Leading360 is a subscription-based platform designed to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) enhance leadership effectiveness. Through monthly or annual plans, the platform provides leadership assessment packages across various leadership aspects tailored for companies with 10 to 50 employees. These assessments offer valuable insights and actionable guidance.

Previous leadership skills assessment journey for SME companies

Previously, the leadership skills assessment journey for SME companies began when the company owner bought a subscription for their employees. For each assessment, employees completed online surveys and received their results in a PDF format. In addition, company owners received a spreadsheet containing employee data and test results.

Focus on revenue growth and tackle subscription renewal decline

What challenges did Leading360 face?

To understand the key challenges and objectives of Leading360, I conducted interviews with the company's leadership team. These conversations helped clarify their goals and the obstacles they were facing, laying the groundwork for more targeted solutions. 

One key insight that emerged was that Leading360 sought to increase revenue by ensuring company owners remained satisfied to continue subscribing. However, they had observed a shift in owners' behaviour (Persona) and a decline in subscription renewals that signalled a need for improved retention strategies. 

Gather employee data from multiple spreadsheets was difficult for company owners

Leading360 leadership didn’t allow direct client contact due to internal policies!

Addressing the decline in company owners renewing their subscriptions was key to solving Leading360’s retention challenges and driving revenue growth. I wanted to interview customers directly for deeper insights, but the leadership team was reluctant due to internal policies that restricted direct client contact. 

To overcome this, I collaborated with the leadership team to facilitate a session where they asked the questions on my behalf. This approach bridged the gap and provided valuable insights into the owners' experiences that guided my next steps. 

Here's what I discovered: 

From the interview, I found that the previous Leading360 assessment journey fell short of providing a satisfying experience for its customers. Company owners had difficulty accessing and collecting employee information scattered across multiple spreadsheet files after rounds of interviews. The core issue was the lack of unified, easy access to employee data.

Drive revenue growth by targeting company owner retention 

By creating a solution that provides easy, unified access to all employee data we could improve the user experience. This improvement would increase the likelihood of company owners renewing their subscriptions which can ultimately drive user retention and contribute to long-term revenue growth.

In collaboration with the team, I established key metrics to evaluate our success. 

Explore solutions for easy, quick, and unified employee data access

I brainstormed several potential solutions to address the challenge of providing quick, easy, and unified access to employee data. After hosting a collaborative workshop with the team, we narrowed down our options through a voting session, prioritizing two key solutions:

• Dynamic Data Updates: Regularly update the employee data file while preserving access to previous versions and providing the ability to receive all employee data in a single spreadsheet file.

• Employee Management System: Create an internal panel to provide quick, easy, and unified access to employee data.

I prioritised the Employee Management System because it aligned better with Leading360's B2C product strategy. This decision ensured our solution would be sustainable and support the company's broader strategy.

Analyse similar products and competitors

Map the journey from workspace creation to employee management system entry

I mapped the user journey following interview insights and competitor analysis findings. It starts when the owner creates a workspace after purchasing a subscription for employees and ends when the owner adds employees and accesses the employee data inside the employee management panel.

Employee management system journey

I designed the journey steps. The journey includes screens both inside and outside the employee management panel. This covers the workspace account creation, setting the workspace name, and inviting employees outside of the panel. Within the panel, it includes features like Member List Display, Specific Actions, Roles & Permissions, and Filter & Search functionalities. 

I faced various assumptions while exploring ideas. So I conducted usability tests with follow-up questions to evaluate them. Here I will dive deep into two of my assumptions:

From ideation, there were two ways to add employees to the employee management system:

• • Invite members by entering their emails

  • Invite members by sharing an invite link

My first assumption was that:

Users would prefer to enter employees' emails and roles, to send invitations. (desirability)

I wanted to test it to uncover the preferred way to add employees by owners and to improve the onboarding experience for them. To test this, I designed a scenario where owners were asked to add 20 employees.  I observed user behaviour to identify any difficulties and I assessed how quickly and easily the task might be done. After the test, I asked follow-up questions to gather their feedback on potential improvements. 

The result showed that the majority of participants shared the "invite link" to add employees rather than doing so by email. So I adapted my design to meet the users' needs. 

Invite employees screen & usability test follow-up questions

My second assumption was that:

Adding an extra functionality (message) would be important to let users understand if a change had been made in the employee management panel.

To evaluate that, I designed a Snackbar to notify users of immediate changes in the product. To test this, I asked users to perform a few actions (Edit a member's role, withdraw the invitation for an employee)  and I observed their behaviour to identify any difficulties and assessed how successfully and easily they completed the tasks. After the test, I gathered feedback through follow-up questions to explore potential improvements.

The result showed that most participants understood changes successfully through "Snackbars".

So the extra functionality (a message using “snackbars”) was helpful in improving user awareness. 

Extra functionality to convey the important change  -  usability test follow-up questions

The solution success results

 We measured metrics post-launch. Based on the result, we found a 21% increase in the Customer Satisfaction Score post-launch compared to the previous version.

Also, there was a 11.8%  boost in User Renewal Rate, leading to improved User Retention. 

During this project, I gained valuable experience collaborating with the software development team, particularly back-end and DevOps engineers. The project involved both data collection from the user interface and retrieving data from the database, requiring close coordination. This collaboration taught me how UX and back-end priorities can align or sometimes conflict, how to navigate decision-making in these situations, and how data is generally stored in a database.