Speak the people's language?
Internal Digital Transformation
Reimagined multiple legacy systems into a unified global employee platform, worked with C-suite to unlock investment, then expanded services and rolled out across multiple Op-Cos.
Challenge
I was initially brought in to lightly refresh MediaCom’s employee review platform, but it quickly became clear the system required a deeper structural rethink. Broader issues surfaced across learning, mobility, and people-management systems. Taking a macro view, I proposed a two-week analysis phase to redefine scope, clarify priorities, and uncover wider opportunities for long-term digital transformation.
Approach
I structured the project into phased sprints, evolving a two-week engagement into eight weeks, then unlocking budgets for rolling three-month milestones. The key was developing C-Suit relations, and building strong business cases for each phase based on a long-term roadmap. I balanced leadership with hands-on craft, coordinating closely across C-Suite, strategy, production, and technical partners to enable the reimagining of a full SaaS-type ecosystem.
Outcome
We rebuilt the ecosystem on top of legacy tech, pushing existing technologies in the front-end, back-end and CMS to deliver stretch-goals for the global business. We focused on strong UX-UI foundations, scalable components, and a unified visual language. Alongside delivery, we produced campaigns, infographics, toolkits, and documentation, guiding development, testing, and refinement. The system became mobile-ready, future-proof, and facilitated real cultural change.
Impact
The work strengthened the Global People team’s credibility with the C-suite and Op-Cos, unlocking sustained investment for new initiatives, courses and events. The redesigned system delivered long-term business value through scalability, usability and ongoing growth. Its success enabled adoption across additional MediaCom opcos worldwide, establishing a flexible internal ecosystem supporting strategic financial returns.
Their system before we started
The original platform was a legacy system that technically functioned, but presented a range of serious challenges. The experience was unintuitive, with thousands of global employees relying on PDF guides to learn how to use this mandatory system. My initial review focused on identifying core improvement opportunities while remaining respectful to the teams who originally designed and maintained the system.
Mobile version
Key decisions at speed with foresight
The key challenge was balancing trade-offs, rapid prototyping, and fast decision-making to demonstrate immediate value to senior stakeholders, while maintaining the foresight needed to ensure the wider ecosystem connected coherently across the product’s long-term future. Progress relied on continual workflow reviews, aligning evolving UX/UI decisions with broader business priorities, technical realities, and platform vision.
Exploration through multiple phases
Through multiple exploration stages, we developed approaches that solved immediate challenges while outlining broader opportunities for long-term transformation. We ensured every short-term solution connected into a wider ecosystem, requiring strategic gymnastics and responsive problem-solving. This approach kept C-suite stakeholders engaged, constantly unlocking budgets to help aligning short-term actions with a shared long-term vision.
Feature of campaigns to direct employee engagement
Creative campaigns were developed to direct employee engagement at key moments across the year. The challenge was creating unified, enticing campaigns across digital, email, and print, signposting users to specific system actions while unlocking high-value existing content through repackaging. Part of the challenge was developing a 3 tier brand system to connect the platform, initiative and campaigns.
Flexible future-proof visual language
With so many features and functions across the internal platform, the challenge was creating a visual language strong enough to unify the ecosystem while remaining flexible enough to support distinct campaign identities. Core brand systems, including colour, shape, and iconography, created consistency, while allowing individual programmes room for their own art direction and expression.
Reflection
Building C-suit trust made it possible to turn a 2 week brief into a 20 month transformation programme
Through balancing leadership and craft it was possible to re-invent an entire digital ecosystem
Working with tight technical framework pushed our team to develop very novel solutions and structures
