Leadership Case Study: The Predictive Index

I led the platform team to design, build, and release foundational platform capabilities and enhancements that strengthened our 2.0 product modules. I led design sprints identifying the product direction for our Inspire 2.0 module and developed a new product development process that aligned sales, engineering, marketing, and product lab goals. Lastly, I led a cross-functional directors cohort that improved communications, planning, alignment, and collaboration between directors in every business unit.

Building a Platform for the Future

At The Predictive Index, ostensibly the world’s oldest startup, our work centered around our Behavioral Assessment (BA), a collection of drivers, avoidances, biases, and motivators that laid out how individuals like to be seen, collaborate, lead, and communicate. Our BA helps people and others understand themselves and how to work with others with different working styles. With our BA being over 60+ years old, our co-CEOs bought The Predictive Index in 2014 and turned it into a tech company built around our BA.

My role at The Predictive Index (PI) was to head our platform teams to build the platform that connects our suite of products, enabling Hire, Design, Diagnose, and Inspire to work seamlessly together on a platform that handles the foundational needs such as permissions, access controls, user management, data exchange between modules, integrations and APIs, search, and navigation. When I joined PI, I sought to understand the current landscape and how we approached building a platform. It was essential to understand the distinction of our SaaS platform as either a fully integrated platform with products made on top or unique products that have a shared architecture but operate individually from each other.

I was confused when talking about both approaches to a platform, which we referred to as a “little P platform” or “big P Platform.” Our products were connected but siloed with the “little p platform,” as our initial 1.0 world of products had operated. The idea of a “big P platform” would be a significant shift from how we had used it in the past and what a new future vision would look like for our product lab. I worked closely with my counterparts in growth, product management, and engineering to detail a “big P Platform” concept for our 2.0 product maturation.

Focusing on the Right Problems

With a product lab with five teams, one team for each product and one group for just one platform, we operated in silos that led to considerable confusion and churn around responsibilities and who would tackle what was on the product roadmap. Often, each growth team would tackle a similar capability, such as sharing, that would create confusion for customers as sharing an object in Hire would be very different from sharing/inviting people to a team in Design. Seeing this problem being a frequent issue, I led my platform teams through workshops to identify what actions and capabilities were platform-centric vs. specific to a module. We spent a week working through all the possible actions and jobs to be done and developing a concise list of platform-centric capabilities. Those included:

• Person Record: a unique record of an individual in our software.

• User Management: the ability to make people users of our software and manage their accounts and access.

• Permissions and Access Control: detailing how people and software users have what attributes and roles would grant them capabilities in our software.

• Sharing: how objects within our software are granted access to and from users.

• Inviting: how people and users are granted access to information or areas of the software they previously did not have access to.

• Search: finding information, objects, people, and users across a connected suite of products.

• Navigation: a consistent and intuitive way-finding throughout the connected suite of products.

• Org Upload: a way to bulk upload a group of people/users into the software.

• Software Settings: a way to set default behaviors and operations in your software.

• Billing and Subscriptions: a way to view, renew, and cancel your software subscription.

• Design system: the UI component library that all growth products should utilize in their work.

After determining these are platform-centric capabilities, I ran my colleagues through the same exercise to get their take on what they believed should be platform-centric areas of focus. While we did identify a nearly identical list that my direct reports and their PM and Engineering counterparts identified, my colleagues differed in views and semantics on whether we should move to an architecture that centralizes these platform capabilities or similarly build them so that each product module could be contained wholly isolated from themselves. My goal was to get us to move to an underlying foundational platform.

Building the Future Platform

While my colleagues and leadership mulled on the architecture direction and other items with the future product roadmap, I led my teams to tackle near-term validation and future dividend-paying enhancements to make our “big P Platform” more immediate and valid. I led my product teams to focus on key enhancements: Global Navigation, Global Administration (User Management, Permissions, Company Settings, Billing, and subscriptions), and updating our design system. Throughout 2022, my teams performed discovery, ideation, pitched, presented, refined, and released our six enhancements.

The Global Experience Team created a new global navigation that serves all four product modules and created a consistent and intuitive way-finding system that, when we tested with customers, cut down time spent in modules and increased engagement in key areas of the products.

The Global Features Team tackled the Global Administration in which they partnered with our two other platform teams to develop how a person record would appear in a subscription, how to edit users’ capabilities, set company software settings, and incorporate new billing and subscriptions view that previously did not exist in 1.0 software.

The entire product design team (eight designers) contributed to updating and improving our design system, Tapestry. I created dedicated days and times for the team to identify, create, review, update, and publish components to our design system in Figma, Zeroheight, and Storybook. In addition to UI components, we created extensive documentation for each component, including usage rules, accessibility, internationalization, and content considerations.

