Executive Onboarding Portal

Role: Lead Product Designer Timeline: 9 months · Q3 2024 — Q1 2025 Team: 1 PO, 1 PowerApp developer, 12 partners, 3 admins

The Crisis

Halfway through the project, the people I'd designed for were laid off.

I'd spent three months building the right tool for the wrong users. Then those users disappeared. What followed was a redesign that turned a personal productivity tool into a coordination platform.

The Baseline

Eight hours per executive profile, mostly in PowerPoint

Every executive hire triggered a 40-page PowerPoint deck. Onboarding Partners coordinated handoffs across six departments, copied data manually from disconnected systems, and assembled the final PDF by hand. The work wasn't just slow — half of it wasn't even creation. It was chasing people.

Where the 8 hours went — and where the 75% reduction came from. Coordination overhead was the dominant cost.

Discovery

Four pain themes, ranked by what hurt most

Fifteen stakeholder interviews surfaced the same friction over and over. I plotted each pain point against how often it occurred and how badly it slowed the work. The top-right quadrant defined the design target.

Coordination overhead and manual data entry were the high-impact, high-frequency issues — together they accounted for roughly 80% of the time loss.

To make the cost visible to stakeholders, I mapped one full profile build end to end: five stages across ten working days, from "Here we go again with this 40-page template" to "Finally done! That took 8+ hours." The emotional arc — anxious, frustrated, exhausted, confused, relieved — did more to win support for the project than any of the numbers did.

The end-to-end journey of one profile build, before the redesign. Click to enlarge.

What We Built

Consolidating 40 pages into 7 dynamic views

An audit of the 40-page manual revealed something liberating: 82.5% of the content was static. Company history, mission statements, departmental org structure — boilerplate that didn't change between executives. That meant 33 pages could become SharePoint templates. The remaining 17.5% — the parts unique to each new executive — became the PowerApp.

Content audit · 40 pages

All 40 pages of the original onboarding manual laid out, every page in full color

Same 40-page layout with 33 pages dimmed to grayscale; only the 7 dynamic pages remain highlighted in color

After auditing every page, only seven contained content that genuinely changed between executives. The other 33 were boilerplate I could template — not build.

Inside the PowerApp, four sections from the old manual collapsed into a single interface each: contact information (3 pages → 1), org chart (2 pages → 1), team responsibilities (3 pages → 1), key stakeholders (2 pages → 1). What had been 40 disconnected document pages became a single coherent workflow.

The Pivot

User testing revealed we'd designed for the wrong department

During UAT, the Onboarding Partners told us: "I don't have information for these sections. Let me skip and come back." That feedback exposed a fatal assumption hidden inside the project brief.

The Onboarding Partners we interviewed didn't build profiles — they coordinated. The actual creators (Enablement Team contractors) had been part of a workforce reduction earlier that quarter. The users we should have designed for no longer worked at the company.

We had two choices: pause the project to find replacement users, or redesign the solution for the people who remained. The Onboarding Partners weren't going anywhere — but they also weren't going to do the data entry work. Whatever we shipped had to let them delegate, not execute.

The Innovation

Task Management: from data entry tool to coordination platform

If the new users were coordinators who didn't want to do the data entry, the tool had to let them delegate. Task Management let Onboarding Partners assign sections of the profile to the right department owner — HR for org chart, IT for systems access, Finance for budget — and see at a glance who'd completed what.

Instead of a "do everything yourself" tool, we shipped a "see and assign" dashboard. Profile assembly became a side effect of normal departmental work, not extra labor.

The Task Management dashboard — every section of the profile, its owner, and its status in one view. Click to enlarge.

The shift is easiest to see side by side. Version 1 was a wizard: one operator, a fixed sequence, and hard dependencies between steps. Version 2 made delegation the organizing principle — the same work, restructured around who actually does it.

Version 1 of the portal: a sidebar wizard with sequential steps and an empty Meetings screen blocked by the message 'Key Contacts must be added before creating Meetings' — "Key Contacts must be added before creating Meetings." The blocking dependency assumed one person had all the information and would enter it in order. Nobody did.

Version 2 of the portal: the Contacts and Meetings step inside a flow where Task Management is a first-class stage, with quick-add employee search and per-contact scheduling — The same contacts-and-meetings work, now one stage in a flow that runs through Task Management — each section fillable by the department that owns the data.

The Product

A portal built around visibility, not data entry

Every screen in the shipped portal answers one coordinator question: where does this profile stand, and who's holding it up? The roster shows every executive in flight with a live status. The review screen breaks a single profile down by section, owner, and state — so a partner's job becomes confirming work, not assembling it.

The roster — every profile at a glance Portal home screen listing executive new hires in a table with name, title, organization, start date, and a color-coded status per profile

What used to take an email thread per executive is now a status column. Confidential hires get a separate, restricted flow.

Review Plan — one profile, by section Review Plan screen showing one executive's profile broken into Task Management, Contacts and Meetings, and Function Resources rows, each with counts and status pills from Available through Exec Login

Each section shows its owner's progress as a status pill. The partner verifies and finishes — no chasing, no version archaeology.

The 33 boilerplate pages from the old manual live on as SharePoint templates the portal links into each plan, so the team maintains them once — not once per executive.

Results

What launched in March 2025

The portal went live ahead of the new fiscal year. Within nine months it had processed 350+ executive profiles — and the team that runs it has never asked to grow.

0 Headcount added to run the portal since launch

2–3 Full-time hires avoided as executive hiring grew

$200–300K Estimated annual labor cost avoided

The coordinator who used to chase

“This completely changed how we work. I can actually see what’s happening instead of chasing people down via email.”

Onboarding Partner

The skeptic the redesign had to win over

“I was skeptical at first, but the task management feature makes my life so much easier. I know exactly what I need to do and when.”

IT Administrator

Reflection

The best design isn't the most elegant — it's the one that actually gets used.

Organizational politics turned out to be real design constraints. Understanding power dynamics, process ownership, and resistance to change mattered as much as understanding user needs.

We designed for the wrong users, discovered this right before launch, faced layoffs, and still shipped a solution that processed 350+ executives in its first year. Success came from adaptability, not from getting it right the first time.

And the Task Management feature, which became the portal's defining innovation, only exists because users refused to take ownership. The most valuable design moves emerged from working with resistance, not against it.

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