YouEarnedIt

YouEarnedIt (now Kazoo) is a SaaS platform designed to improve work environments and team relationships by enhancing employee engagement. Companies that sign up for YEI use the platform to send employee recognition and earn points redeemable for gifts and rewards.

I joined the company with the objectives to build a stronger design presence, expand design’s reach across the organization, and mature the design practice. My role primarily focused on managing and mentoring a young, yet ambitious design team while providing strategic input to the executive team.

As YEI grew, we navigated a strategic capital investment as well as a company merger, thus expanding our product capabilities and customer acquisition targets. As a result, I helped facilitate the planning of product feature integration, team integration, and the rollout of a new corporate identity.

 

Company
YouEarnedIt

Position
Director of Product Design

Roles
Product Strategy
Creative Direction
Brand Identity
User Experience

Year
2016-2019

 

Find True North

 

Early on, if you asked 50 YEI’ers what the mission of the product is, you’d get 50 different answers. Not knowing how to clearly articulate the product vision also became a source of confusion at the product development level, often leading to the wrong prioritization of projects and a continuous realignment of the product roadmap.

We needed a shared understanding of where the product was going. I worked directly with the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Product Officer, and the Vice President of Product to help define the product vision statement and bridge the chasm between product strategy and project implementation.

We identified a simple and memorable product vision statement encompassing three distinct product pillars.

We identified a simple and memorable product vision statement encompassing three distinct product pillars.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

Mapping vision pillars to existing and future product offerings.

 

Design Foundations

 

As most startups often do, YouEarnedIt built its core product offering rather quickly, resulting in design inconsistencies across the platform. If the product were to expand again, we needed a way to ensure the design wouldn’t break or need to be revisited. Additionally, YEI product designers were perceived as “production line” contributors, often told what to design rather than immersing themselves in the problem to validate their efforts.

The design team needed to establish broader trust, evangelize their capabilities across the organization, and accelerate their implementation. I worked with the team, in conjunction with department leads, to create product design principles, discover product archetypes, and begin the formation of Confetti, the YEI design language system.

 

Design Tenets & Philosophy documentation established a company-wide awareness of how design operates inside a product environment.

 

User Archetypes helped build user empathy as well as created a validation framework when uncovering design solutions.

 

We worked with our engineering partners to create a design language system, ensuring design consistency across the platform.

 

New Features

 

As our foundational elements began to solidify the product continued to expand, encompassing new offerings and features to keep pace with the competitive HRIS market. The YEI design team needed to begin

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