Career Mentorship Design

Project Overview

The Challenge

At Splunk, we are dedicated to fostering a culture of growth and development for all of our employees. However, recent declining NPS results and dissatisfaction with our current mentorship program have highlighted the need for a redesign. Our global career mentorship program needed to be re-evaluated in order to provide a more impactful and meaningful experience for both mentors and mentees.

Main Tasks

1. Conduct user research and gather insights to inform design decisions

2. Create wireframes and prototypes to visualize product concepts

3. Test and iterate on product designs through user testing and feedback

4. Ensure that the final product design meets user needs, business goals, and technical requirements.

The Design Process

We kicked off the design process with the objective of fully understanding and empathizing with our users. This required us to dive deep into desk research to uncover best practices in mentorship, industry standards, and current software functionality. We then assessed the rich data from previous cohorts' quantitative and qualitative surveys. The feedback provided informed a moderator guide in preparation for unstructured user interviews to uncover pain points and program strengths. With all of these insights in hand, we began to conceptualize a solution. Honing in on user flows, milestones, and desired learning outcomes, a design plan was crafted with the user’s needs front of mind. Feedback from the team, leadership, and participants were collected and used to refine and iterate on the design. The next steps will be to roll out the new design to users and continue to test and refine it until it exceeds their expectations.

The Outcomes

To address software limitations we onboarded a new platform to support the program based on the identified constraints. The new platform will host the mentorship program, and onboarding buddies, and allow for the creation of net new programs across the business.

Customized Program Design Kit

Working with six departments throughout the research stage of this project led me to create a net new onboarding buddy program that was both innovative and effective. I then crafted an efficient intake process and a comprehensive design toolkit, with the goal of providing guidance and direction to every future consulting engagement for additional customization requests.