McKinsey - New Ventures
In my last two years at McKinsey I became the Head of User Experience with a newly formed group called New Ventures. We built a team, created a design system, and developed 24 applications for consultants to use with clients.
One of the first that needed to be done was to assess the exsiting applications in order to inform a design system. I hired a vendor, MUDAI in Chicago, to help with this effort. No two applications were alike, unsurprisingly.
Much of my work was foundational. In the first 40 days, I did a listening tour to understand user needs from all our different teams. We wrote a budget that informed our hiring plan. Our team structure was driven by resources and overarching team needs alongside engineering, product, and data science hires.
Although spreadsheets and project plans don’t make for beautiful portfolio content, they were a necessary part of the effort. :)
Our target was to hire twelve designers in the first year and we got to nine in six months. Some of our team were supported by other individuals (labeled in black) because as word spread many were keen to work with us. I was especially proud of the team I’d hired. All of them are excellent designers.
The team developed our Impact Design System. We designed an initial set of components, prioritizing the most common elements found in our audit with iterations that included the new company-wide rebrand.
We established our toolset, workflow, and backlog and settled on Kanban for delivery. Our approach contained clear OKRs to measure progress.
Before I left McKinsey, we worked closely on a plan to merge design systems under the new brand. At the time, ours was meant for externally facing applications, but other teams had developed an internal toolset. This was challenging as some teams were eager to work together and budgeted, while others were resource-constrained.
The team I built designed approximately 24 applications and a design system, saving according to our estimates, 1.2m in development costs.