for the product in collaboration with international and domestic team.

RESULTS &
ITERATION

HIGHER QUALITY PROCESS YIELDS HIGHER QUALITY PRODUCTS

  • Spearheaded the new rapid design iteration approach, which improved the product development process. Ideas were rapidly iterated & validated or abandoned before committing expensive resources.
  • Directed rapid design sprints for each project: research, wireframe, prototype, usability testing & ongoing iterative refinements.
  • Simplified and automated 89% of onboarding & global expansion tasks, empowering customers to be in control and get more done in less time.
  • Reduced the time for a client to expand into a new country from weeks to mere minutes.
  • Slashed the time for clients to hire and onboard globally by ~300%.
  • Boosted the ability for customers to self-serve with premium features. Slashed the frequent need for 1000s of emails and phone calls with Support and Client Services.
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