Workday makes software for financial and human capital management. In 2017, they identified a market gap in the analytics space. They wanted to build a next generation human capital management system that fuses data from systems across the HR and recruiting space. I joined in 2018, to convert a product strategy into a realized project. During this process, I worked to define the product, evaluated and chose the framework to support it, and extended the framework to address functional gaps. The product was successfully released in 2019.
The strategy team had found a gap in the market and wanted to execute quickly on it. I worked with product strategists to refine the core functionality, developed personas, storyboards, and design mockups. The research team and I worked together to prioritize features and functionality that would ensure our design met the user needs.
A key requirement for this product was to build upon one of the multiple internal frameworks available. I conducted an evaluation by building a proof of concept and working with the development teams. The primary focus was on how flexible the frameworks were and their ability to be rearranged by end-users.
In the end, I decided that the Discovery Boards framework had the fewest functional gaps and would support the look and feel that we desired.
In addition to the functional gaps I identified through the selection process, I also did market research into competing for analytic tools, like Power BI and Tableau, to create a set of feature requests for the framework development team. I mocked up the initial components so that the development team, working in React, could understand how the visualizations interacted with each other, scaled, and moved to different spaces in the application.
The workday pattern library had drag handles, but they did not provide the bi-directional functionality that we required. I iterated on new variants of the drag handles with the development team to create new components and interactions to support the application.
The team was successfully able to release the product in 2019. It reflected the core workflow and screens I created and was built upon the framework that was extended. This application and framework have become part of their core offering and are used as the foundation for building new products and services.