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Real-time Feedback

A communication channel for continuous performance growth

Namely is an HR management platform. We faced high customer churn during the pandemic. In 2022, leadership prioritized optimizing the entire platform—starting with performance platform.

I helped turn that mission into strategy by partnering with stakeholders, driving rapid iterations, and delivering the refined solution.

Role

Leading Product Designer

Timeline

2022-2025

Skills

Product Design

Product Strategy

Stakeholder managementInteractive prototypingUser research & testing

+30%

User Engagement

+18%

Performance Growth

Navigate the shift

Spot the gap

Our legacy performance platform had the highest churn rate and lowest engagement as user expectations evolved past static annual reviews. The modern workforce demands continuous performance alignment—they require constructive feedback, real-time coaching, and conflict resolution in their daily work, not siloed in an annual process. This created a critical gap: existing communication tools like Slack were not designed for that goal. Learning from that, we had to respond quickly and strategically.

Reinvent communication in the performance world

One of the biggest challenge was designing a new framework that bridges communication and performance. I did several things:

  • Ground in user insight

    I partnered with our researcher to run user sessions to understand what existing communication tool user value the most. The results were clear & surprising: people loved the social post channel over external tools like Slack. But that channel was only a good anchor point because it wasn’t designed for end-to-end communication. I needed to explore a new feature.

  • Rapid prototyping

    I led the discovery workshops and built early prototypes. This process helped us explore and rapidly discard several heavy but complex options. Through iterative testing, we decided that a simple real-time feedback feature integrated into the existing social post channel—was the best fit for quick adoption and immediate utility.

  • Design new framework

    That clarity provided product conviction. The final framework was a new continuous communication channel with social posts and real-time feedback. By expanding the channel to the core performance workflow(for example reference to annual review), we were able to boost performance growth and user engagement.

Continuous communication channel at homepage

Continuous communication channel at profile page

Channel integration into the performance workflow as reference to support precise, goal oriented review.

Craft and elevate the feedback experience

  • Make people better managers

    Another interesting challenge was designing feedback experience for managers as feedback is a management practice. Focusing on manager feedback quality will drive more meaningful growth than simply encouraging volume. From research, we found 44% managers were giving poor feedback - that’s the key signal to move forward. As a complete feedback loop includes feedback creation and response, I explored consistent solutions for both. It took multiple rounds of user testing and many iterations to evolve. The final result is the preset template.

Use template to help managers quick start and write a structured feedback with high quality.

Recommend pathways to reply properly and continue the conversation.

Stay at the forefront of AI

  • Make writing fun

    As Namely platform keeps evolving along with the rise of Large Language Models, we needed to get ready to scale with the growing demands of AI-powered support. We defined writing and summary experience for the testing round as they are the essentials in user’s daily work. I was task to explore a scalable solution that we can implement throughout the whole platform.

Help me write better! Plug-in style writing tool to help rewrite with goals, tones, length and much more.

Tell me what to do! Summary tool helps digest the feedback and respond in a more thoughtful way.

Reflection

  • What I wanted to show you

    I love bringing complex, business-critical projects to life — without losing sight of soul, fun, or creative opinion. Even at scale, I believe the little “just because” details still matter.

  • What I learned…

    This product impacted hundreds of thousands of customers, and I spent countless hours personally responding to their frustration. One of the biggest takeaways was learning how to balance resistance to change with genuine pain points, and reacting accordingly.

  • What I could do better

    Looking back, I could have better balanced value between managers and employees. Earlier versions focused too much on manager but after feature launched, we received many request from employees that they need request feedback features. Secondly, embedding contextual prompts into daily workflows—like Slack nudges or meeting recaps—would have made feedback more seamless and integrated into everyday work.