My role
Product strategy, UX/UI and IA
Led research synthesis, framing, user flows, product storytelling and interface direction.
Rotman Design Challenge 2024 finalist
Nexus
A skills platform that turns upskilling into a social, networked habit - designed for growth, not retention.
Overview
Remote work was not the real problem.
We found the deeper issue one layer underneath: people do not disengage because work is remote. They disengage when work stops growing them. Nexus reframed hybrid engagement as a growth system where employees build visible skills and organisations gain a live map of capability.
Timeline
Approximately 6 weeks
From research and strategic reframing through product concept and case-study system.
Built for
Rotman Design Challenge 2024
A finalist team concept responding to hybrid work, engagement and growth.
Team
Team of 4
Built with Mrinal Jadhav, Nikhil Dhanwatey and Vani Bhatnagar.
01 / Brief
Broad by design
The prompt asked how organisations could create engaging hybrid work environments that were economically sustainable for knowledge workers.
02 / Constraint
Knowledge workers in hybrid organisations
We narrowed the field to mid-to-large organisations where skill growth, talent visibility and internal mobility could change both employee and business outcomes.
03 / Outcome
Finalist concept
Nexus became a finalist project at the Rotman Design Challenge, with the product framed as Workomics: a growth operating system for hybrid teams.
Problem framing
The surface metrics looked fine.
Hybrid work looked solved by visible measures: productivity, tooling and flexibility. The submerged problems were harder to measure: isolation, communication anxiety, blurred boundaries, weak internal mobility and the pressure to stay employable without a clear path to growth.
Audience
Four versions of the same stall.
The personas varied by age, job security and professional stage, but the pattern was consistent: each person had skills they could not turn into visible, credible growth.
The creator
Proof beyond credentials
250k followers, asking whether a degree still proves anything she cannot already demonstrate.
The switcher
Good role, wrong context
Four jobs in two years, never by choice. A capable worker without a stable growth path.
The plateaued
Stuck after landing the job
Same role for three years. The ladder looked clear from outside, but hard to climb from within.
The displaced
Overqualified and under-skilled
Unemployed since 2019, told his experience was too much and his current skills were not enough.
Strategic bet
Design growth as the engagement engine.
The final thesis was upskilling via engagement and networking. Make skill growth social and visible. Connect people to colleagues and projects that stretch them. Let rigid job descriptions become less important than the real capabilities people are building.
Iterations
The final answer was earned by killing two cleaner ideas.
Structure alone did not move people. The early concepts were useful, but they behaved like systems employees were asked to maintain rather than systems they would want to return to.
Product
Four moves, one loop.
The product turns growth into a visible system: build a profile, find collaborators, connect skills to real work, then use progress data to recommend the next stretch.
Feature 01
Build your growth profile
Curate skills and interests, set goals, prove progress with certifications and peer endorsements. The profile is a living record of what a person is becoming.
SkillsGoalsProof
Feature 02
Foster collaboration
Match people by shared interests or complementary proficiency so a beginner can find the specialist one desk, or one timezone, away.
MentorsPeersNetworks
Feature 03
Staff work intelligently
Managers use the same skill data to allocate courses, mentorships and projects. Growth becomes how work gets staffed, not a side activity.
ProjectsCoverageConsent
Feature 04
Close the growth loop
Performance data drives personalised prompts and learning paths. Completing them updates the profile and unlocks new collaborators and work.
SignalsLearningMobility
Walkthroughs
The same data serves both people and the organisation.
The walkthroughs show the system at three scales: an employee builds a profile, gets matched to opportunities, and HR or managers use aggregate talent intelligence without losing employee consent and context.
Walkthrough 1 of 3
Employee builds a growth profile
The first product challenge was trust: Nexus had to make profile setup feel like a path to opportunity, not a data request from HR.
Walkthrough 2 of 3
Employee gets matched to opportunity
Recommendations work only when users understand why they are relevant and what they can do next.
Walkthrough 3 of 3
HR/manager uses talent intelligence
The organisation gets useful talent intelligence, while employee consent, goals and growth context stay visible.
Proof model
Who pays, how it ships, and how we would know.
A serious concept needs more than screens. We pressure-tested the value model, the rollout sequence and the measurement logic so the work could be judged as an organisational product, not only an interface idea.
Model
The Spotify test
We mapped the concept as an extension inside Spotify's internal platform, with HR and IT as partners and employee productivity as the value logic.
Rollout
Adoption is the hard part
The phased plan treated build as only one piece. Needs assessment, integration, change management, pilot learning and reporting mattered just as much.
Metrics
Track movement
The product should prove whether people are finding collaborators, joining opportunities, closing skill gaps and staying engaged over time.
Reflection
What I would change now.
The concept is strongest when it is honest about its gaps. The next version would get narrower, sharper and more measurable much earlier.
01
Pilot before breadth
The real validation is missing. The next step would be a live pilot with one team, instrumented against leading indicators.
02
Cut the research sprawl
We researched every lens and tool. The argument is sharper when the iceberg insight appears in the first third.
03
Resolve the naming
Nexus as team name and Workomics as product name compete for attention. The case study needs one anchor.
04
Name contribution clearly
On a four-person team, a portfolio reader should never have to guess what was mine. I would make ownership explicit earlier.
Appendix
Research moved into product decisions.
The research base included desk research, interviews, a focus group, survey responses, ideation, affinity grouping, user flows and information architecture. The synthesis mattered because it converted a broad workplace prompt into a specific product loop.
Final system
A career companion for employees.
Nexus works when it makes growth visible for people first. The organisation benefits because useful talent data is created as a byproduct of employees pursuing goals they actually care about.