Growing Designers and Growing Teams

At PI, we already had an existing career framework for our design team. The framework, which one of our staff designers lovingly referred to as the spiderweb, comprised design skills and demonstrating competencies in PI’s FABRIC leadership tenants. This framework was a good starting point but lacked the follow-through of practically and measurably identifying how individuals are progressing in their career, whether they wanted to move up into a more senior role/position themselves for a raise or move into an adjacent role. I introduced the use of SMART Goals with my team to develop an objective and measurable way to understand how a designer was progressing and demonstrating competency in our career framework. As a result of my introduction of SMART Goals, I had the demonstrable information needed to promote one of my senior designers to a staff designer. In addition, the SMART Goal and framework pairing gave my other team members their path to progress in their roles, even having one member of the content team join product design, going from visual designer to product designer.

The use of SMART Goals was then implemented in the wider product design team as it bridged the subjective nature of our competency framework and gave the designer and leader objective ways to measure the progress of their team members.

After a reduction in force in 2022, I lobbied for the then Content Studio to join Product Design as a new content design team, pairing them up with each design team and heading up our learning and development work. I made my case for the content studio to join as “content design” with a convincing pitch for improving product outcomes, reducing product development time, better ideation, and improving go-to-market planning. When they joined Product Design, I worked closely with their director to upskill and educate that team on how to approach content design, bridging their established marketing work for more product development work and training them on design practices, tools, and tactics.

Leading Leaders

At PI, we have multiple business units with directors serving as the bulk of middle management and leadership for their respective areas and individuals. Our previous attempts to bring these leaders together in a monthly directors-only cohort fell short of having little to no planning, agenda, topics, and a shared sense of unity as directors. In 2023, I started a new directors cohort aimed at uniting all directors with a common goal of openly collaborating to progress business goals. As this was a group of my peers in level and title, I needed to lead with empathy and an attitude of service to ensure participation between a group of business unit leaders that may or may not impact each other meaningfully in our day-to-day work.

I met with each director to understand what they found valuable in meeting together. I listened and crafted a director’s charter outlining the purpose of working together, what we would bring to the table, and how we would conduct ourselves as a cohort. I created bi-weekly agendas, set the calendar invites with descriptions, posted the agenda weeks in advance, utilized our Slack channel for pre and post-updates, and provided a video summary that wrapped up each meeting. This work bolstered attendance at the meetings and elicited proactive agenda topics where directors sought collaboration from each other. This cohort streamlined our cadence one in-person once a month on Zoom and utilized more asynchronous communication that saw engagement.

The new Directors Cohort was seen and recognized as a refreshing new way for leadership at PI to effectively work together.

Outcomes

The platform enhancements my team and I released saw dramatic changes in engagement with our products. Time spent in products went down (20% decrease), while we saw a small increase in time spent in platform capabilities go up (12% increase.) While time spent in products went down, the measures and triggers we had in engagement went up (55% increase.) This told a few things.

• People spent less time in each product performing certain actions because now they could perform those actions in the platform instead of going to each product and doing repetitive tasks.

• People spent more time performing the primary job-to-be-done because they were busy performing administrative tasks in the products.

• Time spent in the software overall went down because the quality of the spent time in the products increased.

We validate these above statements through qualitative user research four months post-release. This data and response shored up the direction to focusing on the “big P Platform” and investing in the architecture further to enable the platform vision my team and I developed. With the platform coming into focus, the iterative work around Design, Diagnose, and Inspire 2.0 all centered on platform capabilities powering their products, allowing them to focus solely on their product enhancements and new feature development.

Our Tapestry Design System improved our product design and development practices so much that our refinement time that was spent detailing UI for engineering went down by two weeks, cutting time for engineering to spend more time in building out the product and enabling product marketing, GTM, and sales to position earlier product release and partner education.

The design career framework and SMART Goals were so successful that we incorporated the SMART Goals in our Lattice 1:1 meetings for all of product design and introduced them to PeopleOps, Engineering, and Business Systems.

Lastly, our director’s cohort picked up steam where our meeting cadence, topics, and agendas started tackling proactive items around team safety, building career frameworks for other departments, and planning collectively on launching new initiatives. Attendance remained at 95% and engagement in the cohort led to a 96% involvement with product marketing on a grassroots campaign to sign up our respective networks for a trial of Inspire 2.0.

Team Credits

Design, Content, and Research Team:

• Lisa Neal

• Erin Wilkey

• Stephanie Nordness

• Cat Covi

• Richard Lee

• Jessica Osborne

• Sydney Maresca

• Andrew Barks

• David Silbert

• Trish-Davis Gray (TDG)

• Vanessa Darling

• Jessica Ivins

Leadership:

• Ranjan Bhattari

• Brian Jamieson

• Ryan-Donnelly Brelling

• Diana Samon

• Alex Tompkins

• Brian Hobbs

• Suzy Elfishawy